Submitted by James Miller of the Political Insider
There is currently a caravan of around 1,000 Central Americans marching toward the United States border to demand asylum. Their number was closer to 1,500, but Mexico deported around 400 of them for entering the country illegally.
According to CNN, the Mexican Foreign Ministry issued a statement that “the caravan is mainly made up of people from Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador and that around 400 caravan participants who did not enter the country of Mexico lawfully had been repatriated to their countries of origin ‘with the strict legal framework.’”
“Under no circumstance does the government of Mexico promote illegal migration,” the statement said.
Furthermore, according to BuzzFeed reporter Adolfo Flores, Mexico plans to completely disband the caravan by Wednesday.
Everyone else in the caravan, which has traveled through Mexico for days from Chiapas, will have to petition the Mexican government for permission to stay in the country or will have to leave.
— Adolfo Flores (@aflores) April 3, 2018
President Donald Trump tweeted Sunday that “Mexico is doing very little, if not NOTHING, at stopping people from flowing into Mexico through their Southern Border, and then into the U.S.” However, Mexican officials reportedly did not make the decision to deport the illegal migrants in response to Trump’s criticism.
JO Rodríguez, a federal delegate with INM, told me this was not in response to Trump speaking out against the caravan. “Mexico is acting without pressure to find a solution to this problem.”
— Adolfo Flores (@aflores) April 3, 2018
So to recap: a caravan of “asylum seekers” is marching toward the U.S. to demand illegal entry, but their plan was largely thwarted because they’re not “asylum seekers” – they’re border jumpers; meanwhile Trump’s threats to end Nafta and end handouts to Latin American nations, may have resulted in a premature end to end threat of a humanitarian crisis at the border.
via RSS https://ift.tt/2JempFP Tyler Durden