Early in the morning of 28 October 2018, photographer Guillermo Arias released his camera into the air above an outdoor basketball court in San Pedro Tapanatepec, in the southern Mexican state of Oaxaca. As it rose, the camera, attached to a drone, took in a densely crowded scene: migrants from Honduras resting on their 2,700-mile journey towards the US border. “The open court allowed me to use my drone to show a unique perspective on a familiar scene,” says Arias. “It also, despite being photographed at a distance, offers an intimate view on people’s first moments of the day without being invasive.”

A week earlier, Arias, who lives in the northern state of Tijuana, had received an assignment from his editor at Agence France Presse to spend 12 days following a caravan of Central American migrants on their journey north. “I didn’t hesitate,” he says. “I’ve being working on migration themes over the past 15 years but I never got the chance to work on Mexico’s southern border.”

People who commonly travelled in small groups, hidden from the authorities, were suddenly out in the open walking together, being intentionally visible Guillermo Arias

The caravans first came to widespread attention in early 2018, when migrants from Honduras, Guatemala and El Salvador fleeing persecution, poverty, violence and the effects of drought began gathering together in large numbers on their way north. “People who commonly travelled in small groups, hidden from the authorities and away from the media’s eye, were suddenly out in the open walking together, being intentionally visible,” says Arias. Many sought to settle in the US, despite official warnings against illegal entry and increasingly heated rhetoric from Donald Trump, who branded the caravans “an invasion”.

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With his images of the late 2018 caravan, which brought more than 7,000 people to the US-Mexico border a month later – the images are now on show at the International Festival of Photojournalism in Perpignan, France – Arias captured the precariousness and weariness of the migrants, as well as a sense of unity and solidarity. “This was a very special and unique opportunity to see and tell their stories,” he says, “but most of all, it is a political statement against Central American governments who ejected their own people due to extreme levels of insecurity and poverty.”