For migrants, opinions split on walking all the way to US
VILLA COMALTITLAN, Mexico — A group of migrants that once numbered as many as 5,000 split Thursday about whether to keep walking through southern Mexico toward the U.S. border.
A group of about 2,000 mainly younger male migrants set out walking Thursday from the southern town of Huixtla.
But throngs of families with children decided to wait in Huixtla to see if they could get some sort of temporary exit visa. The families were tired after walking some 25 miles since departing the city of Tapachula, near the Guatemalan border, on Monday.
The goal of almost all the migrants is to reach the U.S. border. But none of the migrant caravans that have crossed Mexico starting in 2018 have ever walked all the way to the border, which is more than 1,000 miles to the north.
While some caravan participants reached the border in the past, it was due to bus or car rides — which the government now tries to prevent.
Venezuelan migrant Junior Ramirez waited for papers with about 15 members of his extended family at a National Immigration Institute post outside Huixtla, where the migrants slept in the open air Tuesday and Wednesday.
“Up to now they haven’t told us whether they are going to give them to us,” Ramirez said. “Other migrants have gotten them and left. All we want to do is keep going.”
Luis Garcia Villagran, a migrant advocate traveling with the caravan, said Mexican authorities have been giving out the equivalent of exit visas, which give migrants one to three months to leave the country.
Theoretically, a migrant carrying such papers will either request asylum or leave Mexico — presumably over the U.S. border — and wouldn’t be sent back to their home country.
Josue Mendoza Rojas and Josmar de Nazaret Cardenas, two other Venezuelan migrants, were in the same situation in Huixtla, trying to decide whether to keep walking.
“It’s all confused,” said Mendoza Rojas said, referring to the fact that migrants had tried to draw up their own lists of who would be in line to get papers. “There are about 40 lists, and some people left without papers.”
The couple left Venezuela two months ago with their 1-year-old child and applied for an asylum appointment in Tapachula.
But they couldn’t get an appointment until August, and without enough money to wait until then, they decided to start walking north.
“We don’t know what we’re going to do yet,” he said.
Venezuelans make up a large proportion of this caravan, the biggest of the year, in contrast to previous ones. A factor appears to be a policy change implemented by Mexico in January requiring Venezuelans to acquire a visa to enter the country.
Before that change, Venezuelans had flown to Mexico City or Cancun as tourists and then made their way comfortably to the border. Many made it from home to the U.S. border in as little as four days.