US-Mexico border sees migrant surge

As rising number of people head north, both countries seek to tackle problem

Thousands of migrants continued to march through Mexico toward the US-Mexico border as the top US diplomat visited Mexican City on Wednesday to discuss how to curb mass border crossings.

It has been reported that more than 7,000 people from Central and South America started the caravan march on Christmas Eve from the southern Mexican city of Tapachula near Mexico's border with Guatemala.

Social media photos show members of the caravan holding a big banner with the slogan "Exodus from Poverty" in Spanish. Mexican media reported that most of the migrants were from Cuba, Haiti and Honduras, but some came from faraway places such as Bangladesh and India.

Before meeting with Secretary of State Antony Blinken, Mexican President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador said the US Congress should offer more support to Latin America instead of putting up "barriers, barbed wire fences on the river or thinking about building walls". He also said: "The migration issue is going to intensify."

Blinken's trip was announced last week after Biden spoke by telephone with Lopez Obrador, who met for more than two hours with Blinken and other top US officials including Secretary of Homeland Security Alejandro Mayorkas.

Lopez Obrador, writing afterward on X, formerly known as Twitter, said that "important agreements were reached for the benefit of our peoples and nations", without elaborating.

The number of migrants seeking to cross the border has been on the rise post-pandemic.

According to US Customs and Border Protection, close to 2.4 million migrants were apprehended at the border in the fiscal year 2022 ending in September, and the number went to almost 2.5 million in the fiscal year 2023.

In the first two months of fiscal year 2024, the number of migrants apprehended at the US-Mexico border reached almost half a million. If that continues, it means the total number could reach almost 3 million in 2024.

According to the BBC, migrant rights activist Luis Garcia Villagran was accompanying the caravan. He said joining the mass trek north was a last resort for many of the migrants who had been stuck in Tapachula.

"The problem is that the southern border (with Guatemala) is open and 800 to 1,000 people are crossing it daily. If we don't get out of Tapachula, the town will collapse," he told the BBC.

Villagran said not all migrants want to enter the US. Some seek to get legal status in Mexico and hope to get attention and assistance from the Mexican government by going on the march.

The Joe Biden administration has been criticized by Republicans for the surge in border crossings. Republican House Speaker Mike Johnson sent a letter last week to Biden saying "all of this is the direct result of your administration's policies".

Johnson said in the letter that in addition to "the record 2.48 million illegal aliens at our southern border" last year, another 670,000 got away. "On average, more than 8,400 illegal aliens entered our country every single day over the last year," he wrote.

Shelter shortages

A few major US cities, including Washington, Chicago and Los Angeles, are already overwhelmed by the rising number of migrants bused over from the border by Texas and Florida.

Struggling with a shortage of shelters, New York City has issued eviction notices to about 35,000 migrant families. They were asked to leave the shelters and reapply for shelter if they had been there longer than 60 days. The eviction notice will take effect in January.

According to The New York Times, New York has received more than 157,000 migrants since last year, and 33,000 new homeless students — mostly migrants — have enrolled in more than 32 school districts across the city. Now more than 67,000 migrants are being housed.

Parents and educators fear such an eviction will interrupt the schooling of children from migrant families. They might be reassigned to a shelter far from their current school within the city.

Agencies contributed to this story.