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As Mexico President Andrés Manuel López Obrador prepared to speak with U.S. President Joe Biden about immigration issues Thursday, a caravan left southern Mexican city Tapachula for the border.
The Associated Press reported that about 2,000 migrants, mostly from Central America and Haiti, were on the caravan.
The use of caravans began several years ago as a way for migrants to find safety in numbers when trying to get to the border. However, the AP said Mexico and Guatemala have become more aggressive in stopping the caravans.
López Obrador was in Washington, D.C., Thursday for the North American Leaders' Summit. He said addressing migration issues was one of his top priorities, in the past pushing for programs that would stop the economic pressures that lead many to attempt to migrate.
Honduran Alex Leyva told the AP he was attempting to travel north via caravan for the second time. The first was a caravan traveling from Veracruz in October, which started with 4,000 people but eventually dwindled to only a few hundred due to the grueling conditions of the journey.
Leyva had to drop out because he got sick, then authorities caught him and sent him back to Tapachula. He said he had already started the process of requesting asylum in Mexico.
"My country is in the worst economic, crime, hunger situation," Leyva said. "There are no studies, no education for the kids. That's why my wife and I decided to try to achieve our objective" of getting a better life.
For more reporting from The Associated Press, see below.
Luis García Villagran, of the Center for Human Dignity, said that the migrants are demanding documents that allow them to be in all of Mexico. The Mexican government had relied on a strategy of containing migrants in the southernmost part of the country to alleviate pressure at the U.S. border.
But those states are the poorest, and there is far more opportunity to find work in the northern states.
García Villagran said that even the migrants who received humanitarian visas that should allow them to travel in Mexico were detained by immigration agents and sent back to Tapachula.
Migrants confined to Tapachula near the Guatemala border have grown increasingly frustrated with the slow processing of their asylum cases. They complain that they are unable to find work that would allow them to support their families.
The caravans began as a way for migrants who did not have the money to pay smugglers to take advantage of safety in numbers as they moved toward the U.S. border.
The dwindling caravan in Veracruz was the first to advance so far into Mexico in the past two years, but the conditions of the trek and the government's offers to regularize migrants' status have led the majority to drop out.
López Obrador named addressing migration in the region as one of his priorities for Thursday's North America Leaders' Summit. He has pressed the Biden administration to invest in expanding a tree-planting program that pays farmers to plant certain kinds of trees on their land. The money allows the rural poor to stay on their land rather than feel economic pressure to migrate, he says.
