Thousands of immigrants to the United States

Several thousand immigrants, between 5,000 and 6,000 people mostly Venezuelans, have been traveling since yesterday from Tapachula in Chiapas (southern Mexico) towards the border with the United States, hoping, among other things, with their initiative, to attract the attention of the Summit of the Americas held in Los Angeles (California, USA).

The peculiarity of this caravan, as the Proceso journal emphasizes, is that while in the past most of the migrants were Hondurans, Salvadorans, Nicaraguans, Haitians and Cubans, and on this occasion, were mostly Venezuelans, “stuck in that border town for days, weeks or even months”.

Under the slogan “Migrants are not criminals, they are international workers,” the band left yesterday before dawn in torrential rain, forcing the participants including many women and children to protect themselves with blankets and plastics.. out of luck.

Ray García Villagran, of the Tapachula Human Rights Center for Human Dignity, noted that this march is an act of desperation by migrants stranded in Tapachula, for the Mexican Commission for Refugee Assistance (Kumar) to finally give them appointments in the coming months in order to verify their their documents, while the National Institute of Migration (INM) asked them to come no later than September or October.

Finally, García Villagran said that if the Mexican federal government did not speed up the aid process, up to 200,000 migrants could gather in Tapachula, leading to strong social tensions.