By Rene Emmanuel Ambroise, Age 10 There is a migrant caravan made up of around 7,000 people on its way from Central America to the U.S. The people in this caravan are trying to escape the violence they are experiencing in Central American countries such as Guatemala, El Salvador and Honduras. They are also escaping droughts, floods and other weather problems that are exacerbated by climate change. Poverty is also a problem for many people that have joined the caravan.
President Trump has tried to dehumanize the migrants and create fear around the caravan by saying things such as, “Go into the middle of the caravan, take your cameras and search. OK? … You’re going to find MS-13 [gang]. You’re going to find Middle Eastern. You’re going to find everything. And guess what. We’re not allowing them in our country. We want safety. We want safety.”
Ana Gamboa is a Mexican resident who has been helping the migrants, by providing basic necessities. She wants to show their humanity. “The only thing I can say to people is that they should be more human, that we should look into our hearts and imagine ourselves in the migrants’ shoes, because it isn’t easy, what the migrants are doing,” Gamboa told Democracy Now!
Patricia Montes, an immigrant from Honduras and executive director of Centro Presente in Boston, Massachusetts, told Democracy Now! that U.S. foreign policy is forcing these people to leave. “I think it’s important to understand the role of the U.S. in the crisis that Honduras has been facing for a very long time. There are two particular moments in history in the past 10 years, like the coup d’état that took place in 2009 and, of course, the unconstitutional re-election of President Juan Orlando Hernández in 2017. These two moments in history increased the political and economic instability in Honduras, and now we’re seeing the results.”
Majority of the migrant caravan are intending to seek asylum in the U.S. as refugees.
