Thousands of migrants, mostly from Honduras, are crossing Mexico and headed toward the U.S. border.
It is an organized attack on the American border by open borders activists, aided and abetted by Mexican authorities. Men, women, and children are all hoping that when they arrive at the U.S. border, authorities will be forced to take them in and offer them asylum.
For five days now hundreds of Central Americans — children, women, and men, most of them from Honduras — have boldly crossed immigration checkpoints, military bases, and police in a desperate, sometimes chaotic march toward the United States. Despite their being in Mexico without authorization, no one has made any effort to stop them.
Organized by a group of volunteers called Pueblos Sin Fronteras, or People Without Borders, the caravan is intended to help migrants safely reach the United States, bypassing not only authorities who would seek to deport them, but gangs and cartels who are known to assault vulnerable migrants.
Organizers like Rodrigo Abeja hope that the sheer size of the crowd will give immigration authorities and criminals pause before trying to stop them.
“If we all protect each other we’ll get through this together,” Abeja yelled through a loudspeaker on the morning they left Tapachula, on Mexico’s border with Guatemala, for the nearly monthlong trek.
When they get to the US, they hope American authorities will grant them asylum or, for some, be absent when they attempt to cross the border illegally. More likely is that it will set up an enormous challenge to the Trump administration’s immigration policies and its ability to deal with an organized group of migrants numbering in the hundreds.
The number of people who showed up to travel with the caravan caught organizers by surprise, and has overwhelmed the various towns they’ve stopped in to spend the night. Pueblos Sin Fronteras counted about 1,200 people on the first day.
About 80% of them are from Honduras. Many said they are fleeing poverty, but also political unrest and violence that followed the swearing in of Honduran President Juan Orlando Hernández after a highly contested election last year. The group often breaks into chants of “out with JOH.” They also chant “we aren’t immigrants, we’re international workers” and “the people united will never be defeated.”
With detention centers on the border already full to bursting, what are we supposed to do with this wave of humanity? No doubt the activists’ plan is to overwhelm the system so that immigration enforcement officials simply release them into the general population.
This is not only a direct challenge to U.S. sovereignty, it could be considered an act of war. These illiterate, uneducated “international workers” are simply pawns being used by the Mexican government and international migrant activists. They don’t like the new U.S. immigration policies and are trying to change them.
This is a challenge for the Trump administration and will be the first of many such organized attacks unless our Border Patrol can prevent the mass of humanity from stepping foot on U.S. soil. Once they’re here, we will be forced to take care of them. And given the current circumstances, that isn’t possible.
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