Mexico responds to Trump threat about migrant caravans

 Fox News:

The Mexican government is working hard to break up migrant caravans trying to make the treacherous journey north to the U.S. ahead of President-elect Trump’s inauguration in less than two weeks' time.

Faced with the prospect of massive tariffs on goods under the new administration, Mexico has been dispersing migrants throughout the country to keep them far from the U.S. border, including dropping them off at the once vibrant tourist hotspot of Acapulco, a beach resort town on Mexico's Pacific coast made famous by the jet set in the 1950s and ’60s.

Once a crown jewel of Mexico's tourism industry, the city now suffers under the thumb of organized crime and is still struggling to climb back after taking a direct hit from powerful Hurricane Otis in 2023. It now has one of Mexico's highest rates of homicides.

Yet authorities are dropping busloads of migrants there with little support and few options.

The Mexican government has embraced a policy of "dispersion and exhaustion" to reduce the number of migrants reaching the U.S. border. Authorities let migrants walk for days until they're exhausted and then offer to bus them to various cities where they say their immigration status will be reviewed.

The migrants tell The Associated Press that they accepted an offer from immigration officials to come to the city under the premise that they could continue their journey north toward the U.S. border, but instead they have essentially been abandoned there.

On Monday, desperate migrants could be seen sleeping in the streets in tents and say they fear Mexico's drug cartels could target them for kidnapping and extortion, though many migrants say authorities extort them, too.

"Immigration (officials) told us they were going to give us a permit to transit the country freely for 10, 15 days and it wasn't like that," 28-year-old Venezuelan Ender Antonio Castañeda told The Associated Press. "They left us dumped here without any way to get out. They won't sell us (bus) tickets. They won't sell us anything."
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It would take an adult migrant about 16 days of non-stop walking to get to the most southern point of the U.S. border, which is at the crossing at Matamoros, near Brownsville, Texas. Migrants prefer traveling in caravans because they believe there is safety in numbers as it is hard or impossible for immigration agents to detain large groups of hundreds of migrants.

Trump has threatened Mexico with a 25% tariff on imported goods from Mexico, and the country hopes the lower numbers will give them some defense from Trump's pressures.
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Most of these migrants are not Mexican citizens.  They are coming from around the world responding to Joe Biden's open borders policy.  Millions have already crossed into the US and will be subject to deportation when Trump takes office.   Most of Mexico's trade is with the US and the proposed tariffs would have an impact on the Mexican economy.