Mexico relocates thousands of migrants awaiting a flood of asylum seekers from the United States.

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Mexican authorities have accelerated the transfer of thousands of immigrants from the south of the country to other regions, as the northern border states prepare to receive asylum seekers sent by the United States after the reactivation this week of the

.

Dozens of buses full of migrants, mostly from Central America but also from Cuba and Venezuela, left in the last days of the city of Tapachula, in the state of Chiapas, in the direction of other states, as explained this Monday by a witness and an activist to the Reuters news agency.

A group of migrants is transferred by bus from Nuevo Laredo to Monterrey, Mexico on July 18, 2019.Marco Ugarte / AP

Many migrants had waited months in Tapachula, near the border with Guatemala, to try to regularize their immigration status in Mexico.

.

But the government of Joe Biden reestablished on Monday by court order the defunct migration program

, officially known as Migrant Protection Protocols (MPP) and created by its predecessor, Donald Trump.

Under this plan, asylum seekers are sent to Mexico to await the resolution of their cases in US immigration courts.

[Alejandro Mayorkas reiterates in San Ysidro that the border is not open for irregular crossings]

The first group of migrants under the renewed program is expected to be returned to the neighboring country this week.

Tapachula

, according to different sources.

45 departed on Saturday, confirmed a government source who requested anonymity, while on Sunday and Monday another 32 and 70 buses set out respectively, according to migrant rights activist Luis García Villagrán.

"They are trying not to saturate the northern border now that the MPP is starting. That is why they

, controlling where the migrants go," he said.

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A Nicaraguan migrant who declined to be identified said he was relieved to get on a bus that was going to take him to the city of San Miguel de Allende, in the state of Guanajuato.

"I was here a few months, but thank God we are leaving," he exclaimed.

Large numbers of migrants, especially from Haiti, remain in Tapachula waiting to be transferred by buses.

Some slept in a camp in front of a stadium that migration officials use as a processing center.