Despite president-elect Donald Trump regularly using large caravans of immigrants to bolster fears about the border, in reality they are often broken up by the Mexican authorities far short of the United States, the New York Times reports. Groups of thousands of migrants often come together in southern Mexico near its border with Guatemala, which is more than 1,000 miles from the United States. The reason, mainly, is power and safety in numbers. While waiting in the southern city of Tapachula for humanitarian visas to travel through Mexico, a process that can often take months, migrants band together as they prepare to move north.
Traversing Mexico can be a treacherous proposition, especially for poorer migrants, because they are vulnerable to kidnappings, extortion or violence, whether from criminal groups or corrupt Mexican officials. Caravans can lessen the risk, and provide a means to circumvent the high cost of hiring a smuggler to aid their passage to the U.S. border. Many people, often from elsewhere in the Americas and increasingly from Asia and Africa, arrive in southern Mexico, sometimes after traveling hundreds of miles through jungles and across multiple borders before arriving in Mexico. The Mexican government has tried several tactics to dissuade migrants from moving north through Mexico, even busing them away from the United States border and deep into the country’s south.
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