Many of the migrants trekking to the US-Mexico border express optimism in their vision of the US as president tweets: ‘Go back to your country’

Hoping to avoid crushing tropical heat – and the attention of Mexican immigration officials – members of the migrant caravan began walking before dawn on Friday as they began a punishing 100km (62 mile) trek to the next station on their journey.

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The first groups set out from the town of Pijijiapan around 1 on Friday morning, intending to make as much progress as possible toward Arriaga before the heat of the day.

The group of several thousand people is still some 1,609km (1,000 miles) from the border crossing into the US, but their journey could be twice that if they head to Tijuana, the destination of a much smaller caravan which crossed Mexico in April.

Resting before she set out, Dyana Ávila, 24, said she was still determined to reach the US, where she hoped to find work so she can pay for epilepsy treatment for her three-year-old nephew.

“My dream is to go there, work and save enough money to help my family,” she said. “I can hopefully then have my nephew come to the United States legally, with a visa.”

The caravan has pushed through police blockades, closed borders and inclement weather as it winds its way through Mexico. Eventually, it will push up against Donald Trump, who has turned the caravan into a campaign wedge issue in the US midterm elections.



The president has been firing up his base by branding the caravan an “invasion”. He has threatened to slash US assistance to governments in Central America and floated unsubstantiated stories about “Middle Easterners” moving northward with the migrants. On Friday, Trump’s defence secretary, Jim Mattis, approved a request for an extra 800 soldiers to be sent to the US border.



But caravan participants appear unfazed by Trump’s bluster.

Many, including Ávila, expressed optimism in their idealized vision of America: a country of justice and opportunity – the opposite, they said, of the oppressive and corrupt governments back home, whose misrule has sent them fleeing with little more than the clothes on their back.



“We think he’ll change his way of thinking and let us through,” Ávila said of the US president. “What’s we’re asking God for is that he allows us to enter the United States so that all this sacrifice doesn’t go in vain.”

At times the journey has taken on the appearance of a biblical exodus: entire families, including babies in arms and people in wheelchairs, plodding through the punishing heat and downpours through the scrubby lowlands of southern Mexico.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest A woman baths her daughter as she and others, part of caravan from Central America en route to the US, rest in Pijijiapan on 25 October. Photograph: Adrees Latif/Reuters

Just as the group reached Pijijiapan on Wednesday, Trump tweeted another threat, telling them: “Turnaround, we are not letting people into the United States illegally. Go back to your Country and if you want, apply for citizenship like millions of others are doing.”

It is not possible to “apply for citizenship” from abroad, and the US is obliged by both international and domestic laws to consider all applications for asylum.



And simply heading home is inconceivable for many in the caravan, who fled

death threats, or forced recruitment by street gangs in their home cities.

“I can’t go back. They’ll kill me,” said Darwin Ramos, 30, who fled the rugged Olancho region of Honduras after being forced to work for a drug cartel.



US political considerations of are from the migrants’ minds. Jimmy Peña, 17, a painter from El Salvador, gave a blank stare when told of the politics at play in the United States.

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But he expressed little doubt the caravan will cross the US border.



“I don’t know why they’d be against us if we’re not terrorists or narcos,” he said. “There are babies here, pregnant women, people looking for a better life.”



Rodrigo Abeja, a Mexican member of the migrant support organisation Pueblo Sin Fronteras, who is accompanying the caravan, was very aware of the elections. But he confessed: “It worries me, the repercussions this [caravan] could cause.”



But, he added: “It’s more important to accompany [the caravan] than worry about white voters, sitting down, watching TV, drinking beer and contemplating the election.”