translated from Spanish: There will be special operations, segob warns of new migrant caravan

“There will be special operations and, of course, there will be immigration agents.” This was the response of the Secretary of the Governorate, Olga Sánchez Cordero, to the migrant caravan that left San Pedro Sula, Honduras, bound for the United States, in the early hours of Wednesday.
After his meeting with the poet Javier Sicilia, Sánchez Cordero spoke about the march of Central Americans that still transits through Honduras and that he plans to cross to Guatemala in the next few hours. The trek is scheduled to reach Mexico on Saturday.
“If you want to have some kind of immigration status, we will gladly attend to you, or shelter or asylum,” she said, as well as mentioning that the number of participants in the caravan is about 600 people.
“Mexico is not just a transit country. It is not a country that gives a safe conduct, it is a country that opens its doors to people who want to enter and migrate to our country. There’s no way we have transit visas or safe-conducts,” he said.
Between January and November 2019, Mexico detained 179,000 illegal migrants, most of them 151 thousand 547 from Central America. Of the total detainees, 117 thousand 689 were deported. Although the INM has not yet offered the final figures for 2019, they already exceed those of the previous year, when 131,445 migrants were arrested and 115 thousand 686 deportees were deported.
This increase is explained by the agreement signed on June 7 with the United States, whereby Mexico committed to curb the flow of migration in exchange for Washington’s non-tariff on exports. The pact opened up a period of high praise from US President Donald Trump for his Mexican counterpart, Andrés Manuel López Obrador.
Returning to the figures, the difference between detainees and deportees, which widens in 2019, would have to be searched in asylum seekers. In the year just concluded, the Mexican Commission for Refugee Aid, Comar, processed 70 thousand 302 applications for protection, which doubles by far the 29,630 requests of 2018. All this, within an institution that its commissioner, Andrés Ramirez, has described on several occasions as “collapsed”.
A meeting between the Government, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs (which is responsible for everything related to migration since the agreement with the United States in June), the INM and the Undersecretariats for Labour and Welfare, is scheduled to take place on Thursday.
“Let’s see exactly what the strategy is going to be to address the caravan issue,” Sanchez Cordero said.
Questioned about what the attitude of the National Guard and INM will be in case the migrants do not want to register and try to continue on their way to the United States, the civil servant merely replied: “We are not going to give safe conduct. Is that clear? It’s very clear.”
Sánchez Cordero is the only member of the Mexican government to talk about the caravan. However, Alejandro Giamattei, the Guatemalan president who took office on Tuesday, assured that the chancellor, Marcelo Ebrard, would have pledged not to allow the march to cross Mexican territory bound for the United States.
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Original source in Spanish