Migrants split on whether to keep walking through Mexico

VILLA COMALTITLÁN, Mexico (AP) — A group of migrants that once numbered as many as 5,000 split on Thursday about whether to keeping walking through southern Mexico toward the U.S. border.

A group of about 2,000 mainly younger male migrants set out walking Thursday from the southern town of Huixtla.

But throngs of families with children decided to wait in Huixtla to see if they could get some sort of temporary exit visa. The families were tired after walking some 25 miles since departing the city of Tapachula, near the Guatemalan border, on Monday.

The goal of almost all the migrants is to reach the U.S. border. But none of the migrant caravans that have crossed Mexico starting in 2018 have ever walked all the way to the border, which is over 1,000 miles to the north.

While some caravan participants reached the border in the past, it was due to bus or car rides — which the government now tries to prevent.

Venezuelan migrant Junior Ramírez waited for papers with about 15 members of his extended family at a National Immigration Institute post outside Huixtla, where the migrants slept in the open air on Tuesday and Wednesday.

“Up to now they haven't told us whether they are going to give them to us,” Ramírez said. “Other migrants have gotten them and left. All we want to do is keep going.”

Luis García Villagrán, a migrant advocate traveling with the caravan, said Mexican authorities have been giving out the equivalent of exit visas, which give migrants between one and three months to leave the country.

Theoretically, a migrant carrying such papers will either request asylum or leave Mexico — presumably over the U.S. border — and wouldn't be sent back to their home country.

Josué Mendoza Rojas and Josmar de Nazaret Cárdenas, two other Venezuelan migrants, were in the same...