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Donald Trump, The Migrant Caravan and a Manufactured Crisis at the U.S. Border

The migrant caravan now consists of nearly five thousand people, about a third of whom are under the age of eighteen. Credit: Adriana Zehbrauskas, The New Yorker

Since last week’s midterm elections, Donald Trump has spoken less frequently about the migrant caravan, but the subject is still plainly on his mind. On Friday, he signed a Presidential proclamation (“Addressing Mass Migration Through the Southern Border of the United States”), which suspended the possibility of asylum for anyone entering the country between officially designated ports of entry. By U.S. and international law, migrants are allowed to seek asylum “whether or not” they do so at an official checkpoint along the border; Trump’s measure, which was immediately challenged by advocacy groups, including the American Civil Liberties Union, aims to override explicit provisions of an existing federal statute in order to thwart the entry of tens of thousands of Central American migrants. As Lee Gelernt, the A.C.L.U.’s lead litigator in the case, told me, “It would mean the President could literally sit down with a copy of the immigration act that Congress wrote and cross out any provision he didn’t like.”

The night before the President issued his proclamation, members of the caravan gathered in Mexico City, where they’d paused for a week of rest, to vote on a final destination for the group. Of the big border cities in northern Mexico, Tijuana was considered the safest—the route skirts territory controlled by violent cartels—but it was also the farthest away. The caravan now consists of nearly five thousand people, about a third of whom are under the age of eighteen. An estimated three hundred of them are younger than five. Because of the punishing physical toll of the trip, the group has tried, with mixed success, to arrange van and truck transportation the rest of the way. Hundreds of them have either turned back or have been deported by Mexican authorities, while some twenty-six hundred others, according to the Mexican government, have received temporary legal status to remain in Mexico.

The relative success of the group, coupled with the continued desperation of residents in El Salvador, Honduras, and Guatemala, has prompted a string of smaller caravans, consisting of several hundred people each, to travel in its wake. In recent years, under pressure from President Barack Obama, Mexico has redoubled its efforts to intercept Central Americans heading north, earning its own reputation for aggressive immigration enforcement. At the same time, the U.S. has invested about seven hundred million dollars in an aid package, called the Alliance for Prosperity, to try to address the corruption and rampant crime that are seen as the root causes of emigration from the region. “The caravans are not the problem,” Tonatiuh Guillén López, the incoming head of Mexico’s National Migration Institute, said this week. “The issue is the movements we do not see, those who are not in the caravan, that is the big issue.”

View the complete November 14 article by Jonathan Blitzer on The New York Times website here.

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