A caravan of roughly 2,000 migrants has embarked on a trek to travel from Mexico’s southern border with Guatemala to the United States’s southern border before the U.S. presidential election on Nov. 5.
The couple thousand left on what could be a 1,000 or 2,000-mile journey through the country, determined to reach the U.S. in the next two weeks, according to media and social media reports.
Historically, new White House administrations have not made illegal immigrants who can prove they entered the country before the previous November election a priority for arrest and deportation, giving migrants more incentive to arrive quickly.
WATCH: A group of about 2,000 migrants leaves Mexico’s southern border on Sunday hoping to reach the country’s north and ultimately the United States weeks before the U.S. presidential election, in which immigration has been a key issue: Read more: https://t.co/MgWd4qcdEc pic.twitter.com/Ti7hv6pJIh
— Border Report (@BorderReportcom) October 21, 2024
Former President Donald Trump is running against Vice President Kamala Harris in the presidential election. Trump has promised a severe crackdown on illegal immigration and vowed to carry out the largest deportation operation in history.
Harris has not indicated how she would govern differently than President Joe Biden, who undid many of Trump’s stricter border executive orders when he took office in 2021, leading to historically high rates of illegal immigration.
The Department of Homeland Security’s U.S. Customs and Border Protection agency had increased the number of removal flights and expeditiously removed more illegal immigrants since June when Biden took executive action to quell the flow of people at the border.
Dozens of caravans have embarked on similar journeys from southern Mexico to the U.S. since the Trump administration, and all disbanded before arriving in the U.S.
The travel, often by foot or atop trains, is dangerous as criminal organizations in Mexico, known as cartels, will target migrants with violence for not paying them to smuggle them.
Previous caravans have been organized by activists, including Luis García Villagrán and Irineo Mujica. This group is the third to set out north since Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum was sworn into office earlier this month.
Mexican media outlet La Verdad said the caravan was comprised of Venezuelans and had dubbed itself “El Niño,” Spanish for “the boy,” “the Christ child,” and a meteorological term for a climate pattern where the ocean’s surface in tropical regions of the Pacific Ocean is significantly warm.
A previous caravan of about 1,000 migrants departed on Oct. 13 and called itself “God Guides Us,” according to La Verdad.
Mexico’s stance on migration through the country has ebbed and flowed through the years. For several years, the government required migrants to have a document allowing them to be present in the country while migrating north. Otherwise, they could be picked up and moved south.
In late August, the U.S. government expanded a program that utilizes the CBP One app to allow immigrants anywhere in Mexico to schedule an appointment with U.S. customs officers at the U.S. border to see if they qualify for parole admission.
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The app was originally only intended for migrants who had made it to the northern part of Mexico to be able to apply for an appointment, but it was changed over the summer to allow immigrants in any region of the country to apply.
A CBS News report in February found that migrants had attempted to schedule appointments through the app 64 million times since its inception in early 2023. At present, the app allows 1,450 appointments to be scheduled per day.