Vox

If the migrant caravan didn’t exist, President Donald Trump might have needed to invent it.

The existence of a massive group of Central Americans pushing toward the US without papers — even if they are still hundreds of miles away — seems like something Trump’s GOP might create in a lab to unleash on the eve of the midterms.

But the caravan is real. The migrants in it — mostly Hondurans (with some Guatemalans), half of whom are girls and women, many intending to seek asylum in the US — are real people.

They made the decision to leave their home countries, assessing that the danger of leaving was outstripped by the danger of facing gang death threats or feeding a family on $5 per day. And they made the decision to go together, joining the caravan as it progressed, instead of alone like tens of thousands of their fellow Guatemalans and Hondurans (and Salvadorans) do every year.

The caravan has provided an irresistible visual for Republican closing arguments about immigration. In Trump’s first TV ad of the presidential primary in 2015, he used an image of a mass of immigrants; fact-checkers revealed the picture was in fact taken in Morocco. Now, as he nears the midterm elections, Trump has the image he wanted all along.

The decision about 160 Honduran migrants made to travel as a group in the open to the US — and the decision thousands have made to join them en route — is the result of a situation that predates Trump. The United States and Mexico have worked to make the journey to the US less appealing to Central Americans, but many residents of the Northern Triangle find the prospect of eventual asylum in the US — however difficult it is to get there — more appealing than the insecurity they’re facing at home.

The current wave of Northern Triangle migration raises hard questions about the distinction between economic and humanitarian migration, the US’s ability to process asylum seekers, and the role Mexico plays in the region. Those are emphatically not the questions that are coming up in the Trump-driven conversation about the caravan — which is using the sheer fact of a mass of people traveling northward to activate fears of an invasion by unknowable foreigners.

1) What is a migrant caravan?Over the past decade, there’s been a rise in the number of unaccompanied children and families crossing the US-Mexico border. Increasingly, they are people fleeing violence and insecurity, coming from the Northern Triangle of Central America — Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador.

Meanile, unauthorized border crossings of single adults, Mexicans, and people looking for seasonal work have greatly declined. The result is a change in the character of who is seeking to cross into the US:

To get to the US-Mexico border, Northern Triangle emigrants have to get through Mexico, a journey that takes weeks.

Under current US and international law, asylum seekers from Central America are allowed to apply for asylum either in Mexico or in the US. Many take the first option: Asylum applications in Mexico have gone up more than 1,000 percent since 2013, and most are from citizens of Northern Triangle countries. But applying for asylum in Mexico isn’t a walk in the park. Mexico has been accused of indiscriminate long-term detention of asylum seekers (exacerbated by a two-year backlog in processing applications), and some parts of Mexico aren’t safe for people who are already fleeing violence.

The US has enlisted Mexico to apprehend Central American migrants before they get to the US. Some 950,000 Central Americans have been deported from Mexico over the past several years, and human rights groups have reported torture and disappearance by Mexican security forces.

The crackdown has made an already dangerous journey more dangerous. The harder it is to get through Mexico without attracting attention from the authorities, the more that task falls to professional criminal organizations who might smuggle drugs alongside migrants or abuse migrants physically or sexually. The involvement of criminal organizations makes Mexico even more anxious to crack down.

For some Central Americans, the solution to this problem is hypervisibility: traveling out in the open, as part of a large group of people that can’t simply be grabbed or disappeared. That’s the reason small human rights organizations have gotten people together, on occasion, in “caravans” — and the appeal to hundreds or thousands of migrants who’ve joined them in trying to get to the US.

For some, it’s a way to call political attention to what they’re fleeing and what migrants have to endure; to others, it’s a desperate exodus; to some, it’s simply an opportunity that came along to hope for a better, safer life.

2) How did this caravan start?On October 12, 2018, a group of about 160 Hondurans set forth from the town of San Pedro Sula — which in the first half of the decade was often referred to as the “murder capital of the world” — in hopes of arriving to present...