Thousands of migrants started out in the rain early Monday in southern Mexico, tired of waiting for their situation to be regularized in a region with little work and far from their ultimate goal of reaching the US border to apply for asylum there.
Its defenders explained that they want to draw attention to their difficult situation, making this caravan of migrants coincide with the Summit of the Americas that is being held starting today in Los Angeles.
The caravan is made up of between 4,000 and 5,000 migrants, most of them from Central America, Venezuela and Haiti.
It is the largest that has tried to leave southern Mexico this year.
The local authorities have ended up dissolving the others with harsh police operations and offers to resolve their cases faster.
A migrant in the caravan that left Tapachula, in the Mexican state of Chiapas, in the early hours of Monday, June 6, 2022. AP
For months, these migrants have complained about Mexico's strategy of containing them in the far south of the country in squalid conditions.
Many carry significant debts for their trip there, and have few opportunities to find work in that region.
President Joe Biden plans to announce his vision for a "sustainable, resilient and equitable future" in the region at the Summit of the Americas in California, White House officials told The Associated Press.
Among the issues to be discussed at the summit, migration stands out, although the controversy over Biden's refusal to invite Cuba, Venezuela and Nicaragua, and the response of the President of Mexico, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, declining to attend, may complicate a consensus.
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“I am not going to the Summit because not all the countries of the Americas are invited,” López Obrador said in his morning conference on Monday.
Although he will send his foreign minister, Marcelo Ebrard, the absence of the leader represents a vacuum for the discussion of the migration issue.
In any case, he also announced that he will visit the White House in July.
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Before traveling to the United States, many migrants tried to apply for asylum in Mexico, which has overwhelmed the local agency that deals with these cases.
The restrictive policies have led to that request for asylum in Mexico being one of the few ways that migrants have to legalize their situation and then be able to continue traveling north.
Thousands of migrants arrived at the border before May 23 in the hope that Title 42 would be repealed, thus ending the immediate expulsion of most asylum seekers under this measure approved by former President Donald Trump for health reasons. at the start of the coronavirus pandemic.
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A federal judge barred Biden from ending the policy, as he planned to do in May, admitting the lawsuit from 21 Republican states.
Migrants are also now awaiting the decision of the Supreme Court on the Stay in Mexico program, which forces them to remain in that country until their immigration status in the United States is resolved.
Last Tuesday, a system to expedite asylum applications at the border with a limit of 90 days to resolve cases also came into effect.