Trump vows to send troops to stop caravan
President Donald Trump on Monday vowed to send as many troops as necessary to the U.S.-Mexican border to block a growing caravan of Central American migrants, calling their trek “an assault on our country.”
In an exclusive interview with USA TODAY aboard Air Force One, the president said there were “people from the Middle East” in their ranks, reiterating a claim he made without evidence in a morning tweet. The president declined to say whether his assertion was based on intelligence agencies or some other source.
While Trump has made unsubstantiated charges that Democrats had funded the migrants, he said the television footage that showed them straggling north was rebounding to the political benefit of Republicans in the midterms.
The president warned of “Criminals and unknown Middle Easterners” mixed into the migrant caravan group, which originated in Honduras but has swelled in size as people from other nations have jumped in along the way.
“There isn’t a single terrorist here,” Denis Omar Contreras, one of the caravan organizers, told The Associated Press. He said caravan migrants come from Honduras, El Salvador, Guatemala and Nicaragua. “As far as I know there are no terrorists in these four countries, at least beyond the corrupt governments.”
Mexican President Enrique Peña Nieto is requesting that the United Nations help process the group to determine whether they have valid asylum claims or should be returned to their home countries. On Twitter, Trump said that wasn’t enough and blamed the caravan on America’s southern neighbors, Democrats and the nation’s “pathetic Immigration Laws.”
“Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador were not able to do the job of stopping people from leaving their country and coming illegally to the U.S.,” Trump wrote. “We will now begin cutting off, or substantially reducing, the massive foreign aid routinely given to them.”
The three countries combined received more than $500 million from the U.S. in fiscal year 2017, according to the AP.
Trump also used the advance of the caravan as a political battle cry, as so many GOP candidates have done in recent days.
“Remember the Midterms!” he tweeted.
Trump’s threats have done little to dissuade members of the caravan from trying to reach the U.S. border to make their claims for asylum. Members of the group have become so insistent on staying together, in fact, that they’ve been turning down medical aid and offers of bus rides to ensure that they continue as a group.
Ulises Garcia, a Red Cross official, told the AP that the migrants have suffered a wide range of injuries, from lacerated, infected feet from the miles of walking to ankle and shoulder injuries from falls on the arduous trek. But even they, Garcia said, refused trips to local hospitals and clinics under the theory that there is safety in numbers.
“They fear they’ll be detained and deported” if they leave the group, Garcia said.
Most of the caravan members were holding in the southern Mexican city of Tapachula on Monday morning, trying to figure out how the Mexican government would treat them.
Brenda Ochoa, a member of the Center for Human Rights Fray Matias de Cordova, part of a group of local organizations monitoring the caravan, said Monday morning that many of the caravan members already have been deported to their home countries. She said the Mexican government has not provided any public information on the interviews of some caravan members and said government officials are providing only food, water and medical care to those who agree to be detained by immigration officials.
“This humanitarian aid has been conditioned on detention,” Ochoa said, according to video posted on U.S.-based Spanish-language news network Telemundo. “This has been a grave injustice”