Thousands of migrants attempt to make the dangerous journey from Mexico to the US – this is where it starts
As the sun rises over the Usumacinta River between Guatemala and Mexico, the silence is broken by the sounds of people awaking after another night camping on the riverbanks.
Soon the ferrymen who pilot a flotilla of makeshift rafts constructed of planks strapped to very large inner tyre tubes, begin their never-ending trade of moving fruit and vegetables, construction equipment, crates of beer and liquor, motorcycles and bicycles, but above all – people.
This is where thousands of migrants heading to the United States begin what they hope to be the last leg of their often epic journeys to the northern border with the US.
1600 miles through Mexico is all that separates them from their dreams of a new life.
Amongst the migrants we come across is 14-year-old Edgar Fonseca Cepeda.
He is completely on his own; an unaccompanied minor migrant.
Edgar travelled from Venezuela to Colombia where his grandmother, who had been caring for him, died.
Now he is trying to get to his mother who is in Washington DC and has undertaken this journey on his own.
We arrange for him to speak to his mother Carolina on a video call.
It was heartbreaking to witness.
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14-year-old migrant travels alone to reach his mother in US
Both mum and son started crying, and his mum kept saying how sorry she was that he was having to do this journey alone.
The day before, Edgar had explained to her that he, along with another group of migrants, had been kidnapped by a gang – he was only released after handing over $75 scrambled together by fellow travellers.
“We decided to come here on foot, which is a risk, and well, before Tapachula, just before we got here, we had already walked about six kilometres, we were stopped by a few bikers,” he explained to me.
“That’s when they told us not to cry, not to scream because nothing was going to happen to us, we thought that we were going to be surrounded by immigration, but no, they took us to a chicken coop…”
The group, including Edgar, say they were held for eight to 10 hours.
We’ve heard exactly the same testimony from a number of migrants we’ve spoken to in the last few days.
“The truth is, it was horrible that chicken coop, people holding guns, I’m not used to seeing things like that, it was really scary,” Edgar added.
The route across Mexico to reach the northern border with the US
We spoke to his mum Carolina, and she asked us to take him to the authorities, saying it was too dangerous for him to continue alone.
Edgar says he hasn’t seen his mother for six or seven months.
“It’s really very, very hard, I miss her so much, that’s why I’ve done all of this.”
Edgar bade an emotional goodbye to his new travelling family, the strangers who helped look after him on the journey.
He is safe now but when he will see his mother again nobody can say.
Constant rule changes
I’ve been here many times to report over many years and I am never less than amazed at the number of people who attempt this journey, and the sheer number of small children.
But this time I’ve noticed some things have changed.
Whereas a few years ago the migrants were almost entirely from Southern and Central America, now they’re from all over the world.
On this trip we have met young men and women from China, Egypt, Jordan, Somalia, Mauritania, Kazakhstan, Haiti, and Gambia, to name a few.
Another major change seems to be the attitude of the Mexican authorities.
Migrants bathe in the river
A migrant sleeps near the river
In the past, the passage of the migrants north, while not easy, wasn’t noticeably hindered by the Mexicans.
Now though, with the issue of migration on its southern border a political hot potato in a United States election year, the Mexican authorities have got the message from the United States that thousands of migrants on the border fence is not a good look.
What we have witnessed is a system that doesn’t actually stop the migrants moving north, but makes it bureaucratic, confusing and often contradictory enough that the migrants don’t know what to do.
The US has a problem with the numbers, so people travelling through Mexico are shifted from one location to another and left, and then shifted again – never really making any progress.
Legally, migrants and asylum seekers cannot be stopped, but they can be asked to follow rules (or have their paperwork torn up), and if the rules keep changing, there is nothing they can do about.
After crossing the Usumacinta River from Guatemala, the migrants rest in the city of Hidalgo, before forming into groups known as “caravans” to begin their journey north.
They travel together for safety from gangs and criminals who prey on the migrants.
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Migrants worldwide head to the US through Mexico
We joined a pop-up caravan shortly before dawn; they move at that time to take advantage of the cooler temperatures.
This caravan is led by a young Brazilian man named Davyde who is with his wife and sister-in-law.
“Brazil is not good, I can’t make enough money to pay the rent, America would be great,” he told me when I wondered why he’d made the journey from Brazil.
As we walk with the group of 200 plus people, the sun rises and the temperature soars.
Whole families, very young and old, travel along the sides of busy motorways, heading north – always north.
Walking with the group, we meet Mayra Ferrerr from Acarigua in Venezuela.
The 40-year-old is travelling with her two sons and some fellow Venezuelans.
They’ve all become friends along the way. Mayra has breast cancer, and she’s trying to get to her family in the US.
