Mexico will not stop migrant ‘caravans’
MEXICO: President Donald Trump is warning about ‘‘caravans’’ of migrants heading to the United States, though a caravan of Central American migrants supposedly moving across Mexico towards the border was strikingly immobile yesterday.
The group of about 1100 people, most of them Hondurans, had been walking along roadsides and train tracks, but they have stopped to camp in a field in the southern Mexican state of Oaxaca. They are waiting and getting advice on applying for transit or humanitarian visas in Mexico.
While a group of a couple of hundred men in the march broke off and hopped on a freight train north on Monday – probably to try to enter the US – the rest seem unlikely to move until tomorrow or Friday. They are probably going to take buses to the last scheduled stop for the caravan, a migrant rights symposium in central Puebla state.
Irineo Mujica, director of Pueblo Sin Fronteras, the activist group behind the annual symbolic event, said the caravan would continue only to the city of Puebla southeast of Mexico City, ‘‘but not in a massive way’’. After the symposium, some migrants may continue to Mexico’s capital, where it is easier to make an asylum claim. Mujica said about 300 to 400 of the migrants had relatives living in Mexico and might consider staying at least temporarily.
It is all pretty undramatic – especially compared to 2013 and 2014, when migrants jammed Mexican trains heading north – but Trump’s angry tweets have raised hackles in Mexico.
‘‘Mexico is doing very little, if not nothing, at stopping people from flowing into Mexico through their Southern Border, and then into the US. They laugh at our dumb immigration laws. They must stop the big drug and people flows, or I will stop their cash cow, NAFTA. Need wall!’’ Trump wrote in one. ‘‘With all of the money they make from the US, hopefully they will stop people from coming through their country and into ours.’’
Mexican Interior Secretary Alfonso Navarrete Prida rejected such pressure.
‘‘We will act with complete sovereignty in enforcing our laws,’’ Navarrete Prida said yesterday. ‘‘Of course we will act . . . to enforce our immigration laws, with no pressure whatsoever from any country whatsoever.’’
Navarrete Prida said he talked yesterday with US Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen. ‘‘We agreed to analyse the best means to handle flows of migration, in accordance with each country’s laws.’’
A Mexican government official said the caravans were tolerated because migrants had the right under Mexican law to request asylum in Mexico or to request a humanitarian visa allowing travel to the US border to seek asylum in the US.
The ‘‘Stations of the Cross’’ migrant caravans have been held in southern Mexico for about 10 years. They began as short processions of migrants, some dressed in biblical garb and carrying crosses, as an Easterseason protest against the kidnappings, extortion, beatings and killings suffered by many Central American migrants as they cross Mexico.
The organised portions of the caravans usually don’t proceed much further north than the Gulf Coast state of Veracruz. Some migrants, moving as individuals or in smaller groups, often take buses or trucks from there to the
‘‘Of course we will act . . . to enforce our immigration laws, with no pressure whatsoever from any country whatsoever.’’ Alfonso Navarrete Prida, Mexico’s interior secretary
US border. Mexico routinely stops and deports Central Americans, sometimes in numbers that rival those of the US.
Deportations of foreigners dropped from 176,726 in 2015 to 76,433 in 2017, in part because fewer were believed to have come to Mexico, and more were requesting asylum in Mexico.
Mexico granted 3223 asylum requests made in 2016, and 9626 requests filed last year are either under review or have been accepted. –AP