Trump Threatens Foreign Aid To Honduras Over Caravans

The U.S. Border Patrol “has 19,000 officers with a budget of $3.8 billion”, said Douglas S. Massey, a professor of public policy and sociology at Princeton University who specializes in immigration between the United States and Mexico.

Mexican authorities arrested around 20 more migrants early Tuesday in a raid in the eastern state of Veracruz, out of a group of about 250 caravan members who had chose to travel ahead by hopping a train.

Immigration officials were registering the Oaxaca group. If the caravan had not garnered so much attention, the Mexican government would have remained silent on the issue and continued business as usual.

Mexico’s Interior Ministry said in a statement on Monday that “under no circumstances does the government of Mexico promote irregular migration”.

If Mexican authorities prove unable or unwilling to stop the migrant caravan, President Trump could make the case that America has a compelling national interest in ensuring such caravans don’t reach the USA border, and that drastic measures, or the credible threat of such measures, are entirely appropriate.

Trump, who ran for office in 2016 on a platform to stem illegal immigrants from Mexico, said he had “told Mexico” he hoped it would halt the caravan. Those are probably going to take buses to the last scheduled stop for the caravan, a migrant rights symposium in central Puebla state. “Of course we will act … to enforce our immigration laws, with no pressure whatsoever from any country whatsoever”. The migrants on the journey hope to make it to the U.S. border, where they can make a claim that they qualify for asylum. Later on Monday, the White House released a statement expounding on what Trump had referred to, in an earlier tweet, as “ridiculous liberal (Democrat) laws like Catch & Release”.

Meanwhile, the article’s point about requiring local Mexican jurisdictions to cooperate with the federal government is a red herring for the United States, said David Bier, an immigration policy analyst at the libertarian Cato Institute.

Freeland is expected to travel to Washington at the end of this week for one-on-one meetings with U.S. Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer.

“Mexico has the absolute power not to let these large “Caravans” of people enter their country”, the president wrote.

Pueblo Sin Fronteras said in a statement this week that “the high percentage of people fleeing Honduras in the group are the result of multiple political crises in the region provoked in large part by the policies of the United States government”. Guti-rrez said the people in the caravan are “not dangerous” and that it is important to separate the “shared challenges” of transnational organized crime and other security threats from “a humanitarian situation”.

He called the caravan “a mass nonviolent collective action” that was organized to “raise the political cost of repression” by immigration officials.

Central American migrants are often fleeing brutal violence in their home countries, where gang warfare has led to some of the highest murder rates in the world. Recent elections in Honduras were marred by irregularities and accusations of fraud, and a subsequent crackdown on protesters has been condemned as heavy-handed. The troops repaired and constructed border fencing and flew border protection agents by helicopter to intercept immigrants trying to enter illegally.

In southern Mexico, officials screened the dwindling number of hundreds of largely Central American migrants on Tuesday. “‘Polleros [smugglers] and guides and all of this criminal apparatus that traffics in people, they utilize [the caravans] for their benefit”, he said.

U.S. President Donald Trump has threatened to dump NAFTA if it can not be reworked to his satisfaction. If an immigrant tells an officer at the border that they fear persecution, they are given a “credible fear” test to determine if they may have a claim.

The main goal is not to reach the United States – though some participants have crossed the border in the past.

The saga of the caravan, which some estimates place at up to 1,500 people at its peak, became national news as soon as Trump started tweeting about it on Easter Sunday after it was featured on that morning’s edition of Fox & Friends.

Mexico and Canada began renegotiating NAFTA with the U.S.in August at the initiative of Trump, who repeatedly has said the accord led US companies to fire workers and move factories to Mexico.