A caravan of about 1,500 migrants left southern Mexico on Sunday night en route to the United States in hopes of getting across the border and into the country before President-elect Donald Trump takes office again next month.
But the caravan’s start comes as Mexican leaders continue their crackdown on immigrants traveling to the U.S. Two other caravans that started heading north from southern Mexico last month were recently broken up by Mexican authorities, according to news reports.
The effort to break up the two caravans appeared to be part of “an agreement between the president of Mexico and the president of the United States,” migrant rights activist Luis Garcia Villagrán told the Associated Press last week.
The latest caravan — mostly migrants from Venezuela, Cuba, Haiti, Colombia, Guatemala, and Honduras — began traveling at night to avoid the daytime heat. They hope to reach the U.S. to “achieve a better life for their families,” a migrant from Honduras told the AP.
Some migrants expressed concern that Trump will end the CBP One cellphone app that President Joe Biden launched in January 2023. The app allows 1,450 immigrants per day to schedule asylum-claim interviews via smartphones.
“There are a lot of reports that he has said he is going to do away with CBP One, that there are going to be deportations, the biggest deportations,” Venezuelan migrant Francisco Unda told the AP, “but you have to have faith in God.”
Illegal border crossings have dropped sharply this year after years of record highs, in part because the Biden administration has funneled border crossers to official ports of entry where they’ve increasingly been paroled into the country with a quasi-legal status.
The Mexican government has also helped to curb the flow of migrants to the U.S. border by rounding up prospective border-crossers and keeping them in southern Mexican states along the Guatemala border. Todd Bensman, a national-security fellow with the Center for Immigration Studies, recently claimed that Tapachula, a city in the southern Mexican state of Chiapas, “holds a migrant time bomb ready to go off.”
“People are tired of being in Tapachula,” a migrant from El Salvador told the Spanish news agency, EFE. “There is no work, no accommodation, no money, and people have been waiting for four to five months and can’t find anything in this city.”
Last month, Trump announced plans to impose 25 percent tariffs on Mexican and Canadian goods until they cooperate with his plans to curtail illegal immigration and combat fentanyl trafficking. Mexico’s leftist president, Claudia Sheinbaum, initially responded by floating a threat of retaliatory tariffs: “To one tariff will come another and so on, until we put our common businesses at risk.”
But in late November, Trump announced that he had a “very productive conversation” with Sheinbaum, writing on Truth Social that she “has agreed to stop Migration through Mexico, and into the United States, effectively closing our Southern Border.”
Sheinbaum also wrote on X she’d had an “excellent conversation” with Trump.
“We discussed Mexico’s strategy on the migration phenomenon, and I shared that caravans are not arriving at the northern border because they are being taken care of in Mexico,” she wrote.
Regarding the two caravans that Mexican authorities broke up last month, the first departed from Tapachula on November 5, the day Trump was elected, according to the AP. That caravan of about 2,500 to 3,000 people traveled about 270 miles.
“After hearing that Trump had won, many of those in the caravan felt less hopeful about their chance at a new life in the United States,” Reuters reported in early November.
“I had hoped [Kamala Harris] would win,” a Venezuelan migrant told the news agency.
The second caravan of about 1,500 migrants started traveling north on November 20, and traveled about 140 miles before it was broken up, the AP reported.