A sprawling caravan of migrants from Central America, Venezuela, Cuba and other countries on Sunday trekked through Mexico, heading toward the US border.
The procession came as US Secretary of State Antony Blinken is to arrive in Mexico City tomorrow to hammer out new agreements to control the surge of migrants seeking entry into the US.
The caravan, estimated at about 6,000 people, many of them families with young children, is the largest in more than a year, a clear indication that joint efforts by the administrations of US President Joe Biden and Mexican President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador to deter migration are falling short.
Photo: AP
The Christmas Eve caravan departed from the city of Tapachula, near the country’s southern border with Guatemala.
Security forces looked on in what appeared to be a repeat of past tactics when authorities waited for the marchers to tire out and then offered them a form of temporary legal status that is used by many to continue their journey northward.
“We’ve been waiting here for three or four months without an answer,” said Cristian Rivera, traveling alone, having left his wife and child in his native Honduras. “Hopefully with this march there will be a change and we can get the permission we need to head north.”
Lopez Obrador in May agreed to take in migrants from countries such as Venezuela, Nicaragua and Cuba turned away by the US for not following rules that provided new legal pathways to asylum and other forms of migration.
However, that deal, aimed at curbing a post-COVID-19-pandemic jump in migration, appears to be insufficient as the number of migrants once again surges, disrupting bilateral trade and stoking anti-migrant sentiment among conservative voters in the US.
This month, as many as 10,000 migrants were arrested per day at the US southwest border. Meanwhile, US Customs and Border Protection suspended cross-border rail traffic in the Texas cities of Eagle Pass and El Paso as migrants were riding atop freight trains.
On Friday, Lopez Obrador said he was willing to work again with the US to address concerns about migration, but he also urged the Biden administration to ease sanctions on leftist governments in Cuba and Venezuela — where about 20 percent of 617,865 migrants encountered nationwide in October and last month hail from — and send more aid to developing countries in Latin America and beyond.
Airlines in Australia, Hong Kong, India, Malaysia and Singapore yesterday canceled flights to and from the Indonesian island of Bali, after a nearby volcano catapulted an ash tower into the sky. Australia’s Jetstar, Qantas and Virgin Australia all grounded flights after Mount Lewotobi Laki-Laki on Flores island spewed a 9km tower a day earlier. Malaysia Airlines, AirAsia, India’s IndiGo and Singapore’s Scoot also listed flights as canceled. “Volcanic ash poses a significant threat to safe operations of the aircraft in the vicinity of volcanic clouds,” AirAsia said as it announced several cancelations. Multiple eruptions from the 1,703m twin-peaked volcano in
A plane bringing Israeli soccer supporters home from Amsterdam landed at Israel’s Ben Gurion airport on Friday after a night of violence that Israeli and Dutch officials condemned as “anti-Semitic.” Dutch police said 62 arrests were made in connection with the violence, which erupted after a UEFA Europa League soccer tie between Amsterdam club Ajax and Maccabi Tel Aviv. Israeli flag carrier El Al said it was sending six planes to the Netherlands to bring the fans home, after the first flight carrying evacuees landed on Friday afternoon, the Israeli Airports Authority said. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu also ordered
Former US House of Representatives speaker Nancy Pelosi said if US President Joe Biden had ended his re-election bid sooner, the Democratic Party could have held a competitive nominating process to choose his replacement. “Had the president gotten out sooner, there may have been other candidates in the race,” Pelosi said in an interview on Thursday published by the New York Times the next day. “The anticipation was that, if the president were to step aside, that there would be an open primary,” she said. Pelosi said she thought the Democratic candidate, US Vice President Kamala Harris, “would have done
Farmer Liu Bingyong used to make a tidy profit selling milk but is now leaking cash — hit by a dairy sector crisis that embodies several of China’s economic woes. Milk is not a traditional mainstay of Chinese diets, but the Chinese government has long pushed people to drink more, citing its health benefits. The country has expanded its dairy production capacity and imported vast numbers of cattle in recent years as Beijing pursues food self-sufficiency. However, chronically low consumption has left the market sloshing with unwanted milk — driving down prices and pushing farmers to the brink — while
RSS