Trump Derides Migrant Caravans in Mexico. They Rarely Make It Near the U.S.

by · NY Times

The Migrant Caravans Trump Derides Rarely Make It Close to the U.S.

Migrants often gather in groups in southern Mexico as a means of protection from criminal groups. But they almost never make it anywhere near the U.S.-Mexico border.

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Migrants in Villa Comaltitlán, Mexico, in November.
Credit...Daniel Becerril/Reuters

By James Wagner

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When President-elect Donald J. Trump vowed to impose new 25 percent tariffs on all goods coming into the country from Canada and Mexico, he said he’d keep them in place until drugs and people were stopped from crossing U.S. borders.

In particular, Mr. Trump mentioned a caravan of migrants bound for the United States from southern Mexico. It was the latest example of Mr. Trump using such collections of migrants to bolster his claims about the border — although it’s rare they ever get that far.

The groups of thousands of migrants often come together in southern Mexico near its border with Guatemala, which is more than 1,000 miles from the United States. The reason, mainly, is power and safety in numbers.

While waiting in the southern city of Tapachula for humanitarian visas to travel through Mexico, a process that can often take months, migrants band together as they prepare to move north.

Traversing Mexico can be a treacherous proposition, especially for poorer migrants, because they are vulnerable to kidnappings, extortion or violence, whether from criminal groups or corrupt Mexican officials. Caravans can lessen the risk, and provide a means to circumvent the high cost of hiring a smuggler to aid their passage to the U.S. border.

Many people, often from elsewhere in the Americas and increasingly from Asia and Africa, arrive in southern Mexico, sometimes after traveling hundreds of miles through jungles and across multiple borders before arriving in Mexico.

But the large caravans they congregate in are often broken up by the Mexican authorities far short of the United States, sometimes because of attrition over the course of the long and grueling trip. Other times, they break up after talks between the Mexican authorities and the migrants themselves, who disperse after promises of temporary travel permits.

The Mexican government has tried several tactics to dissuade migrants from moving north through Mexico, even busing them away from the United States border and deep into the country’s south.

The latest notable caravan, of roughly 1,500 people mostly from Central and South America, according to an Associated Press report, formed last week in southern Mexico and is hoping to reach the United States before Mr. Trump’s inauguration in January.

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