Currents News Staff
Another dawn at the migrant caravan heading to the united states. Another night sleeping on concrete for thousands of people. Some get ready for the day. Children play a game as if they were still home. Others decide to sleep a little longer.
Maria Antonia breast feeds her two-month-old daughter Estrella on the pavement where they spent the night. Maria Antonia says she is leaving Honduras so that Estrella can have a future. “There isn’t any work there, we have nothing to live on,” she said.
On the same block, Kevin asks people for coins. He’s traveling alone to join an older brother in the U.S. hoping to send money back home. He says he is 14 but looks much younger. We aren’t showing his face to keep him safe. “I came here so I could work and eat and help my family,” he says.
Over in the town plaza Bryan is figuring out how to get back to the U.S. He lived most of his life in Texas but was deported this month to Honduras. He will walk as long as it takes to reunite with his three-year-old daughter, an American citizen. “She’s the one who needs me the most and I don’t want her to go without me,” he said.
They have over a thousand miles to go to the U.S. – Mexico border where they will not be welcome.
The Trump administration is pressuring the Mexican government to stop the caravan and deport more than 7000 migrants back home because there could be terrorists or dangerous gang members in their midst. But literally everyone we have talked to has said the exact opposite: They aren’t gang members, they are their victims.
Maria Antonia says Honduras’ out of control gangs extort everyone, sometimes for just a few dollars. “That’s why we came. They charge ‘war taxes’ there. If you don’t pay they kill you,” she said. She said she hopes her baby daughter is too young to remember the hell they are fleeing from and the hell they are living now.