The “migrant caravan” that began in Honduras in October has finally surged into Mexico City and must reckon whether to head for Texas or California.
But the caravan’s numbers are dwindling, news and official reports say, as even a third caravan crossed into Mexico on Friday, likely with the same goal in mind: Crash the U.S. border and tell (perhaps phony) tales of persecution to get asylum and lawsuits filed by anti-American leftists.
Meanwhile, the troops President Trump dispatched to the border to repel the caravan have been erecting barbed wire.
Mexico City Arrival
The latest from the Associated Press shows that the once-mighty train pushing through Mexico is losing steam, much to the chagrin, undoubtedly, of subversives hoping they can use the migrants to attack the president’s immigration policies in court. Lawyers have already filed a lawsuit on behalf of migrants who have not even arrived.
No longer is the caraven a mass of 14,000 people running over everything in their path, as some estimates had it weeks ago, or even the 7,000 it was before that.
A somewhat smaller contingent landed in Mexico City on Monday, having come from Veracruz on Mexico’s Gulf coast, AP reported. Helpfully, AP once again inadvertently proved that the migrants aren’t running for their lives, as their leftist supporters in the United States insist, but instead are running for jobs.
By afternoon 2,000 or more had arrived at the Jesus Martinez stadium, which has a capacity of about three times that, and eagerly began sifting through donations of clothes, gave themselves sponge baths, lunched on chicken and rice under the shade of tents and picked up thin mattresses to hunker down for the night….
Alba Zoleida Gonzalez, 48, from Valle, Honduras, said she had walked for five hours and hitched a ride on a tractor-trailer with about 150 people. Her calf muscles were aching, but that was a small price to pay for the chance at a life better than the one back home.
“I looked for work, and nothing,” Gonzalez said, adding that her husband had been robbed and had to hand over everything he made selling crabs so his assailants wouldn’t do worse. “And when one does find a little job they kill you for the money,” she said.
The credulous AP reporters even told the story of “Oscar Ulloa, 20, an accountant from Honduras.” Accountants are 20 years old in Honduras?
That question aside, the horde is still 1,775 miles from Tijuana on the border with California, 1,354 miles from the Nogales on the border with Arizona, and a little less than 600 miles from either McAllen or Brownsville, Texas.
Migrants Dropping Out, Barbed Wire Awaits
AP’s reporting shows how much the caravan has diminished.
“Mexico’s Interior Ministry estimated over the weekend that there are more than 5,000 migrants in total currently moving through Mexico,” but “2,793 migrants have applied for refugee status in Mexico in recent weeks and around 500 have asked for assistance to return to their home countries.”
On October 20, CNN reported that 2,000 of the foot-soldiers had dropped out of the jobs march.
An AP report on Saturday unpacked the numbers a little more. It explained that “Mexico is now faced with the unprecedented situation of having three caravans stretched out over 300 miles (500 kilometers) of highways in the southern states of Chiapas and Oaxaca, with a total of about 6,000 migrants.”
The first caravan now numbers about 3,000 to 4,000, AP reported, while a second that stormed into Mexico last week has between 1,000 and 1,500. A third caravan, this one from El Salvador, crossed into Mexico on Friday. Apparently, another group of 300 is surging toward Veracruz.
In Monday’s dispatch from Mexico City, AP reported that the presidents of Guatemala and Honduras want to know who is behind the caravan movement:
Honduran President Juan Orlando Hernandez said that “thousands” of his countrymen have returned to Honduras. Guatemalan President Jimmy Morales went further, calling for an investigation of people who “promote or participate” in the caravan, saying they “should be judged based on international laws.”
That would include, presumably, the leftist open-borders activists aiming at destroying American sovereignty.
However many “migrants” get to the border, it might not be as easy to get across as they think. The president deployed 5,200 troops to the border last week, with the promise of some 15,000 more.
And those there are now have begun stringing concertina wire on the Rio Grande.
Photo of migrants in Jesus Martinez stadium: AP Images
