Migrants walk along the highway through Suchiate, Chiapas state in southern Mexico, on July 21, 2024, during their journey north toward the U.S. border.
| Photo Credit: AP

Hundreds of migrants from around a dozen countries left from Mexico’s southern border on foot on July 21, as they attempt to make it to the U.S. border.

Some of the members of the group said they hoped to make it to the U.S. border before elections are held in November, because they fear that if Donald Trump wins, he will follow through on a promise to close the border to asylum-seekers.

“We are running the risk that permits (to cross the border) might be blocked,” said Miguel Salazar, a migrant from El Salvador. He feared that a new Trump administration might stop granting appointments to migrants through CBP One, an app used by asylum-seekers to enter the U.S. legally — by getting appointments at U.S. border posts, where they make their cases to officials. The app only works once migrants reach Mexico City, or states in northern Mexico. “Everyone wants to use that route” said Salazar, 37.

The group left on Sunday from the southern Mexican town of Ciudad Hidalgo, which is next to a river that marks Mexico’s border with Guatemala. Some said they had been waiting in Ciudad Hidalgo for weeks for permits to travel to towns further to the north.

Migrants trying to pass through Mexico in recent years have organised large groups to try to reduce the risk of being attacked by gangs or stopped by Mexican immigration officials as they travel. But the caravans tend to break up in southern Mexico, as people get tired of walking for hundreds of miles (kilometres).

Recently, Mexico has also made it more difficult for migrants to reach the U.S. border on buses and trains.

Travel permits are rarely awarded to migrants who enter the country without visas and thousands of migrants have been detained by immigration officers at checkpoints in the centre and north of Mexico and bused back to towns deep in the south of the country.

Oswaldo Reyna, a 55-year-old Cuban migrant, crossed from Guatemala into Mexico 45 days ago and waited in Ciudad Hidalgo to join the new caravan announced on social media. He criticised Mr. Trump’s recent comments about migrants and how they are trying to “invade” the United States.

“We are not delinquents,” he said. “We are hard-working people who have left our country to get ahead in life, because in our homeland we are suffering from many needs.”

Chiapas:

At least 10 Cuban migrants died and 17 others were seriously injured when a cargo truck ferrying them had an accident in the southern Mexican state of Chiapas, Mexico’s migration institute said on Sunday. The accident took place along the Pacific coast stretch of the Pijijiapan-Tonala highway in Chiapas, a common route taken by migrants who cross into Mexico from Guatemala on their way north towards the United States.

The driver of the Ford truck, which is not designed to carry so many people, fled the scene of the accident, the National Migration Institute (INM) said in a statement.

“According to the first reports, the driver was speeding, lost control of the unit and overturned,” the INM added.

Images shared by authorities showed a truck without number plates turned on its side in a ditch by the highway, with half of the wooden bed and the tall side panels on its right side torn off.

The 17 injured people were taken to hospitals and are being monitored, INM said. One of the dead migrants was a child.

Road accidents involving migrants are not uncommon in Mexico, where many people crossing the country to the United States travel in unauthorized and poorly maintained vehicles.

In December 2021, at least 54 people believed to be of mostly Central American descent were killed when the truck they were in flipped over in Chiapas.

(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)