Guatemala’s new government says it will preserve an asylum deal with the United States that allows U.S. border agencies to return migrants who pass through the Latin American country on their way to the United States.

“We will continue receiving (migrants), which has really been very limited,” Foreign Minister Pedro Brolo said to journalists in Guatemala’s congress, according to Reuters.

The agreement solidifies a border wall of asylum law which can block migrants from Honduras and El Salvador, and it may be expanded to include other nations, said Reuters:

Brolo said his government was in the process of determining if other nationalities will be included in the U.S. asylum deal, which the government of former President Jimmy Morales struck in July. Over the past week Guatemala has been dealing with a caravan of mostly Honduran migrants who were crossing its territory on way to the United States via Mexico. … Brolo said a delegation from the U.S. Department of Homeland Security was due to visit Guatemala for further discussions on migration.

The deal with Guatemala is especially important because Guatemala occupies the entire land route north towards Mexico. For migrants to avoid entering Guatemala, they would have to go by boat far out into international waters where they can be tracked by aircraft radars. This means Guatemala is acting as a legal wall against all migrants except for people who only enter Mexico before reaching the U.S. border.

The ability to quickly send migrants back to Guatemala means that border officials are not forced to release migrants into the U.S. before their hearings in the backlogged asylum courts. For years, migrants have used that judge-created Flores catch-and-release loophole to slip into the United States, get jobs, and pay off their debts to the cartel-tied smugglers.

Progressives and pro-migration groups have lamented the asylum deal as the potential closure of most of the migration flow into the United States — including the flow of Indians and Africans.

“HORRIFYING,” said a December tweet from Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, an immigration lawyer at the American Immigration Council:

When this goes fully into effect, the Trump administration will have completed the decimation of the American system of asylum which has existed for generations. Mexican, Honduran, Brazilian, Romanian, Chinese, Russian, who cares. They’ll send them all to Guatemala.