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A caravan of about 500 migrants left Tapachula, in southeastern Mexico, on Monday, with the purpose of reaching the United States because they have not been able to regularize their migratory situation at the Mexican-Guatemalan border.
The group of foreigners, who had been stranded in Tapachula for several days, is mostly made up of people from Venezuela, Colombia, Honduras, El Salvador, and Ecuador.
The group of irregular migrants left the Miguel Hidalgo Central Park with entire families and single men, carrying suitcases of clothes, umbrellas, water bottles, cardboard, and strollers to transport their children.
The lack of money, food, and the desperation of not being able to obtain their papers from the Mexican immigration authorities forced them to leave in this new caravan.
Honduran César Cancino told Efe that he has been in Tapachula for four months because he was previously given a visa, but in Tuxtla Gutiérrez, the capital of Chiapas, authorities tore up this document because they told him that they were not accepting this procedure.
The migrants passed the first immigration checkpoint located in the ejido of Viva Mexico, 3.7 miles (ca. 6 km) north of Tapachula, where they crossed without setbacks or inconvenience from any immigration authority.
Miguel Castro, a Venezuelan migrant, stated that the main idea of this march is to advance peacefully because many of the migrants have already crossed several countries and Mexico is the last place to reach the United States.
The Venezuelan indicated that in Tapachula they were handed over to the authorities of the Siglo 21 migratory station, where they are given a document of expulsion from the country for 10 days, a period in which they are not authorized to move through Mexican territory and which obliges them to leave through the nearest border, which is Guatemala.
Now, the migrants plan to walk some 300 kilometers from Tapachula to San Pedro Tapanatepec, Oaxaca, where they are being given the Formas Migratorias Múltiples (FMM), a transit document to be able to move legally through Mexican territory.
The caravans reflect a record migration flow to the United States, whose Bureau of Customs and Border Protection (CBP) has intercepted more than 1.7 million people so far in the fiscal year 2022, which began last October.
In addition, Mexico received more than 58,000 refugee applications in the first half of 2022, an annual increase of almost 15%, according to the Mexican Commission for Refugee Assistance (Comar).
