Reports out of Guatemala say that a second migrant caravan, numbering between 1,000 and 2,000 people, is passing through that country on its way to Mexico and eventually the U.S. border.
According to Reuters, Casa del Migrante (literally “house of the migrant”), a migrant shelter in Guatemala City, said that more than 1,000 migrants had passed that way from Honduras, before heading to toward Mexico.
Local media outlets have reported the number of migrants in this second caravan as being higher than 2,000.
The first migrant caravan, which is now reported to have grown to anywhere between 7,000 and 10,000 migrants, is reportedly still 1,100 miles from the United States in Huixtla, Mexico. That first caravan is mostly made up of people from Honduras.
On Monday, President Donald Trump said in a series of tweets that he was going to begin cutting off foreign aid to Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador after those nations failed to stop the migrant caravan from moving north.
The U.S. sent more than $400 million to these three nations in 2016 alone. Trump will need congressional approval to stop any aid payments that have already been approved.
Trump has also claimed in those same tweets that “unknown Middle Easterners” were “mixed in” with the Central American migrants. Speaking to the media on Tuesday, Trump clarified that “there’s no proof of anything. But there could very well be,” adding that border officials had “intercepted many people from the Middle East” “all the time.”
For its part, the Mexican government has been trying to get the migrants to register for refugee status in Mexico, instead of continuing north to the U.S. border. The Mexican government said on Tuesday, according to Reuters, that 1,699 people had applied for refugee status. That number included children.
The New York Times reports that local Mexican authorities have been supplying the migrants with food, drinks, and vaccines.
