Report: Small group of migrants arrives within 500 feet of US border

Hasan Dudar USA TODAY

Published 9:25 AM EST Nov 23, 2018

WASHINGTON — A small group of migrants has split from the caravan in Tijuana and made it within 500 feet of the United States-Mexico border, according to a report from the San Diego Union-Tribune.

The newspaper reported Thursday that the group of about 150 people walked from the migrant camp to the foot of a U.S. pedestrian bridge. The migrants were carrying white flags and attempting to meet with U.S. immigration officers to gain asylum, the Union-Tribune reports.

The migrants, who have traveled thousands of miles to flee their home countries, have been staying at a makeshift shelter in the Benito Juarez sports complex, which the municipal government opened last Wednesday. Originally planned to hold 3,000 migrants, the latest arrivals have put the shelter over capacity.

On Thursday, Tijuana’s mayor, Juan Manuel Gastelum, declared an international humanitarian crisis over the arrival of more than 5,000 mostly Central American migrants traveling in a caravan.

Gastelum asked international organizations like the United Nations to help the city deal with the influx of migrants, amid a lagging response from the Mexican federal government, which he accused of neglecting their responsibilities to deal with migrant and immigration issues.

More: Americans divided on whether immigrant caravan is threat to USA

President Donald Trump on Thursday threatened to close the whole of the southern border if the Mexican government fails to do more to secure its side of it.

"If we find that it's uncontrollable, if we find it gets to a level where we are going to lose control or where people are going to start getting hurt, we will close entry into the country for a period of time until we can get it under control,” Trump told reporters at his Mar-a-Lago club in Florida, where he spent Thanksgiving with his family.

The U.S.-Mexico border stretches 2,000 miles from San Diego to Brownsville, Texas, and its closure could cause economic damage to not only the four border states but throughout the country. The State Department estimates that $1.7 billion in goods and services, and hundreds of thousands of people, legally cross the border each day.

Last month, Trump fired off a series of tweets warning he would close the border if the governments of Mexico and Central America did not control a caravan heading toward the United States.

Trump has been railing for more than a month about the thousands of Central American migrants who left Honduras last month and trekked through Mexico en route to the U.S.-Mexico border to seek asylum. The migrants said they were escaping extreme poverty and gang violence. Trump has called it “an invasion” and has deployed thousands of military troops to support U.S. Border Patrol agents to secure the southern border.

Contributing: Sergio Bustos, USA TODAY; Rafael Carranza, The Arizona Republic.

More: Migrant caravan: Tijuana declares humanitarian crisis, asks for international help

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