US shuts Mexico border after city resists migrant caravan
THE United States closed its busiest border crossing with Mexico yesterday following a day of protests in the city of Tijuana against the arrival of the socalled migrant caravan.
Queues at the crossing stretched several miles as traffic into the US was blocked for new security barriers to be installed, causing anger among the 110,000 people who enter the US daily.
An estimated 3,000 migrants have arrived in Tijuana, which sprawls into San Diego in southern California.
On Sunday, several hundred Tijuana residents took to the streets to protest against the caravan, which set out from Honduras on Oct 13. While many are sympathetic to the migrants’ plight, others shouted insults, hurled rocks and threw punches.
Carlos Padilla, 57, a migrant from Progreso, Honduras, said: “We didn’t come here to cause problems, we came here with love and with the intention to ask for asylum. But they treat us like animals.”
The cold reception contrasts sharply with the warmth that accompanied migrants in southern Mexico, where residents of small towns greeted them with hot food, campsites and live music.
But in Tijuana, residents chanted “Out! Out!” and demanded the caravan be diverted.
US border inspectors are processing about 100 claims for asylum a day at Tijuana’s main crossing to San Diego. Juan Manuel Gastelum, the city’s mayor, said it could take at least six months to process all the claims.
He called the influx an avalanche that the city was ill-prepared to handle and appealed to the federal government for more help.
“Some of them are a bunch of bums, smoking marijuana in the street, and attacking our families,” he said on Mexican television. “Who is leading them?”
Tijuana officials have converted a municipal gym to hold 3,000 migrants. The city’s privately run shelters have a maximum capacity of 700.
Alden Rivera, the Honduran ambassador to Mexico, visited the shelters at the weekend and appealed once again for the migrants to return to Honduras.
He said 1,800 had so far been convinced to return. A further 2,697 have requested asylum in Mexico under a programme the country launched in haste in October to speed the issuing of credentials needed to live, work and study there.
Donald Trump, the US president, who sought to make the caravan a campaign issue in the midterm elections, supported the mayor, writing on Twitter that, like Tijuana, “the US is ill-prepared for this invasion, and will not stand for it. They are causing crime and big problems in Mexico. Go home!”