She’s prepared to risk everything.
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Migrant caravan leader Davyde is seen in the white vest
“We left Venezuela because there is no education, because there is no medicine, because I am an oncology patient and I cannot get treatment in the public health system for breast cancer,” she told me.
“And well, I needed to go somewhere where I can be checked and continue treatment.”
Mayra explained that she’s doing chemotherapy in the form of pills, but that she stopped taking them so that she wasn’t too weak on this journey.
She says it’s tough, but that she and her family and friends plan to keep going.
“Well, it is hard because unfortunately in many towns we have crossed, they take advantage of our situation, our need to keep moving forward, and the costs, be it water or bread, they make it more expensive for us.”
A man sleeps with his daughter near the river
Most of the migrants are carrying tents, an absolute necessity for crossing the Darien Gap – a notorious jungle crossing on the migrant route, which lies between Colombia and Panama.
Mayra says the tents are worth holding on to.
“We have kept our tents because we have nowhere to stay, and we have to set up the tent and camp anywhere, so that we can keep moving forward.”
After a few hours of walking the migrants approach an immigration checkpoint where they are met by Mexican immigration officers.
A woman and baby wait near the checkpoint
We keep filming as they are told they will be taken north to the first major city in southern Mexico called Tapachula.
The immigration officials give the migrants water and assure them that they are allowed to continue their journey north, that the involvement of immigration is simply to offer them a ride to Tapachula and a free meal.
The migrants are sceptical, but over and over they are assured that once they are in Tapachula they can get paperwork done and continue.
The ones who agree have their identity cards and passports logged and checked, and then they’re loaded onto minibuses.
Mayra, her two sons, and her friends all agree to go in the migration minibus to Tapachula.
This doesn’t mean however that a journey further north is going to happen anytime soon.
At another immigration checkpoint on the outskirts of Tapachula, crowds surge around immigration staff, waving their papers.
All they’re trying to do is get on a bus north, but the Mexican authorities assumed assistance has dried up.
America does not want them in the north and nor it seems does Mexico, so they’re in a limbo.
At multiple checkpoints we saw what is developing into a multinational mess.
Mexico’s National Guard patrols the area near the river
Groups of young Chinese men and women take shade amongst Jordanians, Egyptians, Somalis, Gambians, even two friends from Kazakhstan.
The list of nationalities is remarkable, not least because of the distances they’ve travelled.
Said is a 28-year-old Afghan who worked for a British NGO until the Taliban arrived in Kabul in August 2021.
Migrants gathered at the park in Tapachula
He says he got his paperwork to leave from Kabul Airport at the time, but abandoned his plans after a suicide bomb went off at the evacuation point.
Said’s father and two uncles were killed by the Taliban, and he sees no safe future for his family there.
Indeed, he asked us not to show his face or use his full name because it would be dangerous for family members still in Afghanistan.
A Mexican military vehicle near the checkpoint
Said is travelling with his wife, three young children, and his 74-year-old grandfather who has stage one Alzheimer’s.
Said told me that other migrants have nicknamed his grandad the “warrior” for undertaking such an intense physical journey in his older years.
The family has been on the move for two years.
“I realised I am on my own, I have to do it for myself, for my family, I’ve realised nobody is going to help me,” he told me.
Said is seen holding his son
Said knows the political mood in the United States ahead of the presidential elections in November will be a factor in their chances of making it.
“I believe in God, I know I am in Mexico and 90% of the people are arriving there, actually, before the election, I need to get there before the election because I don’t know the next president, what he will do and what he is thinking about refugees like us,” he said.
‘They are the law… we are nobody’
All these migrants are in a sort of vortex – not being stopped from travelling north but not being allowed to either.
The day after meeting Mayra and her group of family and friends heading north, we travelled again south to the river.
Migrants from China, Kazakhstan and Nigeria
On our way back we recognised some of Mayra’s group on the side of the road, exactly where they originally started.
We were confused, so we pulled over to talk to them.
They explained they were taken north to Tapachula, given some food, waited about an hour not knowing what was happening, then put back on the minibus and sent straight back to the riverside where they started.
They told us they were given additional paperwork, and then, as they put it “thrown out on the street”.
Mayra and her son wait to board a minibus
I asked one of them, Christian Heredia, if the authorities acknowledged that taking them all the way back doesn’t help.
“They’re delaying us, yes, they know, of course, but as I was saying, they are the law here, here we are nobody, so they do as they please with the migrants. Right? That’s the truth,” he replied.
Christian says many of the migrants we had seen loaded into the minibuses and promised a ride to Tapachula the previous day had been pushed back to the river just like them.
