New Caravan With Thousands of Migrants Moves to Mexico City

In the early hours of Monday, some 10,000 Latin American migrants left Tapachula City for the District of Mexico to ask the authorities to facilitate their transit to the United States.

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The migrants complained about the bureaucratic slowness of the National Migration Institute (INM) and denounced that the Mexican Commission for Refugee Aid is giving appointments for August. On the night before the march, they staged a protest to ask the Tapachula authorities to stop the police raids against undocumented immigrants.

"The INM agents have broken into hotels and houses looking for migrants," said Luis Garcia, a social activist who accompanies the migrants. He also recalled that the migrants waited over 10 days for the Mexican immigration authorities to give them any response to their requests.

This is the 8th migrant caravan that has left Mexico for the U.S. since 2018. Its march towards the U.S. border occurs at a time when the "Summit of the Americas" begins in Los Angeles without the presence of the presidents of Mexico and other Latin American countries.

The tweet reads, "Migrant caravan passes Viva México's first checkpoint in Tapachula. There was no confrontation. The National Guard just watched. They are expected to rest today in the municipality of Alvaro Obregon. About 10,000 migrants make up the caravan."

When Joe Biden took office in January 2021, he proposed a reform project to regularize the stay of some 11 million migrants in the U.S. So far, however, his proposal has made no progress.

Meanwhile, Washington has been pressuring the President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador's administration to contain migrants in Mexican territory. In 2021, for example, Mexico detained over 307,000 migrants heading towards the United States.

Some 130,863 of them applied for refuge in Mexico, an unprecedented figure, according to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR).