Security plan critics say local, state and federal police should be strengthened rather than keep soldiers on the streets.
The incoming government’s new security strategy is a “colossal mistake” and “potentially disastrous,” the international non-governmental organization Human Rights Watch (HRW) has warned.
President-elect López Obrador and future public security secretary Alfonso Durazo this week presented a new national security plan whose central element is the creation of a national guard that will be under the control of the army.
A range of NGOs including Amnesty International have already rejected the plan, charging that it only perpetuates the unsuccessful militarization model implemented by former president Felipe Calderón in 2006 and continued by the current federal government.
Late yesterday, HRW added its voice to the criticism.
“López Obrador is inheriting a human rights catastrophe that has been caused in large part by the militarization of public security in Mexico,” said José Miguel Vivanco, the organization’s Americas director.
“By doubling down on that failed approach, he is making a colossal mistake that could undercut any serious hope of ending the atrocities that have caused so much suffering in Mexico in recent years,” he continued.
Deploying the military to contain criminal violence has produced widespread human rights violations – including executions, enforced disappearances, and torture – and underscores why the military should not be used for law enforcement, HRW said.
More than 200,000 homicides have been recorded since the militarized war on drugs strategy began 12 years ago and last year was the most violent year in at least two decades with 31,174 murders, according to the National Statistics Institute.
“We urge López Obrador to reconsider this ill-advised and potentially disastrous policy,” Vivanco said.
“He should commit himself instead to improving the country’s civilian police forces, however difficult, which is essential to achieve a sustainable end to the violence and abuse that have flourished under his predecessors,” he concluded.
Public policy think tank México Evalúa also joined the chorus of criticism, contending that the new security plan is the wrong approach because it replicates the “exhausted militarization formula.”
It also said that it was worrying that the new plan doesn’t contain proposals to strengthen police forces at municipal, state and federal levels and better train their officers.
Responding to the criticism, a senator with López Obrador’s Morena party said he will propose that the new government meet with experts to discuss how the security plan can be improved.
Primo Dothé Mata, a member of the Senate’s national defense committee, called on people not to be polarized over the plan because what the country needs is unity and commitment.
Jurors at the New York trial of Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán heard cartel tales involving bribes, bullets and bloodshed during the second day of court testimony from a key prosecution witness.
Former Sinaloa Cartel operations chief Jesús Zambada told the jury Thursday that the notorious drug lord once ordered him to pay a US $100,000 bribe to a military general in Guerrero.
The general “is a friend of mine,” he recalled Guzmán telling him in 2004. “Give him a hug and notify him that I’ll be working around the state.”
A day after describing El Chapo as “one of the most powerful drug traffickers in Mexico” and spilling secrets on the inner workings of the lucrative trafficking operation he allegedly headed, the former cartel member told the court that the Sinaloa Cartel paid regular bribes – in dollars – to high-ranking police officers and officials at all three levels of government.
As “plaza leader” in Mexico City between 2001 and 2008, Zambada, who was extradited to the United States in 2012, claimed that he forked out around US $300,000 a month in illicit payoffs to federal and local police, prosecutors, airport officials and even Interpol agents.
One frequent recipient, he said, was the director of the federal Attorney General’s office. Another was the chief homicide investigator of the Mexico City police.
In exchange, they provided protection and information that allowed the cartel’s activities to run smoothly and turned a blind eye to crimes, including homicides committed by cartel members, Zambada explained.
Through bribes, the ex-cartel member claimed on Wednesday, “I controlled the airport in Mexico City . . . controlled the authority.”
The bribes paid to police were particularly useful, the witness said, after Guzmán escaped from prison for the first time in 2001 by hiding inside a laundry cart.
After arranging a helicopter to ferry him to a “semi-deserted location” in central Mexico, Zambada said that he and his brother – current Sinaloa Cartel leader Ismael “El Mayo” Zambada – picked up Guzmán and drove him to Mexico City.
As they reached the outskirts of the capital, the ex-cartel member recounted, Guzmán became anxious when he saw a police car and motorcycle pull in front of their vehicle, unaware that he had arranged for a police escort.
Zambada told the jury that he quickly reassured Chapo that there was no reason for concern.
“I said, don’t worry. These are our people, they’re here to protect us.”
Zambada also told jurors about bloody turf wars that broke out between rival groups of cartel sicarios, or professional killers.
He recounted details of a bloodbath at a Puerto Vallarta nightclub in 1992 when, according to Zambada, El Chapo attempted unsuccessfully to have Tijuana Cartel trafficker Ramón Arellano Félix killed.
Arellano survived but some of his sicarios and bystanders did not.
Zambada also spoke of the slaying of a Roman Catholic cardinal in Guadalajara in 1993 and the murder of a rival trafficker, who was shot in the neck.
The witness admitted to taking part in several Sinaloa Cartel murder plots.
“There was always a lot of deaths,” he said, although he denied ever having killed someone himself.
Zambada also recounted one episode when he was ambushed in a Mexico City store and very nearly killed.
Two attackers shot at him and one bullet sliced a deep groove in the side of his head as it whizzed past him.
“I’m alive,” he told the jury, “because the bullet didn’t penetrate my skull.”
Guzmán’s trial on 17 criminal charges including drug trafficking, conspiracy, firearms offenses and money laundering began this week amid tight security in the Brooklyn federal court.
On the first day of proceedings, a lawyer for the accused attempted to portray El Chapo as no more than a “scapegoat.”
Home construction is encroaching on mangroves, charge local officials.
The municipal government of Progreso, Yucatán, is seeking assistance from federal environmental authorities to halt illegal construction in protected mangrove swamps.
Some houses in Chicxulub Puerto, a community on the Gulf of Mexico eight kilometers east of Progreso, extend up to 50 meters into swamplands, according to municipal officials.
Jorge Enrique Aménica, ecology chief on the Progreso council, told the newspaper El Financiero that the local government has asked the federal Environmental Protection Agency (Profepa) to intervene to put an end to further irregular construction.
Efforts by municipal authorities have so far failed.
“We went there last week but they welcomed us by throwing stones at us,” Aménica said.
He explained that when the current municipal government took office in September, officials were unable to find any information that showed that approval had been granted to build on the swamplands.
“There are no permits to fill in the mangrove swamps or to pull out the mangroves,” Aménica said.
Houses that occupy part of the swamplands were built between 2015 and 2018 during the previous municipal administration, he said.
The mangrove swamps, located south of a thin strip of land on which Chicxulub Puerto is located, are part of a natural protected area established by the Yucatán government in 2010.
The decree that established the reserve specifies that land use in the area must be “compatible with the conservation of natural resources. . . avoiding the fragmentation of the landscape and the loss of habitat.”
But people already living in homes on the swamplands and those currently building new dwellings appear to be openly violating that regulation.
One Chicxulub resident told El Financiero that would-be swamp dwellers hire trucks to bring in rubble that is dumped into the water to provide a solid foundation on which to build.
Aménica said that a lot of the construction debris comes from building sites in places such as Telchac, a port town located about 40 kilometers to the east.
Jorge Herrera, a mangroves researcher with 30 years of experience, said the swamplands have already suffered a lot of environmental damage from the illegal construction and that restoring them will be costly.
“. . . Yes, they can be restored but each hectare will cost around 10 or 12 million pesos [US $500,000 to $600,000],” he said.
The Hondurans who banded together last month to travel northward to the United States, fleeing gangs, corruption and poverty, were joined by other Central Americans hoping to find safety in numbers on this perilous journey.
But group travel couldn’t save everyone.
Earlier this month, two trucks from the caravan disappeared in the state of Veracruz, Mexico. One person who escaped told officials that about “65 children and seven women were sold” by the driver to a group of armed men.
Mexican authorities are searching for the migrants, but history shows that people missing for more than 24 hours are rarely found in Mexico – alive or at all.
An average of 12 people disappear each day in Mexico. Most are victims of a raging three-way war among the Mexican armed forces, organized crime and drug cartels.
The military crackdown on criminal activity has actually escalated violence in Mexico since operations began in 2006, my research and other security studies show.
Nearly 22,000 people were murdered in Mexico in the first eight months of this year, a dismal record in one of the world’s deadliest places.
Central Americans fleeing similarly rampant violence back home confront those risks and others on their journey to the United States. Doctors Without Borders found that over two-thirds of migrants surveyed in Mexico in 2014 experienced violence en route. One-third of women had been sexually abused.
Mexico’s security crisis may explain why so few caravan members want to stay there.
In response to President Donald Trump’s demands that Mexico “stop this onslaught,” Mexican President Enrique Peña Nieto announced that migrants who applied for asylum at Mexico’s southern border would be given shelter, medical attention, schooling and jobs.
About 1,700 of the estimated 5,000 caravan members took him up on the offer.
The Central American caravan includes many women asylum seekers hoping to give their children a safer life in the United States. AP Photo/Rodrigo Abd
Meanwhile, everyday Mexicans are greeting the migrants as they pass through their towns, donating food, clothing, lodging and transport.
A recent poll shows that 51% of Mexicans support the caravan. Thirty-three per cent of respondents, many of them affluent members of Mexico’s urban middle class, want the migrants to go back to Central America.
Mexican law, which allows eligible asylum seekers to both request and be granted asylum, exceeds international standards on the rights of migrants.
But reality in Mexico often falls short of the law.
The Mexican Refugee Assistance Commission is supposed to process asylum applications in 45 days. But its offices in Mexico City were damaged by last year’s earthquake, forcing the already overstretched and underfunded agency to suspend processing of open asylum claims for months.
Meanwhile, new applications for asylum in Mexico continued to pour in – a record 14,596 were filed last year. The processing backlog is now two years.
During that period of legal limbo, asylum seekers cannot work, attend school or fully access Mexico’s public health system. President-elect López Obrador, who takes office on December 1, says he will offer Central American migrants temporary working visas while their claims are processed.
Anti-caravan posts on social media accuse migrants of taking Mexican jobs and violating Mexico’s sovereignty, using nativist language similar to that seen in the United States.
Mexico City, which in 2017 declared itself to be a sanctuary city, nonetheless put thousands of caravan members up in a stadium staffed by medical teams and humanitarian groups.
The first Central Americans from the caravan are now arriving at the U.S.-Mexico border, where they face a far less warm reception.
Calling the caravan an “invasion,” President Trump has ordered the deployment of over 5,000 troops to the border.
U.S. law prohibits the use of the armed forces to enforce domestic laws without specific congressional authorization. That means the troops can only support border agents in deterring migrants.
But Trump’s decision still has symbolic power. This is the first time in over a century that military troops have been summoned to defend the U.S.-Mexico border.
The last deployment occurred during the Mexican Revolution.
On March 9, 1916, a small band of revolutionaries led by Francisco “Pancho” Villa invaded Columbus, New Mexico.
Officially, the group assaulted the border city in retaliation for then-President Woodrow Wilson’s support of Venustiano Carranza, Villa’s political rival. Villa also had a personal vendetta against Sam Ravel, a local man who had swindled money from him.
President Wilson responded by summoning General John J. Pershing, who assembled a force of 6,000 U.S. troops to chase Villa deep inside Mexico’s northern territory. Pershing’s “punitive expedition” returned in early 1917 after failing to capture the revolutionary leader.
Central Americans who reach the militarized United States border can still apply for asylum there, despite President Trump’s recent executive order limiting where they may do so. But they face stiff odds.
After an evaluation process that can take months or years, the majority of Central American asylum claims filed in the United States – 75% – are denied. Caravan members rejected will be sent back to the same perilous place they fled last month.
With 60% of its population living in poverty, Honduras is the poorest country in Latin America. It also has the world’s second-highest homicide rate – 43.6 murders per 100,000 people – trailing only El Salvador.
The U.S. contributed to the instability that created these hardships.
Honduras has been in turmoil since 2009, when the military overthrew leftist president Manuel Zelaya. Rather than join the United Nations and European Union in demanding Zelaya’s reinstatement, then-secretary of state Hillary Clinton called for new elections, effectively endorsing a coup.
The country entered a prolonged political crisis. Honduras’s November 2017 presidential election was contested, with the U.S.-backed president Juan Orlando Hernández accused of rigging the vote. Seventeen opposition protesters were killed in the unrest that followed.
The Central American caravan that started in Honduras seeks in the U.S. a life free of such violence. Its steady progress toward the border shows that even kidnappings, Trump’s threats and soldiers cannot deter them.
Security plan critics fear the perpetuation of soldiers in the streets.
Amnesty International and a range of other non-governmental organizations have rejected the creation of a national guard as proposed in the incoming government’s new national security plan.
The 50,000-strong force, which will be made up of members of the army, navy and Federal Police, is a central element of the new plan that was presented Wednesday by president-elect López Obrador and future public security secretary Alfonso Durazo.
Ericka Guevara Rosas, Americas director at Amnesty International (AI), said the incoming government’s plan represents a continuation of the “failed” militarized crime-fighting strategy that was first implemented by former president Felipe Calderón in 2006 and continued by the current government.
“It’s worrying that the president-elect has proposed a security strategy that essentially repeats the failed model of militarization that has allowed the armed forces to commit grave human rights violations,” she said.
Guevara charged that a Supreme Court ruling this week that the Internal Security Law is unconstitutional represented an opportunity for the new government to develop a plan to withdraw the military from public security duties rather than to perpetuate its role.
The law, which sought to formalize the role of the military in law enforcement, had been described by the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights as “deeply worrying.”
Shortly after López Obrador’s victory in the July 1 election, Durazo indicated that the incoming government would gradually withdraw the military from the nation’s streets. But both he and López Obrador have since backtracked.
Tania Reneaum, executive director of AI in Mexico, was also critical of the new security approach.
“The new government should break the paradigm of military security and establish a new model. Civil institutions should be responsible for security in the country and maintain the control of operations. The president-elect’s proposal to continue militarization should be amended to instead focus on the strengthening and professionalization of civil police forces,” she said.
The head of México Unido Contra la Delincuencia (Mexico United Against Crime) also charged that the strategy was wrong, stating that the creation of a national guard will not help to reduce violence or crime in general because it continues the same strategy that hasn’t worked for the past 12 years.
“The only thing that has happened [since 2006] is that homicidal violence increased and criminality doesn’t fall,” Lisa Sánchez said.
The president of the National Human Rights Commission (CNDH) said he would always favor using civil rather than military forces for public security duties while the Mexican Commission for the Defense and Promotion of Human Rights said the plan was cause for significant concern because the increase in violence is “related to the involvement of armed forces in security tasks.”
Francisco Rivas, president of the National Citizens’ Observatory, said that continuing to put the military in charge of public security duties wouldn’t solve the country’s problems, adding that the new plan “contradicts what López Obrador said for years as an opposition candidate and what he promised in the campaign.”
More than 200,000 homicides have been recorded since the militarized war on drugs strategy began 12 years ago and last year was the most violent year in at least two decades with 31,174 murders, according to the National Statistics Institute.
Meanwhile, the United Nations (UN) has asked both houses of federal Congress to reject a López Obrador proposal to widen the range of serious crimes for which suspected criminals can be remanded in preventative custody.
People accused of crimes such as fuel theft, possession of illegal weapons and electoral fraud would not be eligible for bail.
At least 19 constitutional amendments are being considered by Congress, which since September has been controlled by a coalition led by the soon-to-be ruling Morena party.
Alan García of the Mexico Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights said that “pre-trial detention violates international human rights treaties to which the Mexican state is party.”
The largest Christmas lights festival in Mexico will open next week in Monterrey, Nuevo León.
Luztopía is a festival of lights featuring more than 250 illuminated figures standing up to eight meters in height. The event’s centerpiece will be an 18-meter-high Christmas tree at which a unique animated show will be presented every hour.
The event at Fundidora Park will also have a 15-meter-high castle, a magical tunnel with 3D visuals, a wintry village where Santa Claus has his home and live music.
Festival-goers can also grab a quick bite at Luztopía’s mercadito, where traditional Mexican street food like churros and elotes (corn on the cob) will be sold along with hot and cold beverages.
The mercadito, a traditional market space, also has a gift shop and several stands where artisans sell their crafts.
Luztopía, now in its second year, will open on November 22 and run every day until January 6 from 5:00 to 11:00pm, except on December 24 and 31.
The entrance fee is 50 pesos but children under three enter free.
Violence has displaced more than 6,000 people in Guerrero, according to the head of a human rights organization, who is calling for the state government to declare a humanitarian crisis in response.
Manuel Olivares Hernández of the Morelos y Pavón Regional Human Rights Center said 2,000 people have been forced to leave the municipality of Leonardo Bravo and 2,000 more have fled several communities in the state’s Montaña region.
Around 800 families have also been displaced from the municipality of Chilapa due to threats from criminal gangs, while another 40 have fled two towns in Zitlala, he added.
In addition, high levels of violence in the state’s notoriously dangerous Tierra Caliente region and the opium-poppy growing Sierra region have also forced out residents but numbers for that area have not been documented.
“We could say that the number of displaced people due to violence in Guerrero is greater than the number in the Central American migrant caravan but the government has tried to make them invisible,” he said.
Together with Catholic priest and activist José Filiberto Velázquez Florencio, Olivares is demanding that the Guerrero government and Congress declare a humanitarian crisis so that the gravity of the situation is formally recognized and international organizations can intervene.
Olivares said that he and Velázquez are also seeking an urgent meeting with Governor Héctor Astudillo and representatives of the displaced people in order to find a “more effective” solution to the state’s violence and displacement problem.
Astudillo said Wednesday that violence in the Sierra region is a national security issue, a remark that Olivares considers evidence of the state government’s apathy towards tackling the issue.
“What’s happening here is that there is no political will to confront the situation. The state government has allowed this problem to grow and declaring itself incompetent is the only way out that is left for the governor,” he said.
Olivares also called on the state and federal governments to disarm groups posing as community police, claiming they have proliferated.
“It shouldn’t be possible for there to be a hail of bullets in front of the army and the state police. The problem here is there is a hodgepodge [of security forces], an interrelation, an interdependence between authorities and organized crime. We live in a narco-state and in Mexico there is practically a narco-government,” he said.
An indoor water park developer has selected a city in Hidalgo as the site of its first park outside the United States and Canada.
Great Wolf Resorts will invest 2.8 billion pesos (US $139.2 million) in its new park in Tepeji del Río, situated 80 kilometers north of Mexico City.
The company owns and operates family resorts that offer restaurants, arcades, spas, fitness centers and children’s activities in addition to a water park.
The Tepeji water park will create close to 3,000 direct and indirect jobs, the company said.
Construction is scheduled to start in the first quarter of 2019 and conclude in the fall of 2021.
Great Wolf Resorts CEO Murray Hennessy explained that the company considered more than 170 countries before deciding on two finalists — Mexico and the United Kingdom.
Hidalgo was chosen for the potential market reach it has in central Mexico, its economic growth potential and particularly because of the attractive terms offered by the state government.
Hidalgo Governor Omar Fayad Meneses observed that one-third of Mexico’s population lives within a 100-kilometer radius of the location of the new water park.
The federal environmental protection agency says toxic algae was responsible for the deaths of 48 manatees in Tabasco earlier this year.
Profepa said there was no evidence that oil pollution from Pemex facilities was responsible.
Most of the manatee deaths occurred in the municipalities of Macuspana, Centla and Jonuta in an area known as the Bitzales region.
Agency chief Guillermo Haro Bélchez said experts analyzed the causes of the deaths during 13 meetings between May and October, concluding that a prolonged drought, high temperatures and the presence of fecal matter and urban solid waste in the water led to the algae growth.
“The cause of death was food poisoning from the chronic accumulation of toxic algae, in lethal concentrations, leading to the death of the 48 manatees,” he stated.
Haro observed that of 35 studies conducted on the waters of the Bitzales region, only one revealed elevated concentrations of heavy metals.
But he said that study was conducted by an unaccredited laboratory that did not follow chain of custody procedures with the water samples.
The other studies found that heavy metal levels were well below the maximum concentration allowed.
Haro said no manatee deaths have been reported since October 26 in the region, which has an estimated population of 500 to 1,000 animals.
Profepa recommended monitoring the water to permit the early detection of toxic algae blooms, controlling the spread of invasive species and reforestation programs on river banks among other measures.
Haro said recent studies show that toxic algae levels have returned to normal.
The arrival in Tijuana of large numbers of Central Americans seeking asylum in the United States has triggered an anti-migrant backlash from residents and the city’s mayor, who has been labelled “Tijuana’s Trump.”
Members of the first migrant caravan, made up mainly of Hondurans who entered Mexico October 19, began arriving in the Baja California border city early this week after a journey of more than 4,000 kilometers.
There are now almost 2,000 caravan members in Tijuana and another 4,500 migrants are expected to arrive today.
Tijuana has a long history of welcoming migrants from many different parts of the world but not everyone is happy about the current mass arrival.
Anti-migrant groups have sprung up on social media including one on Facebook called Tijuana en contra de la caravana migrante (Tijuana against the migrant caravan) that has attracted almost 400 followers.
Some posts to the page have included claims that there are gang members, drug addicts and even murderers among the caravan members while others have sought to incite violence against them.
At least one group created on the mobile messaging service WhatsApp has also been used to provoke anti-migrant sentiment and to urge violent action against caravan members.
The virtual opposition turned real Wednesday night when a group of about 200 residents confronted migrants sleeping on the beach next to the border fence that separates Mexico from the United States.
The residents threatened the migrants, telling them they were not welcome and threw stones at them. Scuffles broke out but a contingent of police arrived at the scene and prevented an escalation of hostilities by directing the migrants to a bus and taking them to a shelter at the Benito Juárez sports center.
Honduran Jairo Sorto said that Mexicans throughout the country had welcomed the caravan and wondered why things were different in Tijuana.
“We’ve walked across Mexico and not one state said, ‘we don’t want immigrants in this country,’” he said.
Tijuana Mayor Gastelum: unhappy over migrant ‘horde.’
Municipal police director Mario Martínez said that two migrants involved in the confrontation had been detained for misconduct, adding that three others had been arrested for consuming drugs inside a shelter.
All five will be deported to their country of origin, he said.
Tijuana Mayor Juan Manuel Gastélum added his voice to the opposition against the caravan, declaring in a television interview that the migrants are not wanted in the border city.
Echoing the claims made on social media, Gastélum said that there are “pot smokers,” “bums” and “bad people” among the caravan members, adding that he would organize a citizens’ consultation in order to decide whether the city would continue to welcome the migrants.
“Tijuana is a city of migrants but we don’t want them [arriving] in this way. It was different with the Haitians, they had [immigration] papers, [their arrival] was orderly, it wasn’t a horde, excuse the expression . . .” he said.
“These people arrive in an aggressive, rude way, chanting, challenging the authorities, doing what we’re not accustomed to doing in Tijuana . . . I don’t dare to say that it is all the migrants but there are some who are bums, pot smokers, they’re attacking families in [the beachside borough] Playas de Tijuana, what is that?”
The mayor also called on federal lawmakers to allocate resources to Tijuana so that it could attend to the migrants. Most shelters in the border city are already at or near capacity.
“We need the support now or never . . .” Gastélum said.
His comments were criticized by the head of a migrants’ advocacy organization, Agenda Migrante, who called the mayor “Tijuana’s Trump” and warned he was inciting xenophobic attitudes with discriminatory remarks.
Eunice Rendón urged Mexicans to consider “the racism and language” of President Trump and its impact on hate crimes, which recorded an increase last year.
Federal Interior Secretary Alfonso Navarrete Prida also expressed concern over the situation in Tijuana.
He told a press conference yesterday that the government is worried about the possibility of a confrontation on the border if the migrants don’t agree to lodge asylum requests in an orderly manner but instead try to enter the United States en masse.
“What is it that we don’t want? For violence to be the dynamic moving forward from here in the face of a possible attempt to enter the United States in an untimely and disorderly way, knowing that the actions and discourse of our northern neighbor towards a vulnerable population are extraordinarily hostile,” he said.
What approach the migrants will take to try to cross into the United States remains unclear with a decision set to be made once the largest cohort of the first caravan has arrived in Tijuana.
There are already around 3,000 migrants in Tijuana waiting to lodge asylum requests with United States authorities, meaning that the new arrivals could face lengthy waits to file their claims.
Nick Miroff, a national security reporter for The Washington Post, wrote on Twitter today that “if there are 3,140 [migrants] on waiting list and CBP [Customs and Border Protection] is processing 90/day, that’s 1 month before caravan members can begin to approach the port [of entry].”
With members of two other migrant caravans likely to arrive in Tijuana in the coming weeks, Miroff said that it could take two to three months for U.S. authorities to hear all the asylum requests.
“Are the younger and more restless members of the caravans going to wait that long?” he asked.
The United States government has deployed 5,900 troops to the southern border to bolster security in the face of what U.S. President Trump has called an “invasion.”
Barbed wire is also being affixed to the border fence to act as an additional deterrent to any attempts to scale it illegally.
Trump frequently railed against the caravan in the lead-up to the November 6 U.S. midterm elections but has been much quieter on the issue since.
Despite his hardline rhetoric towards the migrants, the majority remained determined to reach the Mexico-United States border.
How many achieve their final goal of asylum in Trump’s America remains to be seen.
