More than 2,000 migrants in Mexico head to border

TAPACHULA, Mexico — More than 2,000 migrants, mainly Central Americans, began walking out of this city in southern Mexico on Saturday where they have essentially been trapped.

The migrants walked along a highway leading west and north toward the United States border and pushed past a line of state police trying to stop them.

There were scuffles, and a small child suffered a head wound, but the migrants continued on their way.

They made it only a few kilometers to the nearby village of Alvaro Obregon before stopping to rest for the night at a baseball field.

Jose Antonio, a migrant from Honduras who did not want to give his last name, saying he fears it could affect his case, said he had been waiting in Tapachula for two months for an answer on his request for some kind of visa.

“They told me I had to wait because the appointments were full,” the construction worker said. “There is no work there (in Tapachula) so out of necessity I joined this group.”

Job opportunities

He hopes to make it to the northern city of Monterrey to find work, he said, adding: “We’ll go on, day by day, to get as far as we can.”

Video footage shows one family, including a woman and small children, were knocked to the ground in the crush of people, their belongings scattering.

The government’s National Migration

Institute condemned incidents of violence captured on video.

Police, immigration agents and National Guard broke up smaller attempts at similar breakouts earlier this year.

Tens of thousands of migrants from Honduras, El Salvador and Haiti have been waiting in Tapachula for refugee or asylum papers that might allow them to travel, but have grown tired of delays in the process.

Unlike previous marches, the one that started from Tapachula on Saturday did not include as many Haitian migrants, thousands of whom reached the US border around Del Rio, Texas, in September.

In August National Guard troops in riot gear blocked several hundred Haitians, Cubans and Central Americans

who set out walking on a highway from Tapachula.

Mexico requires migrants applying for humanitarian visas or asylum to remain in the border state of Chiapas, next to Guatemala, for their cases to be processed.

In January a larger caravan of migrants tried to leave Honduras but was blocked from crossing Guatemala.

The marches are reminiscent, but nowhere near as large, as migrant caravans that crossed Mexico in 2018 and 2019.

US authorities arrested more than 1.7 million migrants at the US-Mexico border this fiscal year, the most ever recorded.