MEXICO, Dec. 26 (Xinhua) — A new refugee caravan that set off from the city of Tapachula in Mexico's Chiapas state on Sunday continues its transit through the country's south on Tuesday, on the eve of the visit to Mexico of a high-level delegation of American officials , to address recovery from the immigration crisis.
The contingent, calling itself the “Exodus from Poverty,” consists of between 6,000 and 10,000 migrants, mostly Central Americans and Caribbeans, seeking to reach the southern U.S. border, according to local media reports.
The Mexican newspaper “La Jornada” reported that the caravan, the largest this year, advanced around 30 kilometers from the ejido Álvaro Obregón to the municipality of Huixtla in Chiapas on Monday for about seven hours and in heat of more than 30 degrees Celsius.
This Tuesday and in the following days, the group is expected to continue its journey until it receives an answer from the Mexican authorities allowing them to travel regularly through the country to the border with the United States, explained Luis García Villagrán, Coordinator of the group to local media. Civil Association Center for Human Dignity, Defender of the Migrant Community.
The caravan's journey began on Christmas Eve and Christmas festivities, just days before the arrival in Mexico of a high-level delegation of the President of the United States, Joe Biden, to reach an agreement with his Mexican counterpart Andrés Manuel López Obrador, on new measures Reducing irregular migration flows.
The delegation, scheduled to arrive in Mexico on Wednesday, will be led by US Secretary of State Antony Blinken and also includes that country's Secretary of Homeland Security, Alejandro Mayorkas, and the White House Security Adviser. , Elizabeth Sherwood-Randall.
In November, United States Customs and Border Protection counted 242,418 migrants apprehended at the border with Mexico.
This figure, complemented by an increase in daily apprehensions of migrants at the border with Mexico in the first days of December, points to a worsening of the migration crisis that the Central American region is experiencing in recent years and that is affecting the capacity to deal with the phenomenon the governments of Mexico and the United States.
In the United States' full fiscal year 2023, from October 2022 to September 2023, the number of migrant apprehensions rose to a record 2,475,669, higher than the previous two fiscal years, the records of which also marked historic highs at that time. End