State of Emergency for Immigration Containment

Abstract

This article addresses restrictions on human mobility and migrations decreed as a result of the expansion of the COVID-19 pandemic. It analyzes these restrictions' exclusionary approaches aimed mainly at the impoverished migrant population and synthesizes different facts that, over time and by means of state provisions, which are conceptualized as one of the emergency, are limiting rights. For example, the right to migrate;to receive asylum requests or non-refoulement;to live without stigmatization, racism and violence. These are all justified as a matter of national security - a concept that originates and spreads as a policy of the receiving state with a high impact on the emigrants of the expelling states. Guatemala's case is shown to be one that exemplifies how migration in transit is managed and its relationship with the establishment of a state of prevention, which corresponds to a state of emergency conceptually exposed.