The Honduran “migrant caravan” attempting to enter the United States across its frontier with Mexico has failed.
Guatemalan authorities blocked the path of some 1,000 illegal aliens who, despite the global Chinese Virus pandemic, thought they would simply march north unimpeded.
The “caravaners” were wrong.
By 5 a.m. Saturday morning, they were on buses back home.
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COVID Ignored
And that means they walked a long way for nothing, as the Associated Press reported on Friday, and they didn’t much care if they contracted or spread the dreaded Asiatic pathogen.
The threat from Guatemala to stop them and send them home didn’t deter the “migrants:”
Threats from Guatemala’s president to deport migrants who entered the country illegally and the rigors of walking down tropical highways led dozens of migrants to begin the journey back to Honduras Friday, but hundreds more continued trudging toward Mexico and eventually, they hoped, the United States.
Guatemala immigration authorities said the migrants had split between two routes, with about 700 travelling north to Peten aboard trucks and minibuses and 400 walking and taking buses west toward the capital, Guatemala City. Another 800 were still walking in small groups toward the point where the routes diverge.…
About 100 soldiers armed with rifles and wooden sticks, and about 20 police officers, blocked the migrants, most of whom laid or sat down on the roadway to rest after the day’s long walk. Some migrants playing improvised leadership roles tried to dialogue with the security forces.
“You cannot deny us the right to go on,” one of the migrant leaders told a police officer. “Tell your bosses to give us a chance,” said the migrant, who did not identify himself. The police officer responded that the migrants had entered the country illegally, and that their orders were to return them to Honduras, or at least not allow them to proceed toward the Mexican border.
Actually Guatemala could deny them “the right to go on,” and did, AP reported. Helpfully, Guatemalan authorities provided transportation back across the border:
By 5 a.m. Saturday, none of 1,000 or so migrants who had been stalled by police and soldiers along a stretch of rural highway remained. Police said that hours earlier, migrants had boarded buses and army trucks to be taken back to the border.
Small groups of fewer than 10 migrants each could still be found walking along the highway before the roadblock Saturday morning.
Latest Apprehensions at the Border
The COVID caravan aside, the number of illegals U.S. border agents are apprehending is increasing, again, despite the threat of the virulent virus.
The border patrol bagged just shy of 50,000 illegal aliens in August, a 21.4-percent increase over July. And July’s figure was about 24 percent higher than June’s.
The figure for August is a massive increase over April’s 17,086, the lowest number of apprehensions since April 2017.
So far this year, border agents have apprehended 399,770 illegals.
September’s numbers will be published in the next week or so. If agents apprehend migrants at the rate they entered in August, about 1,650 a day, the total caught for the fiscal year ending September 30 will be nearly 500,000.
Bad as that figure sounds, it’s about half what it was last year: almost one million.
Apparently, the “migrants” are unafraid to contract and don’t care if they spread the potentially deadly virus, which U.S. officials believe might have escaped from a poorly-run lab at the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
U.S. taxpayers subsidized the shoddy operation through Dr. Anthony Fauci’s infectious-disease operation.
