Mexico halts US-bound caravan of 2,000 migrants, critics call it ‘an exercise in cruelty’
President Donald Trump has touted a deal reached with the Mexican government in dealing with the flood of humanity that was overwhelming the southern border, and that flood has been slowed noticeably.
Not that the attempts to organize caravans for the journey to the United States don’t continue.
However, Mexico continues to live up to it’s end of the deal, as officials in the county halted a caravan of roughly 2,000 migrants early on Saturday, just hours into their trek north, according to Reuters.
According to the news agency, the migrants are from Africa, Central America and the Caribbean.
The migrants departed before dawn from Tapachula in the southern state of Chiapas near Guatemala, but only made it 19 miles before being confronted by approximately 500 members of Mexico’s National Guard military police, Reuters reported.
The caravan was reportedly the first since early 2019.
Wearing helmets and tactical vests, the military police blocked the highway on both sides, according to witnesses. Most of the migrants were loaded on buses by officials from Mexico’s national immigration institute and returned to Tapachula.
A small number of migrants, around 150, were permitted to return on foot.
Over the summer, President Trump praised Mexico’s stepped-up efforts to stop the flow of migrants into the United States, saying the threat of tariffs on the country’s exports was responsible for the change.
“We’re very happy with the job they are doing,” the president told reporters in the Oval Office. “It was because of tariffs they are doing it.”
With border apprehensions reaching 144,000 in May, Trump proposed crippling tariffs unless Mexico President Andrés Manuel López Obrador took immediate steps to curb the flow, the Washington Post reported in June.
An immigration enforcement agreement with Mexico was reached early that month.
President Trump took to Twitter to share the dramatic drop in apprehensions at the border, boasting on the “incredible progress being made at the Southern Border!”
Numbers show that arrests at the U.S.-Mexico border fell in September for the fourth month in a row.
Meanwhile, with the left actively aiding and abetting migrants in their quest to come to the U.S., despite the perils of a long, dangerous journey, which includes death and the rape of many women, there was outcry from human rights groups.
Salva Lacruz, from the Fray Matías de Córdova Human Rights Center in Tapachula, called the roundup on Sunday a “human hunt,” Fox News reported.
Lacruz said officials waited until the migrants had tired out before detaining them.
Claiming the migrants “need international protection,” he said returning them south was an “exercise in cruelty.”
Also overlooked on the left are persistent reports of children being bought and used to exploit loopholes in U.S. asylum laws to guarantee entry.
As for Trump’s campaign promise of building a wall and having Mexico pay for it, in response to the latest development, a social media user offered up this assessment:
“Do you remember when Trump said he would build a beautiful wall and Mexico was going to pay for it? Well here it is,” the tweet translates, according to Google.
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