The caravan of migrants that’s alarmed President Trump stalls at a soccer field
After days of walking from Mexico’s southern border, the caravan of hundreds of migrants that has drawn President Trump’s Twitter ire has now halted on a brown-grass soccer field, its participants unsure and anxious about the way forward.
The men and women, most from Central America, were squatting Tuesday in a walled public park while government officials decided their fate.
“We are scared, just like you,” Irineo Mujica, the head coordinator of the migrant caravan, told the assembled group through a megaphone Tuesday morning. “Now President Donald Trump has said that he wants to hit us with nuclear bombs.”
Trump has made the migrant caravan a central theme in his tweets for three days running — although he hasn’t in fact threatened a nuclear strike. The president has warned that Mexico must stop the group or risk being penalized in the negotiations over revising the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). He also has threatened to reduce foreign aid to Honduras, the home country of many of the marchers.
For several years, migrants have traveled north in caravans through Mexico around this time of year, both to protect themselves from crime and to highlight the plight of those fleeing Central America to escape poverty and danger. Trump’s comments have turned the event into a fresh source of tension between the United States and its southern neighbors.
The Mexican government has denied that it is allowing the migrants to push unimpeded across its territory.
[Trump says he’ll send the military to guard the U.S. border]
On Tuesday, several Mexican immigration officials began taking a census at the migrant encampment in the town of Matias Romero, in the southern state of Oaxaca. The migrants crowded around the officials and thrust out their IDs and documents.
Several hours later, the officials returned and started calling people’s names over megaphones. The authorities handed those individuals temporary legal permits, giving them 20 days to leave Mexico. Several migrants said they would use that time to travel toward the United States. Others could receive 30-day permits to apply for asylum in Mexico. It was unclear how many people would receive the documents.
“My intention is to seek asylum in the United States,” said Angel Saul Lopez Mendoza, 44, from Honduras, who was traveling with his 7-year-old son. “I have faith in God that perhaps he’ll give me that chance.”
For the time being, the Victor E. Flores Morales sports park has become a hot and dusty makeshift home for more than 1,000 people. Migrants took shade under tarps or scrawny palms. A mostly empty swimming pool on the grounds has become a toilet for some. Laundry hung on the chain-link fencing. There are an estimated 300 children in the camp, some sick and crying.
“This is not safe here for children,” said Delmi Castro Lopez, 21, who was breast-feeding her 8-month-old son, Brian, inside a chaotic room where officials registered migrants. She had lost sight of her other son, 3-year-old Jose Manuel.
While the march wasn’t unprecedented, this year’s event drew an unusually large number of participants. Conservative U.S. media outlets jumped on reports of the caravan, depicting it as a sign of the threat of illegal migration to the United States. In fact, U.S. border authorities reported a 26 percent decline in the number of people detained or stopped at the United States’ southern border in 2017 compared with the previous year.
On Tuesday, Trump said he would call out the military to guard the border.
“We cannot have people flowing into our country illegally,” Trump said.
[After testy call with Trump over border wall, Mexican president cancels visit]
Migrants who have participated in past caravans said some have reached the United States but failed to enter the country. Mujica, who works with the migrant rights group Pueblo Sin Fronteras, the organizer of the march, said participants would not descend en masse on the U.S. border.
“If we arrive at the [U.S.] border with more than 1,000 people, we’re not going to make it,” Mujica told the crowd Tuesday. “We are going to go in smaller numbers to see who really has the right for asylum.”
There were reports that Mexican authorities had detained some members of the caravan who had broken away, but organizers said they had been unable to confirm the specific number.
While the numbers of border crossers are down compared with past years, the hunger to reach the United States — still more than 800 miles from this encampment — is as acute as ever for many Central Americans. They face unceasing danger in gang-controlled neighborhoods; they search fruitlessly for low-paying jobs; they yearn to be with relatives who have been living for decades in the United States; they want better lives for their children.
Among those in the caravan was a 20-year-old Honduran woman named Yamilet Banegas Guzman, who said she witnessed gang members drag her neighbor out of his house and then went home to a note warning that all witnesses would be shot. The gang had killed her sister nine years ago and shot several of her school friends, she said.
“Justice does not exist for us,” she said.
Eduardo Enrique Caña Rivera, 16, from El Salvador, was also part of the march. His older brother disappeared in September, and police later dragged the man’s body out of a river, finding stab wounds in his chest, he said. Caña Rivera fled to the Mexican border city of Tapachula, where many in this caravan convened before setting off.
The journey over the past several days has been haphazard, with some traveling by foot, others taking buses, hitchhiking or riding on top of trains.
“I want a better future for myself,” Caña Rivera said.
Since Sunday night, the migrants had camped at the public park, adapting to their bivouacked life. A former Pizza Hut employee from Guatemala boiled fish soup for the camp over a wood fire alongside his new friend, a fajita cook from El Salvador who had lived in Texas for 14 years before being deported. A man who said he paid 60 percent of his auto mechanic salary in extortion fees to gang members in Honduras still wore his orange vest from an overnight guard shift aimed at preventing cellphone theft at the makeshift camp. On the surrounding streets, migrants begged for money.
All of those interviewed Tuesday said that they would prefer to live in the United States but that they would settle for Mexico if that was where they were allowed to stay.
Trump’s tweets have become fodder for the four candidates competing in Mexico’s July 1 presidential election, with the politicians rejecting his criticism of this country’s response to the caravan. But the Trump messages have caused a colossal headache for the Mexican government as it attempts to secure a NAFTA deal before the vote.
Mexican officials responded this week to Trump’s tweets as they usually do: politely, preferring not to inflame tensions with their northern neighbor. The Interior Ministry said in a statement that it had informed the U.S. government of the caravan’s progress since March 25.
Mexico’s chief technical negotiator on the trade deal, Kenneth Smith Ramos, tweeted Tuesday that the country “will continue working in a constructive manner” in the NAFTA negotiations.
The low-key Mexican government response left the sense for some that the administration of President Enrique Peña Nieto had given in to the U.S. government.
Esteban Illades, editor of the Mexican magazine Nexos, said that the government “will definitely feel pressured to cave in to Trump’s demands.”
Source:-https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/the_americas/the-caravan-of-migrants-thats-alarmed-president-trump-has-now-stalled/2018/04/03/534b01c2-36aa-11e8-af3c-2123715f78df_story.html?utm_term=.5810ee01f958