They suspect the authorities only promised to look after them because of our presence, otherwise they believe the migration officials probably would’ve just driven them straight back down to the river.
Christian Heredia with his daughter
Local buses don’t usually pick up migrants because they’re not allowed to, but standing on the side of the road with fresh papers, Christian and the group were able to flag down a minibus to take them back to Tapachula.
They reunited with Mayra and her boys in the main square where migrants from all over the world gather.
They, like everyone there, refuse to accept defeat. But their mammoth journeys are far from over.
Indeed, their difficulties continue.
The last we heard from Mayra and her friends they’d been robbed at gunpoint in a bus taking them further north.
World
Israeli soldiers ‘psychologically broken’ after ‘confronting the reality’ in Gaza, UN expert says
A UN expert has said some young soldiers in the Israeli Defence Forces are being left “psychologically broken” after “confront[ing] the reality among the rubble” when serving in Gaza.
Francesca Albanese, the UN Human Rights Council’s special rapporteur on the occupied Palestinian territories, was responding to a Sky News interview with an Israeli solider who described arbitrary killing of civilians in Gaza.
She told The World with Yalda Hakim that “many” of the young people fighting in Gaza are “haunted by what they have seen, what they have done”.
“It doesn’t make sense,” Ms Albanese said. “This is not a war, this is an assault against civilians and this is producing a fracture in many of them.
“As that soldier’s testimony reveals, especially the youngest among the soldiers have been convinced this is a form of patriotism, of defending Israel and Israeli society against this opaque but very hard felt enemy, which is Hamas.
“But the thing is that they’ve come to confront the reality among the rubble of Gaza.”
An Israeli soldier directs a tank near the border with the Gaza Strip, in southern Israel. Pic: AP
Being in Gaza is “probably this is the first time the Israeli soldiers are awakening to this,” she added. “And they don’t make sense of this because their attachment to being part of the IDF, which is embedded in their national ideology, is too strong.
“This is why they are psychologically broken.”
Jonathan Conricus, a former IDF spokesman who is now a senior fellow at the Foundation for Defence of Democracies, said he believes the Sky News interview with the former IDF solider “reflects one part of how ugly, difficult and horrible fighting in a densely populated, urban terrain is”.
“I think [the ex-soldier] is reflecting on how difficult it is to fight in such an area and what the challenges are on the battlefield,” he said.
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Ex-IDF spokesperson: ‘No distinction between military and civilians’
‘An economy of genocide’
Ms Albanese, one of dozens of independent UN-mandated experts, also said her most recent report for the human rights council has identified “an economy of genocide” in Israel.
The system, she told Hakim, is made up of more than 60 private sector companies “that have become enmeshed in the economy of occupation […] that have Israel displace the Palestinians and replace them with settlers, settlements and infrastructure Israel runs.”
Israel has rejected allegations of genocide in Gaza, citing its right to defend itself after Hamas’s attack on 7 October 2023.
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‘Israel has shifted towards economy of genocide’
The companies named in Ms Albanese’s report are in, but not limited to, the financial sector, big tech and the military industry.
“These companies can be held responsible for being directed linked to, or contributing, or causing human rights impacts,” she said. “We’re not talking of human rights violations, we are talking of crimes.”
“Some of the companies have engaged in good faith, others have not,” Ms Albanese said.
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Listen to The World with Richard Engel and Yalda Hakim every Wednesday
The companies she has named include American technology giant Palantir, which has issued a statement to Sky News.
It said it is “not true” that Palantir “is the (or a) developer of the ‘Gospel’ – the AI-assisted targeting software allegedly used by the IDF in Gaza, and that we are involved with the ‘Lavender’ database used by the IDF for targeting cross-referencing”.
“Both capabilities are independent of and pre-ate Palantir’s announced partnership with the Israeli Defence Ministry,” the statement added.
An Israeli reservist who served three tours of duty in Gaza has told Sky News in a rare on-camera interview that his unit was often ordered to shoot anyone entering areas soldiers defined as no-go zones, regardless of whether they posed a threat, a practice he says left civilians dead where they fell.
“We have a territory that we are in, and the commands are: everyone that comes inside needs to die,” he said. “If they’re inside, they’re dangerous you need to kill them. No matter who it is,” he said.
Speaking anonymously, the soldier said troops killed civilians arbitrarily. He described the rules of engagement as unclear, with orders to open fire shifting constantly depending on the commander.
The soldier is a reservist in the Israel Defence Force’s 252nd Division. He was posted twice to the Netzarim corridor; a narrow strip of land cut through central Gaza early in the war, running from the sea to the Israeli border. It was designed to split the territory and allow Israeli forces to have greater control from inside the Strip.
