Migrant caravan stops in field in southern Mexico

Migrant caravan stops in field in southern Mexico

Posted: Monday, April 2, 2018 6:38 pm | Updated: 7:10 pm, Mon Apr 2, 2018.
Associated Press |

MEXICO CITY (AP) — President Donald Trump is warning about "caravans" of migrants heading to the U.S., though the caravan of Central American migrants supposedly moving across Mexico toward the border was strikingly immobile Monday.

The group of about 1,100 people, most of them Hondurans, had been walking along roadsides and train tracks, but they have stopped to camp out in a field in the southern Mexico state of Oaxaca. They are waiting and getting advice on filing for transit or humanitarian visas in Mexico.

While a group of about a couple of hundred men in the march broke off and hopped a freight train north on Sunday — probably to try to enter the United States — the rest seem unlikely to move until Wednesday or Thursday. Those are probably going to take buses to the last scheduled stop for the caravan, a migrant rights symposium in central Puebla state.

Irineo Mujica, director of Pueblo Sin Fronteras, the activist group behind the annual symbolic event, said the caravan would continue only to the city of Puebla southeast of Mexico City, "but not in a massive way." After the symposium, some migrants may continue to Mexico's capital, where it is easier to make an asylum claim. Mujica said about 300 to 400 of the migrants say they have relatives living in Mexico and so may consider staying here at least temporarily.

It was all pretty undramatic — especially compared to 2013 and 2014, when migrants jammed Mexican trains heading north — but Trump's angry tweets raised hackles in Mexico.

"Mexico is doing very little, if not NOTHING, at stopping people from flowing into Mexico through their Southern Border, and then into the U.S. They laugh at our dumb immigration laws.

They must stop the big drug and people flows, or I will stop their cash cow, NAFTA. NEED WALL!" Trump wrote. "With all of the money they make from the U.S., hopefully they will stop people from coming through their country and into ours."

Mexico's interior secretary, Alfonso Navarrete Prida, rejected such pressure.

"We will act with complete sovereignty in enforcing our laws," Navarrete Prida said Monday. "Of course we will act ... to enforce our immigration laws, with no pressure whatsoever from any country whatsoever."

Navarette Prida did say he talked Monday with U.S. Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen. "We agreed to analyze the best means to handle flows of migration, in accordance with each country's laws," Navarrete Prida wrote in his Twitter account.

A Mexican government official said the caravans are tolerated because migrants have a right under Mexican law to request asylum in Mexico or to request a humanitarian visa allowing travel to the U.S. border to seek asylum in the United States.

The "Stations of the Cross" migrant caravans have been held in southern Mexico for about 10 years. They began as short processions of migrants, some dressed in biblical garb and carrying crosses, as an Easter-season protest against the kidnappings, extortion, beatings and killings suffered by many Central American migrants as they cross Mexico.

The organized portions of the caravans usually don't proceed much farther north than the Gulf coast state of Veracruz. Some migrants, moving as individuals or in smaller groups, often take buses or trucks from there to the U.S. border.

Mexico routinely stops and deports Central Americans, sometimes in numbers that rival those of the United States.

Deportations of foreigners dropped from 176,726 in 2015 to 76,433 in 2017, in part because fewer were believed to have come to Mexico, and more were requesting asylum in Mexico.

Mexico granted 3,223 asylum requests made in 2016, and 9,626 requests filed last year are either under review or have been accepted.

http://www.brownsvilleherald.com/new...cd8de46f3.html

Quote:

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A Mexican government official said the caravans are tolerated because migrants have a right under Mexican law to request asylum in Mexico or to request a humanitarian visa allowing travel to the U.S. border to seek asylum in the United States.

The "Stations of the Cross" migrant caravans have been held in southern Mexico for about 10 years. They began as short processions of migrants, some dressed in biblical garb and carrying crosses, as an Easter-season protest against the kidnappings, extortion, beatings and killings suffered by many Central American migrants as they cross Mexico.

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What a bunch of crapola - anything to blur the line that they are ILLEGAL ALIENS, w/o rights to be in others' countries, trespassing into a country that is not theirs - use the passion of Christ our Saviour, carrying crosses like they don't support drug cartels!!!!!

Take your cross and go carry it BACK home and camp out on YOUR President's doorstep for safety.



NO ASYLUM!!! YOU HAVE JESUS ON YOUR SOIL

THEY ARE LYING CRIMINAL TRESPASSERS!

NO RIGHTS, NO FREEBIES...LOAD THEM UP AND SEND THEM BACK!

