In one of the largest mass crossings recorded in recent Texas history, this Sunday night some 1,000 migrants entered El Paso after crossing the Rio Grande River from the Mexican city of Juárez in a group, Noticias Telemundo confirmed over the weekend. .
The exact number of migrants that made up the caravan, mostly from Nicaragua, Peru and Ecuador, is not clear, but press reports place the number between 800 and 1,500.
The mass crossing comes as Border Patrol facilities and non-governmental shelters in El Paso continue to report reaching capacity, and as hundreds of thousands of migrants remain stranded in Mexico waiting to enter the United States.
In October alone, according to the most recent data, border agents recorded
51,000 arrests
in that region.
And so far in 2022 the number of arrests along the entire southern border is already a record:
2.4 million.
Texas Governor Gregg Abbott, a Republican, has responded to the crisis by sending hundreds of buses carrying migrants to Democratic states.
The migrants who crossed Sunday night were part of a group that was escorted by the State Police of the Mexican state of Chihuaua from the city of Jiménez to the Juárez border in a caravan of 20 buses, according to reports.
Mexico said it did it to protect them from organized crime.
A large caravan of migrants from Central America crosses the southern border of the United States along the Rio Grande River on Sunday, December 11, 2022. Noticias Telemundo
“A large number of people arrived, a huge number,” Rubén García, director of Annunciation House, a nonprofit organization that offers refuge to asylum seekers, told The New York Times.
He added that
on Monday the border authorities were continuing to process the new arrivals.
Some versions not confirmed by the authorities pointed out that the group on Sunday is the largest known to have crossed the southern border in a single day.
"This is the largest crossing of a single group that we've ever seen," said reporter Bill Melugin of the conservative Fox News network.
Images from Telemundo News
documented the massive passage of hundreds of migrants, including children and women
, in a huge line across the Rio Grande, on whose shores bonfires were also visible.
This weekend was particularly hectic on the southern border, according to authorities.
"Over the weekend, the El Paso sector experienced a large increase in illegal crossings, averaging 2,460 encounters per day over 3 days, primarily through the downtown El Paso area," Peter Jaquez of El Paso said on Twitter. the Border Patrol.
At the beginning of December, the Department of Homeland Security projected that migrant arrivals at the southern border could double when Title 42 expires on December 21.
First with Donald Trump and then with Joe Biden, since 2020 that controversial health rule for COVID-19 has sent hundreds of thousands of potential asylum seekers back to Mexico.
Federal authorities expect between 9,000 and 14,000 migrants to arrive daily at the southern border, double the current number, an anonymous official source told CNN.
For diplomatic reasons, the United States is restricted from returning Nicaraguan asylum seekers, either to Mexico or on deportation flights to their country of origin.
Something similar has been happening with Cuban migrants — some 250,000 have entered in 2022, in the largest exodus in the history of the communist island — but in November Cuba and the United States reached an agreement for that country to begin accepting Cuban flights. deportation, with which Biden seeks to alleviate the crisis on the southern border.