A new caravan, the first of 2022, made up of some 500 migrants, left this Thursday from the Mexican city of Tapachula, Chiapas state, on the border with Guatemala, bound for the United States.
The caravan left this Thursday night from the migratory regularization offices of the National Institute of Migration (INM), where they did not receive a response to their procedures to receive the documents that would allow them free transit through the country and thus leave Tapachula.
This group of migrants is made up mostly of Central Americans, but there are also people from Venezuela, Colombia, Haiti, and African countries who made the decision to walk from tonight to the United States.
Half a thousand people are made up of boys, girls, women, and men and their first objective are to obtain a temporary visa or document to legally travel by public transport through Mexico to reach the US border.
The migrants began their journey on the southern bypass of Tapachula, a road that leads to Mexico City, and indicated that they are going north in search of a better future and that the immigration authorities did not respond to their requests.
Some migrants said that they had been sent to the office of the Mexican Commission for Refugee Assistance (Comar), to start their process, but they know that the appointment is a step that could take up to three months.
On their departure, the migrants asked for help from human rights organizations and migrants as they walk unaccompanied and without water or food.
Most of this group of people marched this Thursday through the Mexican city of Tapachula, to ask the Mexican government for free transit and documents that regularize their situation.
This is the first caravan of 2022 to leave Tapachula, a city that has been a reflection of the migration crisis in the region for months.
Throughout 2021, several migrant caravans with thousands of migrants departed from Tapachula, although the vast majority were stopped and dismantled by the Mexican security forces.
The region is experiencing a record flow to the United States, whose Customs and Border Protection (CBP) office detected more than 1.7 million undocumented immigrants on the border with Mexico in the fiscal year 2021, which ended on September 30.
Mexico has intercepted more than 252,000 undocumented migrants from January to November and deported more than 100,000 in the same period, according to the Migration Policy Unit of the country’s Interior Ministry.
In addition, the Mexican Commission for Refugee Assistance (Comar) received a record 131,448 refugee applications in 2021. Of these, more than 51,000 are Haitians.