The Daily - The Migrant Caravan and the Midterms

Episode Date: October 24, 2018

Thousands of Central American migrants are moving north through Mexico, heading for the U.S. border. Republicans won’t stop talking about it, and Democrats are trying not to. Guest: Annie Correal, a New York Times reporter who spoke to us from Huixtla, Mexico. For more information on today’s episode, visit nytimes.com/thedaily.

From The New York Times, I'm Michael Barbaro. This is The Daily. Today, a caravan of Central American migrants is moving north through Mexico, headed for the U.S. border. Why the Republicans won't stop talking about it, and the Democrats are trying not to. It's Wednesday, October 24th. Hello? Hey, Annie? Hello? Can you hear me? I can hear you, yeah. Yes. Are you in Mexico City? No, I was in Mexico City for a conference over the weekend, and then I decided to come down to join this caravan as it makes its way north. Did you get there today? I arrived a couple of hours ago. Yeah,

I left Mexico City this morning, flew into Tapachula, and we got a van and a driver, kind of a beat-up blue minivan with non-working doors. And what's your plan next? Well, and what's and what's your plan next well um actually can i i think i should try to find the van um and so i don't get left behind here on the highway but i'm happy to to talk again and okay i'll just send you audio that i'm getting from the road okay but i'll talk to you soon sounds good sounds great thank you claire thank you annie Sounds good. Sounds great. Thank you, Claire. Thank you, Annie. So, my name is Annie Correal. I'm a reporter based in New York. I'm in Chiapas in southern Mexico now, following the migrant caravan as it makes its way north to the U.S. border.

This is sort of the tail end of the caravan because thousands of people have been heading along this route all day. So you can see evidence of that on the highway. There are orange peels and napkins and empty bottles of water. There are ambulances that are, and there's a Mexican Red Cross van that's going alongside with the migrants as they travel. They've sort of brought traffic to a standstill, and almost every car and truck

is filled with a dozen people. It's really hot. The sun is just beating down. It was supposed to rain today, but there doesn't seem to be a cloud in the sky. Behind me, there's a man who is carrying a large white flag. He says, you know, it's a message that they come in peace. And the news today is that there's another group that's sort of trying to join this caravan as it makes its way north. And

we can talk a little bit more about the political stuff when I'm not on the highway with the caravan itself. And you know what's happening right now as a large group of people, they call it a caravan. Caravan 7,000 strong is the so-called caravan growing to a mile long as it's heading straight up to our border. What do you think of this caravan we see? What should the president and the congressman send the Marines, send the military to the border to secure our borders? The president is trying to bring home a House victory on November the 6th, or at least narrow the losses by leaning heavily into this caravan as a threat to national security. This will be the election of the caravan, Kavanaugh, law and order, tax cuts and common sense.

That's what it is. Annie, what exactly is this caravan? What we're hearing, and it's difficult to verify, but it was very much a grassroots effort that was started through social media. There were people in three places in Honduras, La Ceiba, Tegucigalpa, and San Pedro Sula, through their own social network, started telling people that they were going to create this caravan and move north. And they converged in San Pedro Sula about 10 days ago. And they say they told the media in Honduras because they wanted people to join. For the most part, caravans offer people safety in numbers. And they told the media,

and suddenly more and more people started coming together. So the idea is that a large group of people is a protected group of people, because this does very much sound like the opposite of how we think of people attempting to sneak into the U.S. in small, inconspicuous groups. So it's about scale. Yes, it's about safety, both from drug gangs along the route, which have been known to kidnap migrants from Central America, and it's a sense of safety from the Mexican authorities themselves. The Mexican government has deported somewhere around 70,000 people this year. So people have a reason to be afraid that they could be deported if they're caught. And there's a sense

that with something this big, it would look really bad if the government tried to crack down. So most people in the caravan have decided not to apply for papers or try to do this in a legal way, and they're just moving forward with the sense and the hope that they'll be allowed to make it all the way to the United States. Now, this happened earlier this year in the spring. Another caravan made its way north. It was only 1,500 people. Some 200 actually managed to get in the U.S. And that caravan attracted attention because of the president's reaction, because of President Trump's reaction. Right. I remember this. Yeah. He called them invaders, sent the National Guard. So many people are making a comparison to that first caravan in the spring.

But oddly, a lot of the people who are migrating right now say that they haven't even heard of that earlier caravan. From what you're saying, this is not a unique situation. It's not unusual. I think that it's unusual to see large numbers. This is by far the largest anyone who I've spoken to has heard of. Annie, who are you meeting as you travel with the caravan? And what are they telling you about why they're making this journey northward toward the U.S.? Some of the surprises have been the number of mothers with small children. The number of strollers along the way. I mean, it's hard to imagine how you would decide that it was worth it to take a three-month-old on something like this.

