Thousands of migrants mostly from Central America broke out of the Mexican southern border city of Tapachula and continued their march toward the US, more than 1,000 miles away.
Over 2,000 migrants pushed past a line of state authorities who were positioned to block their progress. Some minor scuffles left a small child injured.
The migrants — some of who were carrying American flags and signs with President Joe Biden’s name — walked to a nearby town to camp on a baseball field for the night, according to Fox News.
A man from Honduras said he had been in Tapachula for two months, waiting for an answer on his visa request.
“They told me I had to wait because the appointments were full,” said José Antonio, a construction worker who declined to give his last name. “There is no work there so out of necessity I joined this group.”
José said he hoped to find work in Monterrey, Mexico, which is 140 miles from Texas.
“We’ll go on, day by day, to get as far as we can,” he said.
Officials have tried to break up smaller caravans earlier this year as tens of thousands of migrants have waited in vain just over the Guatemalan border for refugee or asylum papers. Mexico requires asylum and visa seekers to wait in the southern state of Chiapas for their requests to be processed.
The current convoy is more organized than other marches north, as coordinators made participants register with a QR code or web link to join, according to Fox.
US Customs and Border Protection detained a record-high 1.7 million undocumented immigrants over the previous 12 months, officials said.
Critics have blamed the influx on the Biden administration’s overturning of the Trump-era “Remain in Mexico” policy for asylum-seekers. The White House is now poised to reinstate the policy after the Supreme Court upheld a lower court ruling on its legality.
With Post wires
