A caravan of thousands of migrants departed southern Mexico on foot Sunday, apparently heading toward the southern U.S. border, days before U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken’s scheduled visit to Mexico, the Associated Press (AP) reported.
The migrants, mostly families with young children from countries across Latin America, including Cuba and Venezuela, departed Tapachula, a Mexican city on Mexico’s border with Guatemala, according to the AP. Security forces reportedly did not deter them.
Numbering about 6,000, the caravan reportedly is the largest in over a year.
“We’ve been waiting here for three or four months without an answer,” Cristian Rivera, traveling without his wife and child who remained in his native Honduras, told the AP. “Hopefully with this march there will be a change and we can get the permission we need to head north.”
Blinken, together with Secretary of Homeland Security Alejandro Mayorkas and White House Homeland Security Advisor Liz Sherwood-Randall, will visit Mexico’s President Andrés Manuel López Obrador Wednesday to discuss “unprecedented irregular migration” and “border security challenges,” according to a statement by the U.S. Department of State.
A similar-sized caravan marched northward in June 2022 as President Joe Biden hosted the Summit of the Americas in Los Angeles, according to the AP. There, the U.S. and various Latin American countries launched the Los Angeles Declaration on Migration and Protection to promote better living conditions that will supposedly render irregular migration unnecessary, among other things. Venezuela, Cuba and Nicaragua were not party to the declaration. (RELATED: Over 2,000 Migrants Cross Into Eagle Pass In One Night)
López Obrador reportedly agreed in May to take in illegal Venezuelan, Cuban and Nicaraguan migrants refused entry by the U.S. He reiterated his commitment Friday to helping to contain the migrant surge but also called for the U.S. to settle its differences with Cuba and send more development aid to the migrants’ home countries, the AP noted.
U.S. authorities took into custody 10,000 migrants per day at the southwest border and over two million in the past two fiscal years, according to the AP.