Photo credit: AP News
Hundreds of migrants, most of them from Haiti, left the southern Mexico city of Tapachula on foot Tuesday seeking better living conditions elsewhere in Mexico.
The Associated Press reports that many of the migrants leaving Tapachula said they had lost hope of making it to the US due to the restrictions that the Trump administration has placed on asylum seekers. They said they would rather settle down in large Mexican cities, where they may be able to find work and file asylum claims. Some of them said they had been unable to get responses for asylum claims in Tapachula, despite spending months in the small city near Mexico’s border with Guatemala.
In March, another group of several migrants left Tapachula on foot. But the caravan was dissolved after 12 days on the march, after the migrants made a deal with Mexican immigration officers.
Since the beginning of the administration of President Claudia Sheinbaum, who came into office in October 2024, there have been 18 migrant caravans leaving from Tapachula. None of them has made it past the southern Mexican state of Oaxaca,
Haitians account for a quarter of asylum petitions filed in Mexico. According to Mexico’s national agency for refugees, 127,000 Haitians filed asylum petitions in Mexico between 2020 and 2024
