Migrant kids and parents struggle with caravan’s trek
TAPANETEPEC, Mexico — Toddlers slump in strollers bouncing across the rough asphalt, and infants only a few weeks old jiggle in their fathers’ arms. Others, limp from exhaustion and nearly too big to be carried, are slung across their mothers’ chests like sacks of grain, sweaty hair plastered to their heads.
The U.N. children’s agency estimated last week that 2,300 children were traveling in the caravan of Central American migrants. That number has declined somewhat as the group’s size diminishes, but kids of all ages are still everywhere and at risk of illness, dehydration and other dangers.
And if it’s exhausting for children, it’s perhaps even more so for their parents trying to care for them as they walk long hours in the sun, sleep on the ground outdoors and rely on donations of food and clothing to get by.
Pamela Valle, a 28-yearold from El Progreso, Honduras, said no child should have to undertake a migration like this. But unable to find work back home, she said she had no choice but to leave and take 5-year-old Eleonor with her.
Each day when they arrive in a new town on the trek across the southern Mexico countryside, she looks first for a sheltered place to sleep. This day, that was a red tarp a group of
migrants stretched across a playground in the main square of the town of Tapanetepec. Then she and Eleonor went in search of food and bathrooms.
“I don’t think you can prepare children psychologically, but we have to in some way make it like a game, like telling them it’s a vacation,” Valle said, adding that it has been hard on Eleonor. “It’s not right, but sometimes the situation obliges you.”
With Tuesday’s U.S. midterm elections just days away, President Donald Trump has continued to ramp up his rhetoric against the caravan of some 4,000 migrants, repeatedly hammering Democrats and talking of sending as many as 15,000 U.S. troops to the southern border — more than double the number of migrants in this group and three
other much smaller ones following in its footsteps hundreds of miles behind.
In a lengthy speech on Thursday, Trump promised an executive order next week that would automatically deny asylum to migrants who try to enter the United States illegally between ports of entry. U.S. immigration laws currently allow migrants to seek asylum no matter how they arrive in the U.S.
Unless they unexpectedly find some way of traveling faster — and Mexican officials have shown no inclination to facilitate that — they are still weeks away from reaching the U.S. border. Thousands already have dropped out, applying for asylum in Mexico or accepting free bus rides home, and many more are expected to do the same.