MEXICO CITY, Jan. 18 (Xinhua) -- At least 800 Central American migrants from a new caravan entered Mexico early Friday morning from its border with Guatemala, local authorities said.
According to local media, the migrants illegally crossed the border bridge that connects the Mexican city of Hidalgo with the Guatemalan city of Tecun Uman. They are part of the caravan that left Honduras on Monday with intention of arriving in the United States.
The entry occurred despite the fact that Mexico offered the members of the new caravan legal entry if they presented identification and registered at the border entry with the National Institute of Immigration (INM).
In a radio interview, Mexico's National Coordinator of Civil Protection David Leon said he did not have precise figures of the number of migrants that entered, but it was estimated to be about 800.
The Mexican police were guarding the group's route along the road that connects Hidalgo with the neighboring city of Tapachula and there were no plans to stop it, the official said at the interview.
Images released by local media show men, women and children walking along the edge of the highway that connects the border with Tapachula, located some 37 km away and where they are expected to make a stop.
The civil protection agency of the state of Chiapas said on Twitter that they would provide humanitarian assistance on their journey and published photos in which personnel can be seen providing water to women and children.
,The first few hundreds of Central Americans that arrived at the southern Mexican border solicited legal entry and began the process to obtain a visitor card, which the INM offered to provide no later than five days.
On Thursday alone, the INM registered more than 1,100 migrants from Honduras, El Salvador, Guatemala and Nicaragua, giving them a bracelet with a hologram that contains their information for processing.
,The new caravan departed from the northern Honduran city of San Pedro Sula after being gathered through social media. Its objective is to reach the Mexico-U.S. border, seeking to follow the example of October's massive mobilization of migrants.
U.S. President Donald Trump on Friday acknowledged the new caravan by posting on his Twitter account that it would be very hard to stop it without a wall, keeping in line with the rhetoric of the past few weeks of building a wall along the Mexico-U.S. border.
The new migrant mobilization was undertaken despite the fact that Honduran authorities warned its participants that so far none of the members of the first caravan have been allowed into the United States, contradicting what organizers led them to believe.
