Move in effect dashes migrants’ plans to travel together in a ‘caravan’ to the United States

This article is more than 7 months old

This article is more than 7 months old

Guatemalan police accompanied by US Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents have swept up hundreds of migrants, returning them to the Honduran border and in effect dashing their plans to travel together in a “caravan” to the United States.

Other, smaller groups traveled on in dribs and drabs in a movement involving several thousand people but very different from previous caravans.

Praying and singing songs, the group of 300 migrants – adults, teens and young children – had set out from a shelter in Entre Rios under rainy skies before dawn and walked about six hours before stopping in the town of Morales to eat and rest. There they were challenged by police, loaded on to buses and returned to the border to register under rules governing freedom of travel between Guatemala, Honduras, El Salvador and Nicaragua.

Guatemalan police officers said the United States paid for the buses.

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The action essentially dissolved what had been the largest and most cohesive group that left the Honduran city of San Pedro Sula on Wednesday in response to a call for the first migrant caravan in many months. Guatemala’s tactics mirrored those employed last year by Mexico to discourage and break up caravans on its territory following intense pressure from Washington.

Alejandro Giammattei, the Guatemalan president, had said on Wednesday that the migrants would be allowed to pass through the country, though he noted they would need the proper papers and predicted they would run into a “wall” in Mexico.

Most of the migrants split into smaller groups – some as small as 20-30 people – and began walking along highways, boarding buses and hitching rides. It was nothing resembling the mass human flows that formed in recent years, inspiring the fury of Donald Trump and becoming a political football in the United States.

“This caravan is not anything even remotely similar to what we saw in ’18 and a little bit in ’19. A few folks here and a few folks there,” Chad Wolf, the acting US homeland security secretary, told Fox News Radio. “What has changed ... are the number of agreements that we have in place with Honduras, Guatemala, as well as Mexico.”

Wolf also noted the presence of US “tactical agents” in Guatemala.

Guatemala’s immigration agency reported a total of 2,274 migrants registered at its El Cinchado and Agua Caliente crossings. An unknown number of others crossed irregularly.

Many of those swept up on Thursday were expected to give up and return to Honduras, even as scattered groups continued to walk and hitchhike through a tropical region of south-eastern Guatemala.

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Among them was Génesis Fuentes, a 19-year-old Honduran who was part of the first caravan in October 2018. Back then she made it to the northern Mexico city of Mexicali, across from Calexico, California, and lived there working as a waitress and cook for about five months. She ultimately crossed the border, but was detained by US border agents and deported last May.

Clad in a red T-shirt, a hooded sweatshirt, jeans and sandals, Fuentes was limping from a bruised knee. She said that being sent back home meant returning to a life that is no life at all.

“There is no work in Honduras,” Fuentes said. “Since they deported us, we have not been able to find jobs.”