A new caravan of at least 1,500 asylum seekers has departed southern Mexico in the hopes of reaching the US border before President-elect Donald Trump takes office.
The caravan of migrants — who hail mostly from Venezuela, Cuba, Haiti, Colombia, Guatemala and Honduras — started walking north late Sunday from Tapachula, a city near Mexico’s southern border with Guatemala.
Some of the migrants, who kicked off the trek under the cover of darkness to avoid the scorching daytime heat, are racing to try to cross the border ahead of Trump’s Jan. 20 inauguration amid fears he will follow through on campaign promises to crackdown on immigration.
There are concerns Trump could eliminate the Biden administration’s CPB One app program — which allows asylum seekers to book appointments with immigration officials — as soon as he takes office, some migrants say.
“There are a lot of reports that [Trump] has said he is going to do away with CBP One, that there are going to be deportations, the biggest deportation, but you have to have faith in God,” Venezuelan migrant Francisco Unda, 38, said.
The app entry program was introduced in January last year, with President Biden claiming it would help control the number of migrants crossing the border illegally.
There are roughly 1,450 appointments made available daily via the program.
Meanwhile, the fresh wave of migrants took off heading north after Trump threatened to slap 25% tariffs on Mexican products if the country didn’t do more to block the flow toward the US border.
Last week, Trump said Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum had agreed to stop unauthorized migration.
Sheinbaum, on her part, insisted that “migrants and caravans are taken care of before they reach the border” — adding she was confident a tariff war with the US could be averted.
The back-and-forth comes after two small caravans that started rushing toward the southern border in the wake of Trump’s election victory last month were broken up just weeks later by Mexican authorities.
Some migrants were bused to cities in southern Mexico, while others were offered transit papers.
A handful in the caravan that departed Tapachula Sunday said they’d be willing to stay and find work in the industrial cities of northern Mexico if they are stopped.
Most migrants cannot work or find work in Tapachula — a city flooded with migrants — some 1,100 miles from the border.
“I think a lot of people here, if there were opportunities in Monterrey and surrounding areas, they would stay there,” Santos Modesto, a migrant from Honduras, said, “because there are a lot of Cubans and Venezuelans who would rather stay here than return to their country.”
He added, though, that most in the caravan want to get to the US so they could “achieve a better life for their families.”
With Post wires
