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.
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