Photo: EFE/Juan Manuel Blanco
The fifth caravan of migrants, which left the Mexican city of Tapachula on the border with Guatemala on Thursday morning, barely managed to advance about 16 kilometers in about six hours to the municipality of Álvaro Obregón, where they were broken up by Mexican authorities.
This group of about 200 people, the second in consecutive days, was met by a deployment of National Institute for Migration (INM) agents and National Guard (GN) anti-riot teams who halted their advance on the road that lies parallel to the coast from Chiapas.
“We want visas, we want visas!” It was the achievement and plea of the foreigners as they approached the federal troops that urged them to halt their advance.
This caravan of migrants was mainly made up of women, children and single men who accepted the dialogue and surrendered to the INM authorities to be later taken to the customs office of Cerro Gordo where there are windows for issuing ID cards for humanitarian reasons. .
A Central American migrant who was released from Siglo 21 immigration station, a temporary residence for irregular migrants, and who joined this caravan asked authorities to clarify her immigration status because, she said, “they don’t have the resources to find hotels.” to pay or to buy food.
Meanwhile, another migrant from Venezuela said they were not treated at the immigration station, but said they preferred to act peacefully and decided to walk along the coast road in search of care.
After the caravan was broken up, the INM delegate in Tapachula, Paola López, informed the migrants that the authorities were ready to take the institution’s vehicles to take them to the municipality of Huixtla, to the customs office of Cerro Gordo.
The 200 foreigners from different countries left in a caravan this Thursday to promote their regularization for humanitarian reasons and to continue their route to the United States.
This was the fifth caravan formed in Tapachula this year by people from countries such as Venezuela, El Salvador, Dominican Republic, Colombia, Honduras, Guatemala, Haiti, Nicaragua and Cuba.
This new group of people left without registering any violence, unlike the first two caravans of the year, in which migrants and authorities clashed.
The other four caravans formed from January to April, the last formed and disbanded on Wednesday, were disbanded by the agency after the foreigners obtained agreements with immigration officials.
Mexico deported more than 114,000 foreigners in 2021, according to the Migration Policy Division of the country’s Interior Ministry.
In addition, Comar received a record 131,448 refugee applications in 2021. Of these applicants, more than 51,000 are Haitians.
Mexico’s INM recently reported that it intercepted 115,379 migrants between January 1 and April 13 this year, 15% of whom were minors, mostly from Central American countries.
In fiscal year 2022, which began October 1, 2021, 1,060,094 migrant encounters were recorded at the U.S. southern border, according to the Customs and Border Protection Office (CBP).
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