New ‘caravan’ faces roadblock
Border security forces in southern Mexico are preparing for the expected arrival of hundreds of Central Americans travelling through Guatemala – and have vowed to prevent a repeat of the headlinegrabbing ‘‘caravans’’ of past years, when massive flows of migrants and asylum-seekers overwhelmed them.
National Guard and army troops stood watch yesterday as rafts plied the Suchiate River between the two countries at dawn. About another 100 guardsmen arrived with riot shields.
A soldier who requested anonymity said more small groups of soldiers were expected to continue arriving. Small groups of migrants on the Guatemalan side grew slowly as the day wore on.
‘‘We have been tasked with being vigilant, and if we see a large group on the other side, we will deploy a human wall on this side to contain them,’’ another marine and member of the National Guard said.
River levels were so low that men were damming sections so the water would be deep enough for rafts to cross.
About a dozen Honduran canecutters were bathing in the murky waters on the Guatemalan side and sizing up the situation.
One of them, Osman Duran, 37, was in the first caravan in 2018. He made it to the United States border and jumped the fence to turn himself in, only to be deported later. His wife and daughter are in Mississippi, awaiting resolution of their asylum petition. ‘‘We have to wait for the group and see what decisions are made,’’ Duran said.
Local Marvin Garcia, 41, who has made a living poling a raft on the Suchiate for two decades, predicted that the migrants would avoid the kind of chaos seen in 2018, when there were clashes with agents at the border gates on the
Mexican side, with migrants jumping off the bridge and wading across in large numbers.
He added that far fewer migrants were crossing there compared with six months ago, when Mexico began deploying thousands of federal agents after US President Donald Trump threatened punishing trade tariffs.
Francisco Garduno, commissioner of Mexico’s National Immigration Institute, was emphatic that migrants who tried to enter the country irregularly would go no further. He said there were ‘‘sufficient’’ troops to keep order.
Mexico’s Interior Ministry said immigration agents and officials from the country’s refugee agency would be on hand to offer protection and potential temporary employment to those migrants who entered the country legally and agreed to stay in the south.
Representatives of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees office and medical NGOs were also at the river.
Christy Rivas, a 33-year-old who left her two children with her mother in the Honduran capital, Tegucigalpa, made her way on to the border bridge with another migrant to ask whether they would be allowed to pass. A Mexican agent asked if they were ‘‘part of the caravan’’, and directed her to the immigration outpost. Fearful of being entrapped and deported, they went back to wait for others to arrive. ‘‘United is better,’’ Rivas said.
She said she was aware that Mexico and the US had made it more difficult to get to and then stay in the US, but her journey was a necessary risk because there was no work back home. It is a complaint commonly cited by people on the migratory route out of Honduras, El Salvador and Guatemala, along with rampant gang violence, grinding poverty, and political persecution.
Rivas said she planned to hire a ‘‘coyote’’, or smuggler, to get her to the Texas border and across illegally, because she did not have documents to claim asylum – but this depended on getting into Mexico first.
The first groups of about 1460 migrants set out from San Pedro Sula in Honduras on Thursday, followed by some 2083 on Friday, according to Guatemala’s immigration agency. However, most went in separate groups rather than as a single cohesive whole, and at least 300 were rounded up by Guatemalan police and bused back to the Honduran border.