Hope for better life drives migrants
Caravan pushes on despite heat, thirst, hunger, exhaustion
TONALÁ, Mexico — Trudging toward the U.S. border, one weary foot in front of the other, unstopping, perhaps unstoppable.
That’s life now for José Hernández, his two friends and thousands of other men, women, children and infants on a long march through Mexico in search of jobs, safety and a future at the U.S. border.
Starting their trek hours before dawn each day, Hernández and the others collapse by early afternoon in the tropical swelter. Fed, clothed and patched up by Mexican townspeople scarcely more prosperous than themselves, the Central Americans bed down on sidewalks or plots of grass, some under plastic tarps that stanch the rain but enhance the sun’s heat.
A few hours respite and they’re at it again — pushing ever forward.
“It might be December by the time we arrive, but we are going to make it,” Hernández, 25, says as he and
his companions trudge along a four-lane highway through southernmost Chiapas state. “Every time we think we are finished, that we can’t do more, help comes. God is with us.”
President Donald Trump has said these people never will be given refuge, a vow likely to be challenged in U.S. courts. Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen said Friday that all legal options are on the table to “make sure that those who don’t have the legal right to come into this country don’t come in.”
On Trump’s orders, the Pentagon will dispatch as many as 1,000 active-duty troops to the border in a support role for immigration agents. They join some 2,000 National Guard troops already doing the same thing.
In the meantime, the migrants’ slow advance — and Mexico’s seeming inability to stop it — have girded the president’s recent political rallies across the American heartland.
“To those in the Caravan, turnaround, we are not letting people into the United States illegally,” the president tweeted Thursday. “Go back to your Country and if you want, apply for citizenship like millions of others are doing!”
‘There is work’
As these travelers tell it, they and their homelands are snared in an insurmountable matrix of plenty and scarcity. Too many children, not enough good jobs to sustain them. Too much violent crime, scarcely any leaders who care.
Too many obstacles and apparently just one way to overcome them.
“I don’t want my children to live through the same things I did,” says Haydeé Dorales, 30, traveling from the verdant Caribbean Coast in Honduras with her five children, ages 2 to 12. “If they continue living back there, what can I expect of them? My sons gang members and my daughters prostitutes? No. No.”
Traveling with children is overwhelming and probably foolhardy, Dorales agrees. But leaving them behind wasn’t an option.
Her husband was murdered last December, she says. Cancer consumes her mother, who otherwise might have cared for the kids while she went north.
“In the United States there is work, there is hope,” Dorales says, three of the children huddled with her on a flattened cardboard box in a cinder block warehouse. The youngest sleeps like the dead in a battered baby carriage. “We aren’t asking for anything. We are the people who will work the hardest in the United States.”
Toeing a line between mollifying Trump and angering his own pro-migrant public, lame-duck Mexican President Enrique Peña Nieto on Friday offered the marchers at least temporary refuge in Mexico — with school, health care and jobs — so long as they stop their progress in the poorer southern states of Chiapas and Oaxaca.
Some 1,600 of the migrants already have taken that option, abandoning the effort in recent days to settle in Mexico. Several hundred others have turned toward home, daunted by the distance and the difficulties.
But many of these self-exiles, as well as international aid officials monitoring their caravan north, say most are likely to push on, at least for now.
“There are many people here who want to ask for asylum in other parts of Mexico where there is more work.” says Maria Rubí, a senior official with the U.N. High Commission for Refugees. “We are trying to assure that people understand the requirements for seeking asylum in Mexico and the dangers they confront continuing forward.”
Destination is Tijuana
An effort by Mexican federal police to stop the caravan failed early Saturday after two hours of negotiations with the caravan’s organizers. The migrants were allowed to go on to their next stop, crossing the state line into Oaxaca.
They’re expected to turn inland from the coast in the coming days, toward Mexico’s much cooler central highlands.
This throng — maybe 3,500 migrants, or perhaps twice as many, depending on who’s counting — set off two weeks ago from Honduras, gathering steam in Guatemala before pushing into Mexico last weekend.
The people have been marching and hitching rides in the days since, advancing 25 or 50 miles at a time. Even at this exhausting pace, the nearest points on the U.S. border — at South Texas — remain more than a month away.
Members of the U.S.based group directing the caravan’s path — Pueblo Sin Fronteras, or People Without Borders — say their destination is Tijuana, on the California border, more than twice the distance to South Texas.
Most of the several hundred migrants who reached the U.S. line at Tijuana in a similar effort last spring were denied asylum and turned away. The same fate all but certainly awaits those in this caravan.
“Worth it or not, they are going to continue,” says Israel Lopez, 24, a Guatemalan who has been volunteering with the group since failing to win asylum in yet another caravan last year.
Led by local officials and church leaders — Catholic and Protestant alike — Mexican townspeople have provided migrants food, water, medicine, a rudimentary bath and a place to sleep.
“We are all human beings. We have to do what we can,” says Hilda Martha Sanchez, in a cluster of women passing out water and soggy homemade sandwiches of beans, cheese and cream at the roadside village of Piedritas, where work in the fields pays $6 a day.
“We are poor as well,” she says, “but we have to help them.”
Like many, if not most, of those marching north, José Hernández says he and his two companions decided to join the caravan in the heat of the moment after hearing about it on Honduran television and social media.
He had thought about migrating for years, Hernández says, but considered it too expensive, too dangerous, too crazy. But this caravan makes sense to him, providing strength in numbers and momentum for the march.
Melvin Contreras, 27, grew up with Hernández in an especially poor area of central Honduras. Hector Lizama, 23, returned home six years ago after living since second grade in Mission, on the South Texas border, where he played football for the local high school.
Hernández and his companions start out in the light of a full moon, marching along the four-lane highway that cuts through harvested mango groves and brilliant green cattle pastures. The formidable peaks of Mexico’s coastal mountains hover to the right. The Pacific Ocean washes unseen to the west, too distant to provide a benevolent breeze.
Having declined offers of rides in order to leave the space for those traveling with young children, the three migrants have walked eight hours and nearly 20 miles by the time the late morning sun and 95-degree heat begins sapping their remaining strength.
This day’s goal — the bustling market town of Arriaga — beckons another 30 miles up the road.
As they have every day, cargo trucks speed by dangerously near. Heat radiates from the asphalt through the soles of the men’s shoes. Backs and legs ache. Thirst chokes their throats and sun boils the sweat-soaked shirts they wear.
Faith in God
As they walk, both Hernández and Contreras clutch Bibles given them by one roadside church group — which surprisingly has not offered them water or food.
Like nearly everyone else in the caravan, these men have heard Trump call them gang members, terrorists or worse. They know about border walls and unyielding immigration courts. But so far, they also have been blessed with kindness in Mexico.
That has birthed a faith — a strangely optimistic theology of the despairing — that the divine will deliver their destiny.
“Trump can’t be as bad as they say,” Hernández murmurs as he keeps up a steady pace. “God changes the hearts of even bad people.”