‘Caravan’ caught in immigration row
Migrants hope for new life as tensions grow between Mexico and US
In some of the Mexican towns playing host to a “caravan” of more than 1200 Central American migrants heading to the United States border, the welcome mat has been rolled out despite President Donald Trump’s call for Mexican authorities to stop them.
Local officials have offered lodging in town squares and empty warehouses or arranged transport for the migrants, participants in a journey organised by the immigrant advocacy group Pueblo San Fronteras. The officials have conscripted buses, cars, ambulances and police trucks. But the help may not be entirely altruistic.
“The authorities want us to leave their cities,” said Rodrigo Abeja, an organiser from Pueblo San Fronteras. “They’ve been helping us, in part to speed the massive group out of their jurisdictions.”
In the coming months, the caravan’s 3200km journey that began at Tapachula near the Guatemalan border on March 25 will end at the US border, where some of its members will apply for asylum, while others will try to sneak into the US.
So far the Mexican Government has provided little guidance on how to handle the migrants but Abeja worries that local reactions will change.
“There’s a lot of pressure from authorities to stop the caravan because of Donald Trump’s reaction,” he said.
Trump railed on Twitter against the caravan yesterday, accusing Mexico of “doing very little, if not NOTHING” to stop the flow of immigrants crossing the US border illegally. “They must stop the big drug and people flows, or I will stop their cash cow, NAFTA,” he concluded.
Mexico’s Interior Minister, Alfonso Navarrete wrote on Twitter that he and US Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen had “agreed to analyse the best ways to attend to the flows of migrants in accordance with the laws of each country”.
Mexico must walk a delicate line with the US as the countries are in the midst of renegotiating the North American Free Trade Agreement (Nafta) with Canada. At the same time, Mexican leftwing presidential candidate Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador has an 18-point lead ahead of the July 1 election, according to a poll yesterday.
A Lopez Obrador victory could usher in a Mexican government less accommodating toward the US on both trade and immigration issues.
Mexican Senator Angelica de la Pena, who presides over the Senate’s Human Rights Commission, told Reuters that Mexico should protect migrants’ rights despite the pressure from Trump.
Former President Vicente Fox called for Mexican officials to take a stand against Trump’s attacks. Trump keeps “blackmailing, offending and denigrating Mexico and Mexicans”, he wrote on Twitter yesterday.
Under Mexican law, Central Americans who enter Mexico legally are generally allowed to move freely through the country, even if their goal is to cross illegally into the US.
Migrants in the caravan cite a variety of reasons for joining it. Its members are disproportionately from Honduras, which has high levels of violence and has been rocked by political upheaval in recent months following the re-election of US-backed President Juan Orlando Hernandez in an intensely disputed election.
Maria Elena Colindres Ortega, a member of caravan and, until January, a member of Congress in Honduras, said she is fleeing political upheaval. “We’ve had to live through fraudulent electoral process,” she said. “We’re suffering a progressive militarisation and lack of institutions, and . . . they’re criminalising those who protested.”
Colindres Ortega, who opposed the ruling party in Honduras, said she spiralled into debt, after serving without pay for the last 18 months of her four-year term. She decided to head
north after a fellow congressman from her party put out word on Facebook that a caravan of migrants was gathering in southern Mexico.
Pueblo Sin Fronteras, which means People Without Borders, has helped coordinate migrant caravans for the past several years, though previously it had a maximum of several hundred participants. It says on its website: “For more than fifteen years, members of Pueblo Sin Fronteras have been reaching out to the most vulnerable immigrants in the United States and to migrants and refugees on the move.”
During the journey, members of the organisation instruct the migrants about their rights.
“We accompany at least those who want to request asylum,” said Alex Mensing, Pueblo Sin Fronteras’ programme director. “We help prepare them for the detention process and asylum process before they cross the border, because it’s so difficult for people to have success if they don’t have the information.”
A Reuters analysis of US immigration court data found that Hondurans who come before the court receive deportation orders in more than 83 per cent of cases, the highest rate of any nationality. Hondurans also face deportation in Mexico, where immigration data shows that 5000 Hondurans were deported from Mexico in February alone, the highest number since May 2016.
Meanwhile, the US Department of Justice has moved to establish quotas for immigration judges aimed at speeding up cases and clearing a backlog.
The Department of Justice sent an email on Saturday to federal immigration judges telling them their job performance would be evaluated based on how quickly they close cases. Judges will be required to complete at least 700 cases a year and have fewer than 15 per cent of their decisions appealed and remanded back, according to Dana Marks, spokeswoman for the National Association of Immigration Judges.