Tired and penniless, hundreds of caravan immigrants return to southern Mexico

Hundreds of immigrants, most of them Haitians, started on Tuesday (30) the return to the starting point of a caravan started the day before, in southern Mexico, amid fatigue, lack of money and little support from the authorities for the displacement, which had been agreed last week.

Entire families, carrying their belongings on their backs, began walking the 25 kilometers between Huehuetán and Tapachula, near the Mexico-Guatemala border, after authorities notified that they would not be taken to other regions of the country immediately, despite pressure from foreigners, who set up roadblocks.

“I’m going to Tapachula (…) everything is difficult: no more money, no one wants to help us,” Bruno Noel, a Haitian immigrant who was walking to Tapachula, told Reuters. “I don’t know what we’re going to live on,” he added, visibly tired, carrying a large backpack on his shoulders.

Like Noel, hundreds of other immigrants started on Tuesday to return to Tapachula, where they said they will await the response of the authorities to be transported to other regions of the country to regularize their immigration status and find jobs.

Last week, Mexican authorities began transporting thousands of immigrants who had been detained for months in Tapachula by bus to other regions of the country, with the promise of regularizing their immigration status, amid pressures with road blockades.

“Blocking streets is a crime (…) as soon as they continue blocking streets, they will not only be immigrants, they will be criminals,” he told a group of immigrants in Huehuetán Hugo Cuellar, from the National Institute of Migration.