After crackdown, Mexico president sees immigrant caravans as waning

MEXICO CITY— President Andrés Manuel López Obrador said Friday that he expects more caravans of Central American migrants and asylum seekers to emerge, but he sees the phenomenon which became a political football in the United States in recent years as waning.

A week after armored

National Guard troops and immigration agents broke up what was l eft of the most recent caravan in southern Mexico, loading men, women and children onto buses for likely deportation, López Obrador suggested that fewer will come in future groups.

“Surely they are organizing other caravans. ... Only each time they have fewer migrants,” he said. “There is more and more information.”

Hours earlier a group numbering in just the low dozens set out before dawn from the bus terminal in San Pedro Sula, Honduras, in response to the latest call for a caravan, a far cry from the kind of numbers seen previously.

Mexico has made clear that it will no longer allow large caravans to pass through its territory, following intense pressure and threatened trade tariffs from

Washington last year.

Early caravans beginning in late 2018 were largely permitted passage, at times receiving humanitarian aid and transportation from local communities and governments. But now Mexico has thousands of National Guard troops deployed to support immigration enforcement, and Guatemala, too, returned hundreds from the most recent caravan to Honduras.