HONDURAS: Hundreds of asylum seekers are forming new migrant caravans in Honduras in Central America, planning to walk thousands of kilometres to the United States via Guatemala and Mexico, in search of a better life under the new administration of President Joe Biden.
A first group of some 300 people set out at dawn on Thursday from San Pedro Sula, the second-largest city in Honduras, headed for Corinto, on the border with Guatemala, some 100 kilometers (62 miles) northwest.
Traveling in small groups, some bearing the Honduran flag, most of the traveling migrants wore coronavirus protective face masks.
According to social media pages, another 3,000 people are to meet at San Pedro Sula on Thursday evening to leave in the small hours for Corinto or Agua Caliente elsewhere on the border, some 260 km away.
The migrants say they are fleeing poverty, unemployment, gang and drug violence, as well as the aftermath of two violent hurricanes that hit the country last November.
The US commitment to the "rule of law and public health" is not affected by a change in the administration, he stressed, and migrant caravans will not be allowed to make their way north in violation of national sovereignty and immigration laws.
"This is a deadly journey -– the US Border Patrol recovered more than 250 bodies along the US-Mexico border last fiscal year. We saw two deaths just last week, when smugglers abandoned dozens of migrants in a winter storm that dumped two feet of snow near Big Bend, Texas," added Morgan.
More than a dozen migrant caravans have set off from Honduras since October 2018 -- at least four of them with 3,000 people each. But all have run up against thousands of US border guards and soldiers positioned on Mexico's southern border by the President Donald Trump's administration. Guatemala, Mexico and Honduras have an agreement with the United States to stop north-bound migratory flows from the south of the continent. - AFP
