Hundreds of migrants departed in various groups throughout Friday from southern Mexico's border with Guatemala, after a registration process to transport undocumented asylum-seekers by bus was suspended by the country's National Institute of Migration (INM), local media reported.
According to reports, the migrants stated that they wanted to leave the southern state of Chiapas because they had not received the promised humanitarian visas or been transported to other parts of Mexico where they would have improved living conditions.
Earlier, the INM had reportedly begun a registration process to transfer undocumented people from different nations to other cities and states to carry out procedures to request visas for humanitarian reasons.
This is reportedly the third caravan that has departed from the Guatemalan border. The first left more than a month ago, on October 23, from the state of Veracruz, near the shores of the Gulf of Mexico, bound for the north.
A second caravan of migrants departed on Friday morning from Olympic Stadium in the city of Tapachula, where they were waiting for paperwork, moving in the direction of the municipality of Huixtla.
Migrants in the caravans, mostly natives of Latin America, Haiti and Africa, reportedly did not want to accept the authorities' offer to move to other states or decided not to wait for their turn for registration. Immigrants from a previous caravan, which was heading to the United States, reached an agreement this week with the country's migration authorities on legalization in the country - they refused to go to the northern border and will undergo formal procedures at migration centers in various states.
Mexico itself has recorded more than 190,000 undocumented migrants from January to September, about three times the number in 2020, in addition to having deported almost 74,300.
This development comes as earlier this week, Axios reported that the Biden administration wants to restart Trump's Migrant Protection Protocols, often known as the "Remain in Mexico" program, which permits US officials to prevent foreign nationals from entering the country from Mexico while their immigration cases are being processed. and, as a result, start turning away asylum seekers at the US-Mexico border.