The caravan of migrants that’s alarmed President Trump stalls at a soccer field

https://img.washingtonpost.com/rf/im...EeiP0kn-PGdaiQ

April 3 , 2018

Joshua Partlow and David Agren


MATIAS ROMERO, MEXICO — 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 reforming the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). He has also threatened to reduce foreign aid to Honduras, the country of origin of many of the marchers.


Trump’s comments have turned what had been an annual march of U.S.-bound migrants — an event aimed at highlighting the suffering of Central Americans fleeing home — into something of a political crisis for Mexico.


Central American migrants to Trump: 'Have a conscience'




On Monday, Mexican immigration officials began to register the hundreds of migrants and talked about the possibility of humanitarian visas for the most vulnerable, while others might receive permits of less than a month. Some already have been deported, according to Mexican officials.


While the march wasn’t unprecedented, this year’s exercise drew an unusually large number of participants. Conservative U.S. media outlets jumped on reports of the march, 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 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, as he discussed the caravan while posing for a photo at the White House with Baltic state leaders.


Earlier in the day, he tweeted: “The big Caravan of People from Honduras, now coming across Mexico and heading to our “Weak Laws” Border, had better be stopped before it gets there. Cash cow NAFTA is in play, as is foreign aid to Honduras and the countries that allow this to happen. Congress MUST ACT NOW!”


At the Victor E. Flores Morales sports park in this southern city in Oaxaca state, scores of children played Tuesday on slides and metal swings, waiting for their parents and the organizers of the caravan to decide the next move. For most migrants, their goal is the United States, still more than 800 miles away. They wanted to march on.


Some said they heard about this caravan through friends and relatives; others said they have made the trip in the past but weren’t allowed into the United States. The migrants said they had convened from several countries in Tapachula, a city along Mexico’s southern border, and begun their march north. A number of them said they were fleeing gang violence and extortion threats in their violence-plagued countries, while others said they were looking for better-paying jobs.


Trump says he asked Mexico to stop caravan of Central American migrants




After several nights of sleeping outdoors, the migrants had begun adapting to this 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 been deported after living in Texas for 14 years. A Honduran man who said he paid 60 percent of his auto-mechanic salary in extortion fees to gang members still wore his orange vest from an overnight-guard shift aimed at preventing cellphone theft. 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. Almost anything, they said, would be better than returning to Central America, which has some of the hemisphere’s highest levels of violence.


“There is a barbarous situation in our country,” said Santos Alberto Lino, 40, who had worked as an auto mechanic in Honduras before joining the caravan. “People want to live in peace and harmony.”

Trump’s tweets have turned into fodder for the four candidates competing in Mexico’s July 1 presidential election, with Mexican politicians rejecting his criticism of the 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. Mexico’s chief technical negotiator on the trade deal, Kenneth Smith Ramos, tweeted Tuesday that the process of modernizing the treaty “is entering a phase of intense activity.” Mexico, he added, “will continue working in a constructive manner.”

The low-key Mexican government response to Trump left the sense for some that the administration of President Enrique Peña Nieto had caved.

Esteban Illades, editor of the Mexican magazine Nexos, said that the government “will definitely feel pressured to cave in to Trump’s demands.”

In southern Mexico, many of the members of the migrant caravan knew that Trump had spoken harshly about them.

“Donald Trump’s words are hurtful to us,” said Manuel Flores, 30, a Guatemalan who is one of the camp’s self-appointed cooks. “We are not extraterrestrials. We are not from another world.”

His friend, Jose Ernesto, 28, from El Salvador, spoke about his time working in a Texas grill house for years before his deportation.
“You look in the kitchen, and who prepared that food for you? It’s a Mexican; it’s a Hispanic,” Ernesto said. “We are the ones who have made your country the way it is.”


Agren reported from Mexico City.


https://www.washingtonpost.com/world...=.c4ae61311b9c

They can go work and prepare food in their own country.

Donald Trump's words are hurtful...boo hoo hoo!

What about your own President and what HE does to you! Go whine on his doorstep.

We "prefer" you NOT live in the United States...we "prefer" you go home...not DUMP yourself on anybody's country and solve our own problems.

We have a high cost of living here. They TAKE $113 BILLION dollars in resources...we cannot take in the world's breeding poor!


YOU ALL "HURT" YOURSELVES BY THE WAY YOU BREED, THE WAY YOU LIVE, YOUR MORALS AND YOUR LACK OF WILL TO FIGHT FOR YOUR RIGHTS ON YOUR SOIL.

What they need to understand is when Trump speaks, he speaks for the American People. If they think Trump is mean to them, oh my Lord, will they be whimpering when they meet US.