Trump: Use military to secure the border
Caravan walkers not expected to reach U.S.-Mexico border
A migrant family from Honduras participating in an annual caravan rests Monday in Matias Romero, Mexico. President Donald Trump tweeted Tuesday that the caravan “now coming across Mexico and heading to our ‘Weak Laws’ Border, had better be stopped before it gets there.” A caravan organizer said the walkers “are not terrorists.” Organizers plan to bus participants from Matias Romero to the final event of the caravan, an immigrants’ rights conference in the central state of Puebla later this week.
It has become a regular occurrence, particularly around the Easter holiday: scores or even hundreds of Central American migrants making their way north by foot and vehicle from the southern border of Mexico. They include everyone from infants to the elderly, fleeing violence and poverty in their homelands. They travel in large groups — the current is one of the largest, at about 1,200 participants — in part for protection against the kidnappers, muggers and rapists who stalk the migrant trail, but also to draw more attention to their plight. Some have the United States in mind, but many are only thinking as far as a new home in Mexico. Called “caravans,” most of the journeys, which date back at least five years, have moved forward with little fanfare, virtually unnoticed north of the border with the United States.
Why are they in the news now?
Tweets by President Donald Trump have suddenly turned the latest caravan into a major international incident and the most recent flashpoint in the politics of immigration in the United States.
“Getting more dangerous,” the president tweeted Sunday. “‘Caravans’ coming.”
On Tuesday, he tweeted, “The big Caravan of People from Honduras, now coming across Mexico and heading to our “Weak Laws” Border, had better be stopped before it gets there.”
What do the organizers say?
In interviews on Monday, the caravan’s organizers rejected the president’s description.
“We are not terrorists,” said Irineo Mujica, Mexico director of Pueblo Sin Fronteras — People Without Borders — a transnational advocacy group that is coordinating the current caravan and has organized several others in recent years. “We are not anarchists. We try to help people to know their rights, things that we has human beings should be doing, try to advocate for human, sensible solutions.”
Where’s caravan now?
On Tuesday, the caravan was sidelined at a sports field in southern Mexico with no means of reaching the U.S. border.
The caravan halted days ago in the town of Matías Romero in the southern state of Oaxaca, where participants slept out in the open. After days of walking along roadsides and train tracks, the organizers now plan to try to get buses to take participants to the final event, an immigrants’ rights conference in the central state of Puebla later this week.
Bogged down by logistical problems, large numbers of children and fears about people getting sick, the caravan was always meant to draw attention to the plight of migrants and was never equipped to march all the way to the U.S. border.
Where did caravan start this year?
The group left the southern Mexican border town of Tapachula on March 25, at that point numbering about 700. Most of the participants were from Honduras, and many of them said they were fleeing violence and poverty in their home countries, organizers said. Some say they were inspired to flee Honduras following the violent suppression of political protests in January.
Over the past week, the group grew, to about 1,200 by the time it arrived in Matías Romero.
What is their goal?
Organizers said that, contrary to the vision of a migrant onslaught on America conjured by Trump, most participants do not intend to travel as far as the border of the United States.
“He’s trying to paint this as if we are trying to go to the border, and we’re going to storm the border,” Mujica said.
Alex Mensing, project coordinator for Pueblo Sin Fronteras, added: “We’re definitely not looking for some kind of showdown.”
What about Mexico?
The Mexican government said late Monday it had already sent back around 400 marchers to their home countries.
Mexico routinely stops and deports Central Americans, sometimes in numbers that rival those of the United States. 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.
How does DACA fit in?
In his Twitter posts Sunday, Trump also asserted that many migrants trying to cross the border into the United States were seeking to “take advantage of ” the program known as Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, or DACA, that has provided protected status to hundreds of thousands of young immigrants brought to the country as children. Trump announced last year that he was ending the program but was open to keeping it.
Advisers said the president was also alluding to a perception, supposedly held by many Central American migrants, that as part of efforts to salvage DACA, Congress may soon agree to legislation that would permit unauthorized immigrants to remain in the United States.
But migrant-rights advocates, including coordinators of the latest caravan traversing Mexico, said these assertions were a White House invention.
“It’s laughable!” Mujica said. “Most of the people don’t even know what DACA is. They know that it’s almost impossible to get into the United States. They know that they’re deporting everyone.”
How did the caravans begin?
Mensing said that the cross-country caravans originated in local protests inspired by the traditional Holy Week re-enactment of the Stations of the Cross.
Directors of migrant shelters and soup kitchens would conduct short, local marches along popular migration routes “as a way to highlight the kinds of things that would happen to migrants from Central Americans,” including kidnappings, sexual assaults and murders, he said.
In recent years, these demonstrations got increasingly ambitious. In 2014, a caravan left the southeastern Mexican town of Tenosique, in the state of Tabasco, with a plan to go to Palenque in the state of Chiapas. But the movement gathered momentum as it moved north and kept on going, Mensing said.
It was the first caravan to reach the U.S. border.