Christmas Day meant similar to some other day for hundreds of migrants walking through southern Mexico: more trudging under a hot sun.
There were no presents, and Christmas Eve dinner was a sandwich, a bottle of water and a banana handed out by the Catholic church to a few of the migrants within the town of Álvaro Obregón, within the southern state of Chiapas, which borders Guatemala.
Migrants spent Christmas night sleeping on a scrap of cardboard or plastic stretched out under an awning or tent, or the bare ground.
In the morning, it was waking as usual at 4 a.m., to get an early start and avoid the worst of the warmth, walking to the subsequent town, Huixtla, 20 miles (30 kilometers) away.
Karla Ramírez, a migrant from Honduras who was travelling with other adults and 4 children, got to Álvaro Obregón too late Sunday to get any of the food being given out by the church. So that they had to purchase whatever little they may afford.
“It was sad: we’ve never, ever been on the street before,” Ramírez said. “Our Christmas dinner was some mortadella, butter and tomato, with a tortilla.”
Mariela Amaya’s seven-year-old son didn’t understand why that they had to spend Christmas this manner. Amaya, also from Honduras, tugged the hand of her drained, recalcitrant son as they walked.
“They don’t understand why we’ve to do that to get a greater life,” Amaya said. Nor did the governments of Mexico and the United States, she said.
“Why cannot they assist us? We need their help,” she said.
What little help there was got here from local families, one among whom gave out tamales — traditional seasonal fare — and water to the passing migrants.
The migrants included single adults but in addition entire families, all desirous to reach the U.S. border, offended and frustrated at having to attend weeks or months within the nearby city of Tapachula for documents that may allow them to proceed their journey.
Mexico claims it doesn’t give out transit visas, but migrants keep hoping to get some kind of document in order that they could not less than take buses to the border.
“This journey has been really hard for us migrants. We need the (Mexican) immigration office and the federal government to have some pity on us, and provides us a secure conduct pass,” said Jessica García, a migrant from Venezuela.
Mexico says it detected 680,000 migrants moving through the country in the primary 11 months of 2023.
At around 6,000 people, the migrant caravan that set out Sunday was the biggest one since June 2022, when a similarly sized group departed Tapachula.
And just like the 2022 caravan — which began as U.S. President Joe Biden hosted leaders in Los Angeles for the Summit of the Americas — this 12 months’s Christmas caravan got here a couple of days before U.S. officials are to fulfill with their Mexican counterparts in Mexico City to explore ways of stemming the variety of migrants showing up on the U.S. southwest border.
The Mexican government has already said it’s willing to assist attempt to block migrants from crossing Mexico; the federal government had little alternative, afte r U.S. officials briefly closed two vital Texas railway border crossings, claiming they were overwhelmed by processing migrants.
That put a chokehold on freight moving from Mexico to the United States, in addition to grain needed to feed Mexican livestock moving south. The rail crossings have since been reopened, however the message was clear.
U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken is predicted to reach in Mexico City Wednesday to hammer out latest agreements to regulate the surge of migrants searching for entry into the United States. The U.S. delegation will even include Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas and White House homeland security adviser Liz Sherwood-Randall.
This month, as many as 10,000 migrants were arrested per day on the U.S. southwest border.
In May, Mexico agreed to absorb migrants from countries reminiscent of Venezuela, Nicaragua and Cuba who had been turned away by the U.S. for not following rules that provided latest legal pathways to asylum and other types of migration.
But that deal, aimed toward curbing a post-pandemic jump in migration, appears to be insufficient as numbers rise once more, disrupting bilateral trade and stoking anti-migrant sentiment amongst conservative voters within the U.S.
Arrests for illegal crossing topped 2 million in each of the U.S. government’s last two fiscal years, reflecting technological changes which have made it easier for migrants to depart home to flee poverty, natural disasters, political repression and arranged crime.
