Caravan migrants play the PR game, shifting tactics
Dumping the Honduran flags, a group of about 150 caravan migrants apparently did a test run for a border surge, swarming the police at a border bridge in Tijuana with white flags "of peace" and paying no attention to warnings that this isn't the way they are going to get asylum into the United States.
According to the San Diego Union-Tribune:
Asking for more humane conditions in the overflowing Benito Juarez shelter and trying to present themselves to United States immigration authorities for asylum, the group carried white flags as they marched from the migrant camp to the foot of the U.S. pedestrian bridge, a distance of about five city blocks.
The migrants have been camped out in muddy and cramped conditions at an open-air sports arena turned into a makeshift shelter. They said they awoke Thanksgiving Day hungry, as rain worsened the already unsanitary conditions in the packed shelter.
"There are sick children here, and we are cold and hungry," said Carlos Lopez, a Honduran who was leading the group. Lopez added it was inappropriate to shelter the women and children outside. "The whole world is watching what is happening here."
The U-T photo shows the migrants shoving a Mexican, rather than a white flag, in front of the Tijuana cops, obviously in a bid to gain the goodwill of the Mexicans for the cameras, which is lately in short supply as they've make their presence known in the city (already 60 caravaners have been arrested for crimes against the Mexicans and hauled off to the Tijuana jail), but we can probably take the U-T's word for it that they were also waving white flags.
What we are seeing here is an obvious shift in public relations tactics. The idea with the white flags is a bid to gain more sympathy for the open-borders agenda of Pueblo Sin Fronteras, which is behind this project. It underlines that the migrant caravan is primarily a political project, not a humanitarian one, and the agenda remains to pry the border open and keep it that way. Hard screaming and conquest didn't work as a tactic, because President Trump didn't bend. Now, instead of posing as an invading screaming migrant army waving the flags of the country they're desperate not to be shipped back to, they're waving white flags of peace. Surrender. Taking a page from tactics of the Ladies in White in totalitarian Cuba or the democracy protesters marching in white in Venezuela. They're now going for legal and public relations tactics, focusing less on moms and kids with sob stories, which didn't work as a tactic, and more on white flags. That's despite the gang tats on their arms and the rap sheets behind them, as the U-T noted in the case of one migrant in the scrum. See, they're just sweet little daisies all along, not a conquering army anymore.
Never mind. Pay no attention to these leopards changing their spots. We're supposed to buy into this, same as we were supposed to buy into their earlier tactic of being a conquering army and their entry inevitable.
What's more, they keep giving the game away about coming here only to work. Their demands to the Mexican cops signal that it's really all about the benefit packages.
Image credit: ABC 13 Houston via YouTube screen grab.
Why do I think that? Start with their demands for housing at no cost to themselves from the Mexicans, as the 150 border-surgers just insisted on. Seriously, do you ever travel to a foreign city with no money and expect to be housed by the foreigners? They do. Note that entitlement mentality. They show up at a border with no money expecting to get free housing, and then they complain about having to sleep under bleachers instead, and, worse still, having to eat, horrors! Mexican food such as beans and tortillas, which are a form of food that "fit only for pigs," as one Honduran charmer told the cameras earlier. Note also that if they didn't get all that free housing they expected, then Mexico would be the bad guy because "the world is watching." Oh, shame, shame! That'll shake out what they want from the Mexicans, even though, as ordinary Mexicans tell the press, they have a heckuva lot of poor local people residing right now in their country, including in Tijuana. I've been to one of those places, a place where people lived in tin shacks and cardboard boxes and visited Playas de Tijuana once a year as their big vacation day, without bathing suits or a carried picnic basket solely because they could not afford any. The rich ones could sometimes afford a watermelon. I've been to that beach. Now these foreigners march in and demand free housing? The Mexicans can only shake their heads at that one. It's obvious these people were never poor back in Honduras, given their expensive clothes and inflated expectations. Now they are trying to shake down the Mexicans into providing them with free five-star hotels while they wait for their phony asylum claims to be processed.
The tactic is to shift to being sweet and helpless, waving the white surrender flag so as to shame the U.S. troops at the border. This is another scam the media will fall for, but the rest of us shouldn't.