Thousands of migrants moved slowly north across the southern Mexican state of Chiapas on Tuesday in a caravan hoping to reach the U.S. border, one day before top U.S. officials planned to visit Mexico to discuss migration.
On Wednesday, Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Homeland Security chief Alejandro Mayorkas will visit Mexico to meet with Mexican President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador.
The officials will discuss “unprecedented irregular migration in the Western Hemisphere and identify ways Mexico and the United States will address border security challenges,” according to a statement from State Department spokesman Matthew Miller.
The meeting comes a week after U.S. President Joe Biden spoke with Mr. Lopez Obrador by telephone, during which the two leaders said that more enforcement was needed at their shared frontier.
On Tuesday, migrants walked along the highway near the southern Mexican city of Villa Comaltitlán. Some held a banner reading “Exodus from poverty.”
The number crossing the Darien Gap straddling Colombia and Central America has topped half a million this year, double last year’s record.
This month, as many as 10,000 illegal immigrants were arrested daily at the southwest U.S. border.
The Mexican government felt pressure to address that problem, after U.S. officials briefly closed two vital Texas railway border crossings, claiming they were overwhelmed by processing illegal immigrants.
That put a chokehold on freight moving from Mexico to the United States, as well as grain needed to feed Mexican livestock moving south. The rail crossings have since been reopened, but the message appeared clear.
The caravan started out on Christmas Eve from the city of Tapachula, near the border with Guatemala.
The migrants, all eager to reach the U.S. border, angry and frustrated at having to wait weeks or months in the nearby city of Tapachula for documents that might allow them to continue their journey to illegally enter the United States.
Mexico says it detected 680,000 migrants moving through the country in the first 11 months of 2023.
In May, Mexico agreed to take in migrants from countries such as Venezuela, Nicaragua, and Cuba who had been turned away by the United States for not following rules that provided new legal pathways to asylum and other forms of migration.
But that deal, aimed at curbing a post-pandemic jump in migration, appears to be insufficient as numbers rise once again, disrupting bilateral trade and stoking anti-migrant sentiment.
Arrests for illegal crossing topped 2 million in each of the U.S. government’s last two fiscal years.
