TAPACHULA, Mexico—An estimated 5,000 Honduran migrants—some on foot carrying children and some hitching rides on trucks—set out Monday from southern Mexico on a grueling journey toward the U.S. border, as President Trump threatened to end or cut foreign aid to Central American countries for failing to stop the caravan.
The caravan’s 11-day march through Honduras and Guatemala and into Mexico has fueled a fresh political rift between Mr. Trump and those countries’ leaders just two weeks before U.S. midterm elections.
In a series of tweets Monday, Mr. Trump said he had alerted the U.S. Border Patrol and the military that the caravan was a national emergency. He criticized El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras and Mexico for not stopping the group or otherwise curbing the flow of migrants, called for an overhaul of U.S. immigration laws and exhorted his supporters: “Remember the Midterms!”
The caravan set out Oct. 12, after several hundred people vowed to trek north from San Pedro Sula, Honduras, one of the world’s most violent cities. The numbers grew quickly after local media, social activists and leftist opposition politicians drew attention to the initiative.
At the end of last week, the caravan arrived on the doorstep to Mexico. Under pressure from the U.S., Mexico offered the migrants asylum but said it would only let in groups of 150 to 200 people a day to process their requests. Anyone crossing the border illegally would be deported, Mexican officials warned.
The Honduran government estimates that 2,000 migrants returned home. Mexico says another 1,000 or so have applied for asylum. But the majority—about 5,000, according to the Mexican government—crossed the border illegally, mostly on rickety rafts run by human smugglers.
On Monday, Mexican President Enrique Peña Nieto called on the migrants to cease crossing the country illegally.
“They will hardly achieve their goals of migrating to the U.S. or stay in Mexico if they continue with this attitude,” Mr. Peña Nieto said at a business summit in Guadalajara.
Interior Minister Alfonso Navarrete, however, said Mexico wouldn’t use violence to stop the caravan. “They won’t be deported or repatriated,” he said. “We want to exhaust dialogue with those who joined the caravan.”
The group is still a long way and many days from the U.S. border, facing a difficult journey through some of the most violent areas of Mexico. There are several routes, including a 1,100-mile long journey to the border town of Reynosa across from McAllen, Texas, or a far longer 2,420-mile trek to Tijuana by San Diego.
“We can’t get to the northern border all together” said Irineo Mujica, the head of People without Borders, a U.S.-Mexico nonprofit that has backed the caravan since its arrival in Guatemala. Such a huge group moving across Mexico days before the U.S. midterms, he added, would embolden Mr. Trump. “If this full caravan arrives to the U.S. border, it would be like a declaration of war,” Mr. Mujica said.
Others were confident the caravan could stay united and get to the U.S. border. “The plan is to get to Tijuana! The fight continues, we don’t give up,” said Denis Contreras, a Honduran migrant and social activist helping to organize the caravan, a loudspeaker in hand.
Most migrants say they want to get to the U.S. but generally don’t know what legal options they have ahead. Many said they were determined to abandon Honduras, which has among the world’s highest rates of violence. When they saw news on television that a caravan had left from San Pedro Sula heading north, many thought it was the right moment to leave.
“I was at my apartment near Tegucigalpa when I saw on [my news] channel that the caravan was leaving,” said María Rodríguez, 17. “I said to myself: that’s my opportunity.” She said a criminal gang extorted her family business. and demanded a “war tax,” calling it that because “if you don’t pay the gang destroys your business and kills you.”
A dozen Honduran migrants said they first learned of the migrant caravan on Facebook in early October in a post that called on would-be migrants to join in at the bus terminal of San Pedro Sula on Oct. 12 at 8 a.m.
“A friend of mine shared a post…Then I talked to my friends and convinced them to go together, and they also talked with their own friends and neighbors,” said Manuel Valladares, 22, who is traveling with four friends.
For many would-be migrants, leaving in a caravan is attractive because they can avoid paying some $5,000 in smugglers’ fees and are safer traveling in numbers.
On Oct. 5, Honduran social activist and leftist politician Bartolo Fuentes shared the information about the caravan on his Facebook account, criticizing the government for not helping would-be migrants have a safe journey. His post was shared more than 200 times, and he continued to post extensively about the caravan in the following days.
The government of Honduras’s conservative President Juan Orlando Hernandez said Mr. Fuentes and other leftist activists were behind the caravan. On Sept. 26, before news of the caravan became public, Mr. Fuentes said on his Facebook account: “There are already groups of migrants looking to leave in a more organized way in coming weeks.”
Mr. Fuentes has repeatedly denied being the organizer. “The true organizer of the caravan is violence, poverty, unemployment,” he said. He was arrested in Guatemala on Oct. 16 for breaching that country’s immigration rules and deported back to Honduras on Friday.
The emigrant caravan puts Mexico between a rock and a hard place, said Andrew Selee, president of the Migration Policy Institute, a nonpartisan think tank in Washington.
“Most Mexicans are sympathetic to the migrants, so politically it becomes very difficult for the government to move against the caravan given it has such visibility,” he said. “On the other hand, you don’t want to anger the U.S. and be seen as just allowing migrants to cross through your country freely.”
On Sunday, Mr. Trump warned the migrants on Twitter that if they didn’t accept Mexico’s offer of asylum, they would be denied entry to the U.S. He said Monday the caravan included “criminals and unknown Middle Easterners,” without offering evidence.
Mr. Trump has seized on the caravan to rally Republican voters ahead of the Nov. 6 elections. Close Senate races are being fought in the U.S. border states of Arizona and Texas.
The White House didn’t say how or when the U.S. would begin changing the amount of aid it sends to El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras and Mexico. For fiscal year 2019, the U.S. plans to send about $70 million in aid to Guatemala, $66 million to Honduras and $46 million to El Salvador, according to the State Department. Most of the funds go to violence prevention, justice and rule-of-law programs, along with funding for border and narcotics enforcement.
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Cutting aid to Central American countries would be a mistake, since U.S. aid dollars fund programs that reduce violence, strengthen the justice system, and encourage investment that make them more attractive places for their citizens, said Marcela Escobari, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution.
Studies have shown that once a country’s GDP per capita reaches between $6,000 and $8,000, the gains from migrating somewhere become less attractive, said Ms. Escobari, who served under President Barack Obama as head of Latin America for the U.S. Agency for International Development.
“We need to stop these countries from becoming failed states, because that’s what’s going to cause a tremendous exodus,” she said.
Immigrants asking for U.S. asylum either at a legal border crossing or upon being arrested by the Border Patrol for crossing illegally are subjected to a “credible fear” interview to decide if their request should be heard by an immigration judge. More than 75% of immigrants pass the so-called “credible fear bar,” according to U.S. government statistics. Those who don’t pass that initial interview are subject to deportation.
Immigration authorities can jail asylum seekers until their case is decided, but bed space is at a premium as the Trump administration steps up immigration enforcement both at the border and in the U.S. interior.
For those released into the U.S., a final decision could take years amid a backlog of more than 764,000 cases pending in federal immigration court. During that time, they can live in the U.S. and apply work permits, something Mr. Trump has repeatedly criticized.
—Rebecca Ballhaus in Washington and Alicia Caldwell in Los Angeles contributed to this article.
Write to Juan Montes at juan.montes@wsj.com
Corrections & Amplifications
The migrant caravan crossed Guatemala. An earlier version of this article incorrectly spelled Guatemala in one instance. (Oct. 22, 2018)
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