That's the youngest child I've met, was three months old. They're kids who are a year old. There are lots of toddlers. And for the most part, people say that the children are actually not an impediment. But they're the reason that they're going. She says she actually wouldn't have left had she not had this baby because she said, well, I never left before. So she says that being a single mother and not having work or anything to offer her child

was part of the reason that she joined the caravan. They're elderly people, you know, a man with the crutches, entire extended families. Walking, caminando. Walking is the hardest thing we can do. It would be hard to put a number on it, but it's easy to say that half of the group or more are young men. And that makes sense. They're able-bodied. They're going to look for work.

The question of whether people are in imminent danger or they're just seeking a better life, it's very hard to pull those two things apart. And then there are groups that face grave danger. I met four people today. Now, this group is carrying a gay pride flag, una bandera de los derechos gay, ¿no es cierto? Three gay men and a trans woman who had left El Salvador

and hightailed it to the border to try to join the caravan. They're experiencing discrimination in their country. the caravan. They're experiencing discrimination in their country. The trans woman said that she was told that if she went through with the operation that they would cut off her breasts. So as one man told me, if you stick around long enough, you're going to find everything in this group. The basketball court where some of the migrants slept Monday night is right next to the river. It's on the banks of the river. And migrants have been climbing up to a path

that leads to the river to bathe this morning. You say, where are you from? to bathe this morning. So I met this man who told me his name was Sam. He'd been walking for 20 days. I met him as we walked down to the river. He's going to bathe. And he told me that he had two daughters. Two twin daughters. They're four years old. Sammy and Andrea. And he was going for them and a new set of twins that are due on Christmas Eve. and a new set of twins that are due on Christmas Eve. Wow.

And why do you want to go with this group? Do you feel safer with this group than alone? Yes, safer. Safer with this group because we are a lot. He says he's limping and he says that one of his feet is not doing well, but he's not going to stop and rest because he wants to keep going with the caravan because he feels safer, that there's a safety in numbers. And there are so many of them. And what is, in his mind, what happens when he reaches the U.S.? And how does this change his circumstances? So the majority of people I've interviewed feel that it's always

hard to get across the border. And this will just make it easier for them to get through Mexico and get to the border. I don't think they're thinking necessarily about what's going to happen when they arrive. But he clearly has it in his head that something good happens or else he wouldn't be taking this journey. successfully turned back and then being given food and water and used clothes and really being welcomed here has given them the hope as unrealistic as it might seem that the same thing might happen when they reach the U.S. A lot of people are drawing that comparison saying you know we made it across the border into Mexico we can make it across the border into the U.S. Yesterday was an interesting turning point. Morale was high after people were able to get into Mexico.

And they had done this long march from Hidalgo to Tapachula, the first leg of the trip. And things went relatively well. And then it was the second leg of their Mexican journey, Tapachula to Huixla. And they all set out with a lot of energy and they were piling into trucks and they were walking. And there was a young man, 21 years old, Melvin. He was on a truck, which I gather was quite crowded, and he fell off the back and he was killed. And traffic sort of stopped.

The police were there. The Human Rights Commission workers were there. And the next day, the newspapers said, primer muerto, the first death of the migrant caravan. It's hard to know if that's the first death, but that's the first documented case of someone dying on the caravan. And I think it was the first time that the sort of real danger came into sight for a lot of people. And the police were there and the authorities were there.

And so I think that all along, literally all along the highway, people were hearing about what had happened. And then they woke up to seeing the news on the front page of a newspaper called El Diario Sur. This is the president's tweet. He says, sadly, it looks like Mexico's police and military are unable to stop the caravan heading to the southern border of the United States. Criminals and unknown Middle Easterners are mixed in. I have alerted Border Patrol and military that this is a national emergy.

I guess he meant emergency. Emergy must change laws. But we're going to call it the Democrat Party, and it's openly inviting millions of illegal aliens to break our laws, violate our borders, and overwhelm our nation. The Democrats want caravans. They like the caravans.

A lot of people say, I wonder who started that caravan. Here, you would never know that Trump and all the tweets even existed. Maritza Isabel Garcia, do you know anything about the them in the U.S. She doesn't know about the midterm elections. Gracias, señora. They say that they don't know about the midterm elections. They're not informed of that. ¿Y usted cómo se llama?

Gracias. So a man who gave me only his last name, Sammy Flores, said that they don't know about the politics, the elections, what Trump has been saying about the caravan. They just know that he doesn't want them. What many people told me is that all they know is that Trump doesn't want us, or Trump doesn't like us, or Trump doesn't love us. But they are not aware of the day-by-day, how things are playing out. I think one, maybe one in ten, knows that there are midterm elections coming up at all.

