Caravan of nearly 600 migrants bound for the United States clash with Mexican security forces
Video footage has once again highlighted the ongoing immigration crisis thousands of miles south of the United States border as members of a caravan of migrants clashed with security forces near Mexico's border with Guatemala in their attempt to reach the U.S.
A man cradling his son in his arms was pushed away by Mexican National Guard troops in riot gear.
The migrant shouted at the guardsmen, 'Kill me with my child. It doesn't matter. Kill me with the child,' before he was able to walk continue down the road.
Another male migrant bound for the United States was placed in a choke hold and then slammed to the ground by National Institute of Migration agents who repeatedly punched and kicked him.
The latest incident unfolded Saturday in the southern Mexican town of Tapachula, where at least 600 asylum-seekers from Haiti, Cuba and Central America split into two groups and and set out on foot before they were dispersed by the National Guard several hours later.
After about eight hours, they passed through an immigration checkpoint without problems, but then National Guard troops in riot gear blocked their way as a heavy rain fell. Some of the migrants were arrested while others eluded capture and kept heading north.
A migrant man holds on to his son as he attempts to go pass Mexican National Guard members in riot gear on Saturday as nearly 600 people joined a caravan that departed from the southern Mexico border town of Tapachula and headed towards the north in hopes of crossing to the United States
A member of Mexico's National Institute of Migration lies on top of a migrant as a child (left) who was traveling with him looks on moments after security forces and nearly 600 migrants from Haiti, Cuba and Central America clashed in the southern border town of Tapachula on Saturday
By Saturday night about 200 had arrived the town of Huixtla, said Reverend Heyman Vazquez, a priest who works with migrants.
Immigration agents also helped break up the group.
The Collective of Monitoring and Documentation of Human Rights of the Southeast, which is a coalition of groups that work with migrants, said some people were injured though it gave no numbers. It said the detained migrants had been loaded on buses and driven away.
The flow of migrants from Central America has increased since the beginning of the year and in recent days despair had grown especially among the Haitian community stranded in Tapachula, where some 125,000 foreign nationals are camping out in the open.
This week they began to demonstrate seeking to speed up their immigration procedures and threatened to leave in a caravan if Mexican officials did not pay attention to them.
One of the migrants told Univision that some of the people who joined the caravan had been in Tapachula for 'four to five months with a humanitarian visa, but they were allow us to move."
Haitian migrants demonstrate in front of the facilities of the Mexican Commission for Refugee Aid (Comar), in Tapachula, Mexico. Some 125,000 migrants hoping to reach the United States are camping out in the border city, which is located near Guatemala
A man seeking to reach U.S. border clashes with immigration agents in the southern Mexican border town of Tapachula, where two groups of nearly 600 migrants set off in a caravan on Saturday with the plan of reaching Mexico's northern border with the United States
The group that started out Saturday was the biggest one this year and recalled the caravans that occurred in Mexico before the pandemic and the big formation that tried to leave Honduras in January but that was blocked from crossing Guatemala.
The Mexican government has insisted this week that it will continue with its policy of containing migrants. Defense Secretary Luis Cresencio Sandoval said Friday that the main goal of the deployment of the army, navy and National Guard is to "stop all migration."
More than 14,000 military and National Guard personnel are deployed in Mexico's south, a move that was made by the administration of President Andrés Manuel López Obrador in the summer of 2019 after former United States President Donald Trump threatened to slam his country with import tariffs if they didn't do their part to stem the flow of migrants towards the 1,954-mile long border region shared by both nations.
However, tens of thousands of migrants have continued to march north, managing to stay in shelters or sleeping in tent camps set up along the border towns in the states of Baja California, Chihuahua, Tamaulipas, Nuevo León and Coahuila.
For several weeks now, the administration of President Joe Biden has been petitioning the Mexican government to put an end to the ad-hoc camps housing thousands of migrants in border cities due to concerns they pose a security risk and attract criminal gangs, officials familiar with the matter told Reuters.
The officials emphasized the importance of eradicating conditions that encouraged cartel members to try to extort migrants, or to pressure them into joining their ranks.
Haitian foreign nationals congregate in front of the Mexican Commission for Refugee Aid in Tapachula, Mexico, on August 23
An agent with Mexico's National Institute of Migration kicks the head of a migrant pinned to the ground on a highway in the souther border town of Tapachula
The bodies of Salvadoran migrant Oscar Alberto Martínez Ramírez and his nearly one-year-old daughter Valeria lie on the bank of the Rio Grande in Matamoros, Mexico
The U.S. Supreme Court on Tuesday ordered Biden to comply with a Texas-based federal judge's ruling to revive a Trump administration immigration policy that forced thousands of asylum seekers to stay in Mexico to await U.S. hearings.
The Migrant Protection Protocols, or 'Remain in Mexico,' police was instituted under orders of Trump in which migrants who attempted to enter the U.S. illegally or without legal documents could be expelled to Mexico where they would have to await their immigration proceedings.
The move was widely criticized by opponents of the administration and also tested the patience of migrants, including several parents and children who died in the process of crossing the border, including 25-year-old Oscar Ramírez, who was found dead on the banks of the Rio Grande with his one-year-old daughter Valeria by his side after they were swept away by a rip current in June 2019.
The family from El Salvador had spent two months at a camp in the northern Mexico border town of Matamoros waiting for an appointment with U.S. But the lagging wait times drove Ramírez and his pregnant wife, Tania Ávalos, 21, to migrate illegally to the U.S.
Ramírez crossed the Rio Grande lethal currents in Matamoros first with his child before returning to other the side for Ávalos.
But their youngster, misunderstanding why she had been left on the other side got back into the water and Ramírez fatefully went in to save her.
Ávalos could only watch in horror as her husband and daughter were swept a few hundred yards downstream to their deaths.
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