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A migrant holds a photograph of Mexican President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador that reads in Spanish: “The lives of migrants matter too” as his caravan stops to block the highway in Huixtla, Mexico, Wednesday, Nov. 8. Some 3,000 migrants, most of them from Central America, are protesting for the government to grant them transit documents that allow them to continue north to the U. S. border.
MEXICO CITY >> Authorities discovered 123 migrants from Central and South America trapped in a caravan in Mexico’s central state of San Luis Potosi, Mexico’s immigration firm said Thursday.
Officials from the state attorney general’s office tracked down the migrants in Matehuala, a city on the border with Nuevo Leon, on Wednesday after a local court asked for calls from an enclosed trailer.
Most of the rescued migrants came from the Central American countries of Guatemala, Nicaragua, Honduras and El Salvador, as well as four from Ecuador and one Cuban, according to Mexico’s National Migration Institute. Among them were 34 children.
The immigration firm didn’t say how the migrants got caught there or where they were headed, but those teams of immigrants hope to succeed in the United States.
On the same day, police in Ciudad Juarez, across the border from El Paso, Texas, arrested three suspected human smugglers after locating Guatemalan migrants trapped in a home, according to the Chihuahua Department of State Security.
The Chihuahua Attorney General’s Office opened an investigation into the suspects, two of whom are 16 years old.
Kidnapping and extortion are well-known risks for migrants traveling to northern Mexico, many of whom rely on bills to local gangs to cross safely.
On Wednesday, a caravan of migrants from Guatemala blocked a highway near the southern Chiapas city of Huixtla, saying they feared they would be attacked by criminals if they kept walking. They continued to block the highway on Thursday, hoping to force tension. The Mexican government will provide them with transit documents that allow them to reach the U. S. border.
The southern U. S. -Mexico borders have faced an increasing number of migrants traveling north this year. More than 400,000 people crossed the Darien Gap from Colombia to Panama in 2023, according to Panamanian government data, up from 250,000 in 2022.
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