New Times has confirmed that the man is now being held at the Broward Transitional Center run by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) in Deerfield Beach. Nestor Yglesias, a spokesperson for ICE's Miami field office, stated via email that the Guatemalan man, who the agency will not name, will be "afforded access to all legal processes available to him under the laws of the United States.”
"People would do anything for a better life. He deserves to stay," one user commented on the Only in Dade video, which has garnered more than 537,000 views on Instagram.
"Bro let him stay. That’s well deserved bc damn," wrote another.
"Do not deport this guy!" added another.
It's unclear what circumstances motivated the man to risk his life by stowing away in the landing-gear compartment — an often deadly gambit, but South Florida's immigrant advocates explain that circumstances in Guatemala are dire and getting worse. While the man's harrowing escape story is unique, they say it is unsurprising as refugees from around the world seek asylum on U.S. soil.
"No one makes this extremely dangerous journey unless it's a matter of life and death," says Marian Blanco, assistant executive director of the Guatemalan-Maya Center in Lake Worth. "We have people who come for a lot of reasons, a lot of it is to escape from gang violence in Guatemala, and there's a lot of poverty."
According to a 2021 report from the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, nearly half of Guatemala's population (49.7 percent) suffers moderate to severe food insecurity. Guatemala experiences the fourth-greatest prevalence of undernourishment in Latin America and the Caribbean, behind Haiti, Venezuela, and Nicaragua, the report says.
The majority of Guatemalan migrants in Florida reside in Palm Beach County, and Blanco says many of them are undocumented. The Washington Post reported last summer that roughly 80,000 Guatemalan Mayans of indigenous descent lived in Palm Beach County. Blanco says the exact number is hard to pin down owing to the limited number of U.S. Census workers in the county who speak Spanish and indigenous languages. She says many Mayan people were marked as "White" or "Hispanic" rather than "indigenous."
Many Guatemalan Mayans emigrated to Florida and the U.S. in the 1980s after a wave of government genocide murdered more than 200,000, an atrocity referred to as the "Silent Holocaust." Blanco says violence and poverty are still prevalent in those communities today, and many Guatemalan citizens risk the arduous journey north to seek asylum, though they rarely attain legal status in the U.S.
"We're not sure what this man's narrative is, but the fact that he did this shows he was desperate enough to travel that way," she says. "I can assume he was being persecuted back home."
Neither Blanco nor members of the advocacy group Florida Immigrant Coalition say they have been able to make contact with the man but intend to lend him support and legal services.
MIAMI, Florida – An investigation is ongoing into what appears in a video to be a stowaway exiting a plane’s wheel well.
The flight in question was American Airlines flight 1182 which arrived at Miami International Airport on Saturday at 10:06 a.m. from Guatemala City, Guatemala.
American Airlines told Local 10 News that the plane, “was met by law enforcement due to a security issue.”
The airline is working with local law enforcement in their investigation but did not provide any additional information.
According to U.S. Customs and Border Protection, a 26-year-old man was apprehended.
CBP said the man, “attempted to evade detection in the landing gear compartment of an aircraft arriving from Guatemala Saturday morning.”
Miami-Dade Fire Rescue confirmed that the man was taken to a nearby hospital.
Must have grown up at high mountain elevation to survive the flight level altitudes in the unpressurized wheel well. Would have expected gloves and bulky coat for the cold, as well.
ReplyDeleteI see the cargo door open. Any chance he came out of there and then tried to hide in the wheel well?
DeleteNo
Delete"interesting How do some stowaways survive? Though stowing away on an aircraft is an incredibly dangerous undertaking, there are some factors that might, very precariously, help stowaways survive, as pointed out by a Los Angeles Times article following a similar incident in 2016 that saw a 16-year-old boy survive a five hour trip from Hawaii to California inside a wheel compartment. The weight of a passenger airline creates a great amount of friction during takeoff, causing its tires to heat up. The heat from hydraulic lines in the wheel well as well as heat from the tires themselves might help to keep stowaways warm as they travel at high altitudes without the protection afforded to those in the cabin.
ReplyDeleteStill, commercial aircraft typically fly at an altitude between 31,000 and 38,000 feet (5.9 and 7.2 miles). A lack of oxygen at those altitudes can lead to serious brain damage, and, sadly in many cases has led to the death of stowaways. According to the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), temperatures in non-pressurized, non-climate-controlled parts of a passenger plane can drop to 65 degrees below zero, meaning the majority of people who attempt to hide inside an aircraft's wheel well will die of hypothermia or hypoxia, and they are also at risk of being crushed by heavy equipment such as the aircraft's wheels. In fact, the FAA says some 129 people have attempted to stow away in commercial aircraft since 1947, and only 29 of those survived." @ LATimes