He said that when his unit was stationed on the edge of a civilian area, soldiers slept in a house belonging to displaced Palestinians and marked an invisible boundary around it that defined a no-go zone for Gazans.
“In one of the houses that we had been in, we had the big territory. This was the closest to the citizens’ neighbourhood, with people inside. And there’s an imaginary line that they tell us all the Gazan people know it, and that they know they are not allowed to pass it,” he said. “But how can they know?”
People who crossed into this area were most often shot, he said.
“It was like pretty much everyone that comes into the territory, and it might be like a teenager riding his bicycle,” he said.
The soldier is seen in Gaza. Photos are courtesy of the interviewed soldier, who requested anonymity
The soldier described a prevailing belief among troops that all Gazans were terrorists, even when they were clearly unarmed civilians. This perception, he said, was not challenged and was often endorsed by commanders.
“They don’t really talk to you about civilians that may come to your place. Like I was in the Netzarim road, and they say if someone comes here, it means that he knows he shouldn’t be there, and if he still comes, it means he’s a terrorist,” he said.
“This is what they tell you. But I don’t really think it’s true. It’s just poor people, civilians that don’t really have too many choices.”
He said the rules of engagement shifted constantly, leaving civilians at the mercy of commanders’ discretion.
“They might be shot, they might be captured,” he said. “It really depends on the day, the mood of the commander.”
He recalled an occasion of a man crossing the boundary and being shot. When another man came later to the body, he too was shot.
Later the soldiers decided to capture people who approached the body. Hours after that, the order changed again, shoot everyone on sight who crosses the “imaginary line”.
The Israeli soldier during his on-camera interview with Sky News
At another time, his unit was positioned near the Shujaiya area of Gaza City. He described Palestinians scavenging scrap metal and solar panels from a building inside the so-called no-go zone.
“For sure, no terrorists there,” he said. “Every commander can choose for himself what he does. So it’s kind of like the Wild West. So, some commanders can really decide to do war crimes and bad things and don’t face the consequences of that.”
The soldier said many of his comrades believed there were no innocents in Gaza, citing the Hamas-led 7 October attack that killed around 1,200 people and saw 250 taken hostage. Dozens of hostages have since been freed or rescued by Israeli forces, while about 50 remain in captivity, including roughly 30 Israel believes are dead.
He recalled soldiers openly discussing the killings.
“They’d say: ‘Yeah, but these people didn’t do anything to prevent October 7, and they probably had fun when this was happening to us. So they deserve to die’.”
He added: “People don’t feel mercy for them.”
“I think a lot of them really felt like they were doing something good,” he said. “I think the core of it, that in their mind, these people aren’t innocent.”
The IDF soldier during one of his three tours in Gaza
In Israel, it is rare for soldiers to publicly criticise the IDF, which is seen as a unifying institution and a rite of passage for Jewish Israelis. Military service shapes identity and social standing, and those who speak out risk being ostracised.
The soldier said he did not want to be identified because he feared being branded a traitor or shunned by his community.
Still, he felt compelled to speak out.
“I kind of feel like I took part in something bad, and I need to counter it with something good that I do, by speaking out, because I am very troubled about what I took and still am taking part of, as a soldier and citizen in this country,” he said
“I think the war is… a very bad thing that is happening to us, and to the Palestinians, and I think it needs to be over,” he said.
He added: “I think in Israeli community, it’s very hard to criticise itself and its army. A lot of people don’t understand what they are agreeing to. They think the war needs to happen, and we need to bring the hostages back, but they don’t understand the consequences.
“I think a lot of people, if they knew exactly what’s happening, it wouldn’t go down very well for them, and they wouldn’t agree with it. I hope that by speaking of it, it can change how things are being done.”
The soldier is a reservist in the Israel Defence Force’s 252nd Division
We put the allegations of arbitrary killings in the Netzarim corridor to the Israeli military.
In a statement, the IDF said it “operates in strict accordance with its rules of engagement and international law, taking feasible precautions to mitigate civilian harm”.
“The IDF operates against military targets and objectives, and does not target civilians or civilian objects,” the statement continued.
The Israeli military added that “reports and complaints regarding the violation of international law by the IDF are transferred to the relevant authorities responsible for examining exceptional incidents that occurred during the war”.
On the specific allegations raised by the soldier interviewed, the IDF said it could not address them directly because “the necessary details were not provided to address the case mentioned in the query. Should additional information be received, it will be thoroughly examined.”
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The statement also mentioned the steps the military says it takes to minimise civilian casualties, including issuing evacuation warnings and advising people to temporarily leave areas of intense fighting.
“The areas designated for evacuation in the Gaza Strip are updated as needed. The IDF continuously informs the civilian population of any changes,” it said.
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