At least 1,500 migrants have formed the first caravan of 2024 as part of an effort to reach Mexico’s northern border area with the United States.
The group, mostly migrants from Central and South America, had grown fed up with the lagging Mexican immigration system in Tapachula, a city in the southern state of Chiapas, which borders Guatemala.
The migrants left on foot on Thursday and reached the town of Huixtla on Friday.
The plan, local media reported, is for migrants to spend the night there before heading to Escuintla in the morning.
Ezequiel Sánchez said he had abandoned his native Venezuela along with his wife and one-year-old son.
Migrants walk along a road on Friday in Huixtla, a city in the southern Mexican state of Chiapas. The group is part of the first caravan that will form in 2024 and they hope to reach Mexico’s northern border area with the United States
Migrants walk across a shallow part of the Rio Grande as they try to reach the border with the United States
He said the political and economic crisis that has destabilized the country under the regime of socialist President Nicolás Maduro was one of the factors causing the family to look for a new beginning in the United States.
Sánchez heard that other migrants had waited as long as eight months. Mexico’s National Migration Institute worked on their applications for humanitarian visas, allowing them to travel freely.
“We don’t want to wait,” he said. ‘There are no jobs and we have no place to live. We have decided that it is better to move forward in the caravan, we want to go to the United States.’
Migrant Alexander Girón chose to leave his native El Salvador because his former job could not provide basic needs.
In previous years, many people left El Salvador due to gang-related violence. But even as the Salvadoran government has brought down the murder rate with a crackdown on gangs that has jailed tens of thousands of people, Girón said he still had to leave.
“Safety is not enough if there is no work,” said Gíron, who was traveling with his wife and two teenage sons hoping to reach the US. ‘Wages cannot keep up, everything is very expensive. We are going to find work and give our sons a better life.’
The first caravan of the year comes as migrants continue to find ways to enter the United States illegally.
More than two dozen migrants were filmed storming the beach in La Jolla, California, an extremely wealthy suburb of San Diego, on Wednesday morning and disappearing into the Southern California enclave where homes are going for an average price of $2.2 million .
The exclusive footage was captured by NewsNation’s national correspondent Jorge Ventura and captured the group that arrived on the coast by ship before leaving as they ran into the neighborhood.
Migrants carry a child while walking in a caravan in Huixtla, Mexico, on Friday after it formed a day earlier. The group consists of about 1,500 people, most from Central and South America, who planned to rest in Huixtla on Friday and then continue their journey to the town of Escuintla on Saturday.
The first migrant caravan of 2024 formed on Thursday in the southern Mexican city of Tapachula and had advanced on Friday to Huixtla, where they planned to spend the night before setting off again on Saturday morning for their journey to the municipality of Escuintla.
Migrants, most from Central and South America, lie on the sidewalk in Huixtla, Mexico, on Friday, on their second day of their 1,000-mile journey to the U.S. border
A Christmas Eve caravan once included about 6,000 migrants from Venezuela, Cuba and Central America. But after New Year’s Day, the Mexican government persuaded them to give up their journey, promising that they would receive some sort of unspecified documents.
The following week, about 2,000 migrants from that caravan resumed their journey through southern Mexico after participants found themselves without the papers the Mexican government appeared to have promised.
That group wanted transit or exit visas that would allow them to take buses or trains to the U.S. border.
However, they were issued papers that limited their holders to Mexico’s southernmost state, Chiapas, where work is scarce and local residents are largely poor. Last week, only about a hundred people had reached the border between neighboring Oaxaca state and Gulf Coast state Veracruz, mainly by buses.
Mexico has allowed migrants to pass through in the past, trusting they would tire themselves walking along the highway. No migrant caravan has ever walked the full 600 miles to the U.S. southern border
U.S. officials met with Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador in December to discuss how Mexico could control the flow of migrants.
López Obrador confirmed that U.S. officials want Mexico to do more to stop migrants at the border with Guatemala, or make it harder for them to move through Mexico by train, trucks or buses — a policy known as ” conflicts’.
Mexico felt pressure to address the problem after U.S. officials briefly closed two key railroad border crossings in Texas in December, saying they were overwhelmed by processing migrants. That hampered Mexican exports to the U.S. and grain moving south for Mexican livestock.
U.S. Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas has said that the December spike in border crossings at the southwestern U.S. border coincided with a period when Mexico’s “immigration enforcement agency was unfunded.”
López Obrador later said that the financial shortfall that led Mexico’s immigration agency to suspend deportations and other operations had been resolved and that some deportations later resumed.