What a number of people have told me is that they feel sadness, that they feel that any humane politician would see what they were going through and let them in. So that may seem wild as a proposition, but that's what I'm hearing from people on the ground. And people are reacting to their own local politics in terms of the timing of this precise caravan. It doesn't seem to have dovetailed with political events in the U.S. Annie, I'm struck that despite what people in this caravan are telling you, that they are not that aware of what's going on in the midterm elections, that the timing here means that they are inevitably going to be used to animate the political forces in the U.S.

who are the least sympathetic to their cause, and that we're in a moment where who gets animated politically matters a great deal because it dictates who's going to show up at the polls, who's going to be elected, and what our immigration policies are going to look like. Yeah, I mean, I would say that they're playing into the hands. This is almost felt to Republicans, to Trump supporters, possibly even to the president himself as something of a political gift, a way to really stir up or mobilize the conservative base, people who are worried about open borders, who want that wall to be built, that that was a way to sort of resurrect that message. It's almost like this kind of colossal political accident, but that they managed to capture America's imagination two weeks before these incredibly important elections that are already about questions of national security. It's kind of incredible because at this crucial moment,

this really large group of people has almost materialized as if to fulfill the political imagination, not just of Trump supporters, but also liberal progressive Americans who can point at nursing mothers sitting on cardboard boxes and the image of a migrant that isn't the MS-13 gang member that Trump has portrayed migrants to be. So this group, they each have their own story, but they have all played into the hands of the political reality of the moment in a way that I don't know whether they'll ever understand. I hope that's not condescending, but I think the only way they will understand is if they make it to the border and see what awaits them, because it's so abstract from this distance. And if they end up making it all the way to the

U.S. at the pace that they're currently traveling, when will they conceivably get there? Well, it's not clear how many miles they'll be able to cover every day. So far, it's only been about 20 miles. So it could be weeks. And however long it ends up taking, it will most certainly be after the U.S. midterm elections. So after all the votes are in and things have been decided one way or the other, these people will still be walking. They'll still be making their way up through Mexico. I'm in the central square of Wikla it's just after 9.30 on Tuesday and tonight there's a big rain, and after the storm was over,

everyone gathered around a band shell, and mariachis played, and they sang the Honduran anthem. There were mothers and sisters of disappeared migrants who spoke. And then at some point, everyone lit candles, and they raised their arms into the air, and they remembered Melvin into the air and they remembered Melvin Gomez, the migrant who died yesterday after he fell off a truck. Someone lifted a sign into the air that said, for our Melvin Gomez, we love you.

And after the rally was over, everyone took their candles and put them on the flagstone square until they formed this huge cross. Over the weekend, the Democratic congressional leaders, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer and House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, issued a statement essentially urging their colleagues to ignore Republican efforts to turn the caravan into a midterm issue. The president is desperate to change the subject from health care to immigration, they wrote,

because he knows that health care is the number one issue Americans care about. Democrats are focused like a laser on health care, they continued, and will not be diverted. We'll be right back. Here's what else you need to know today. We're making very clear that the United States does not tolerate this kind of ruthless action to silence Mr. Khashoggi, a journalist, through violence. On Tuesday, the Trump administration took its first concrete steps toward punishing Saudi Arabia for the murder of Jamal Khashoggi.

We continue to maintain a strong partnership with the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. Neither the president nor I am happy with this situation. During a news conference, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said that the U.S. was revoking visas for 21 Saudi officials accused of playing a role in the operation. These penalties will not be the last word on this matter from the United States. We will continue to explore additional measures to hold those responsible accountable. And. to hold those responsible accountable. And... My beloved nation,

my distinguished friends, members of parliament... In Turkey on Tuesday, President Recep Tayyip Erdogan demanded that Saudi Arabia extradite the Saudi suspects to Turkey to face prosecution. Now, this incident took place in Istanbul. Therefore, this team of 18 people, their trials, I'm proposing that their trials be held in Istanbul. In a highly anticipated speech, Erdogan made clear

that he would not accept the Saudi explanation, that a rogue operation was behind Khashoggi's assassination. Of course, we cannot put the blame on a number of security or intelligence officials for such an incident. It will not satisfy either us or the international community. Above all, Erdogan's speech made clear that after weeks of leaking details about the assassination to the international media, Turkey intends to keep a spotlight on the case. The international conscience will only be satisfied when everyone is held accountable, the executors and the persons or the people who gave the

instruction. That's it for The Daily. I'm Michael Barbaro. See you tomorrow.