Caravan organizers dump migrants, flee responsibility
With the caravan in Tijuana descending into a sozzled mess and den of pestilence, caravan organizers Pueblo Sin Fronteras now say they have nothing to do with it and seem to have skipped town.
Get a load of the interesting stories within this long piece that ran in the San Diego Union-Tribune that begins with a migrant thinking about going back to Honduras (emphasis mine):
"I think this is the end," Benavides said.
The experience taught her not to believe things as they appear, she said. Many in the caravan have said they felt deceived by the messages they received along the way about what awaited them at the U.S. border.
The caravan had leaders as it traveled north, Benavides said, but she hadn't seen them since Sunday's march to the border.
Though she had family in the U.S. ready to help her if she's allowed inside, she didn't know how to begin the process of asking for asylum or where to go for information.
Getting accurate and useful information to a group of more than 5,000 people can be challenging, and the caravan's nebulous leadership structure only adds to the difficulty.
The reporter seems to be a good reporter, but she doesn't have a clue as to what's happening here: the caravan organizers are realizing that their political project to challenge Donald Trump at the border is a disastrous mess and, instead of taking responsibility for it, are now abandoning the people they used for the television cameras and saying they had nothing to do with it. The migrants they lured to the caravan via flyers and social media and press appearances were useful so long as the moms and kids and strollers put the political heat onto the U.S., but now that the truth is out about who they really are – military-aged young men, mostly – and they're sitting in a squalid camp waiting their turn for entry same as anyone else, they're no longer an advertisement about how to immigrate easily into the U.S. (actually, they're the opposite). So now the organizers are gone. Packed up and left the circus. Missing. AWOL. Nowhere to be found. Their website hasn't been updated since advertising for last week's border confrontation. And the mayor of Tijuana says he wants them arrested.
Now they're denying they ever had anything to do with the migrant caravan. According to the U-T:
Meanwhile, Pueblo Sin Fronteras has adamantly denied being the leaders of the caravan, saying the group works to facilitate conversations between members of the caravan so that the caravan can make its own decisions. But the number of caravan members who know about or participate in that decision-making process is small, Pueblo Sin Fronteras member David Abud admitted.
This is nonsense. Might that have something to do with the Tijuana mayor wanting them in jail?
It's also at odds with the facts. Why the heck do you think the caravan went to distant Tijuana to make its asylum showdown with the U.S., as opposed to, say, the far closer and easier to reach U.S. border city of McAllen, Texas? The caravan came to Tijuana because the far-left organizers, Pueblo Sin Fronteras, had a base of operations there, right near the beach at Playas de Tijuana, the site of the first caravan arrivals. We wrote about those here. And PSF organizers told the press they had organized successful caravans in the past, with most asylum-seekers from their caravan last April getting in – a while back, they were bragging about their track record. Documentary filmmaker Ami Horowitz shows how Pueblo Sin Fronteras was right there from the start, telling the migrants what to do in their black t-shirts and neon vest – boarding them onto buses and ladling out soup. There also was cash handed out during the early part of the caravan. Somehow, there wasn't any at the ante-gate before the great charge into San Diego.
News accounts said that the organizers were promising the migrants easy entry to San Diego, and the Sunday Tijuana border charge came when the migrants felt frustrated. With that a failure, too, that's got to be rather bitter for some, a question we raised the other day, wondering why the migrants didn't turn on the caravan organizers after what they did. Migrants can see that they've been dumped to their fate, and the caravan is now breaking up, with many going back home (with Mexico offering free bus rides) or taking the well paid jobs Tijuana is offering them. But the organizers' promises continue to stand as fake, because anything too good to be true always is.
You don't bust down anyone's border and bring 10,000 people into another country without having some kind of plan to care for them. Now the mess is there, and the time waiting is all anyone can look forward to with many migrants feeling as though they've been sold a "bad bill of goods." They've been had, and they know they've been had, and now the organizers seem to have skipped town.
Some shepherds. Think of that next time the far leftists claim to be champions of the people.
Image credit: Library of Congress, public domain.