HUIXTLA, Mexico: A deportee from the United States trying to get back to the life he spent more than a decade building. A woman whose soldier husband already is in the US with their 4-year-old son. A teenager desperate to earn money to support his diabetic mother back home.
The caravan of Central American migrants traveling through southern Mexico — estimated at around 7,000 people, nearly all Hondurans — has attracted headlines in the United States less than two weeks before Nov. 6 midterm elections.
But most of those walking through blistering tropical temperatures, sleeping on the ground in town squares and relying on donated food from local residents are unaware of US political concerns or even that there’s a vote coming up.
While they commonly cite the same core reasons for migrating — poverty, violence — their stories are deeply personal.
“My record is clean“
David Polanco Lopez, 42, is a former anti-narcotics officer from Progreso, Honduras. He’s traveling north in the caravan with his daughter Jenifer, 19, and his 3-year-old granddaughter, Victoria, whom the adults take turns pushing in a stroller.
Polanco came to the United States 13 years ago and applied for asylum after he was threatened by drug traffickers over his police work. He was given a court date, but he acknowledges he never showed up — in part because he didn’t understand the court document’s instructions, which were in English.
Polanco put down roots in Arizona: He married, and got a home. He thought that as long as he stayed out of trouble, he’d be fine.
“If they catch me committing a felony, then go ahead and kick me out,” Polanco said. “But my record is clean.”
He came to the attention of US immigration authorities three months ago when he caught a ride to work with a friend and Arizona police stopped them. Immigration officers later visited his home, he said, asked him to come outside and arrested him.
After being deported, he immediately turned around and headed back toward the United States with the caravan in hopes of rejoining his wife, who is from Mexico.
“I came (to the United States) fleeing the drug traffickers. The US police know that. They told me I qualified for asylum. But they didn’t give it to me,” Polanco said as he rested in the shade of a gas station in the far southern Mexican state of Chiapas. “I can’t live in Honduras because my life is in danger.”
Polanco said he will never give up on trying to return to the US That’s where his home, his family, his land are. He said he’s been paying US taxes for 13 years and never invested a cent in Honduras because “it’s unlivable, dangerous.”
“If they deport me I’ll just come back,” Polanco said, “because my place is there.”
“It's too much“
It’s been seven months since Alba Rosa Chinchilla Ortiz, a 23-year-old from Amapala in Honduras’ Valle department, has seen her 4-year-old son.
The boy’s father is an ex-soldier who — like Polanco — received death threats because of his job. Three times he survived attempts to kill him, Chinchilla said. He has applied for asylum in the United States and she’s trying to join him and their son.
Life on the road has been demanding. At one point, Chinchilla worried she was too exhausted to go any farther. She’s still moving forward, but fears dangers that may lie ahead — such as Mexican cartels, which have been known to kidnap, hold for ransom and kill migrants.
The separation has been almost more than she can bear.
“The desire to see my son is too much,” she said, speaking in the Mexican city of Huixtla, surrounded by dozens of fellow migrants and Mexican Red Cross workers.
Breaking into sobs, she wiped tears from her eyes with her thumb and forefinger.
“It’s the only thing that drives me,” Chinchilla said, “my son.”
’Treatment for my mother’
Reuniting with family in the US is something those on the road north frequently speak of. Marel Antonio Murillo Santos is doing the opposite — leaving his loved ones behind in Copan, Honduras.
After his parents separated five years ago, Murillo became the primary breadwinner for the family at age 13. His mom is diabetic, leaving her weak and missing a toe on each foot.
Dressed in a brown V-neck T-shirt, Murillo said he left with just 500 lempiras (about $20) in his pocket, a bit of clothing and a spare pair of shoes. He heard about the caravan from a friend, and decided on the spot to take off for the United States where he hopes to spend five years working and saving.
“What I want more than anything is to pay for treatment my mother needs for her health,” Murillo said. “Build a home for her, have a bit of money in the bank and also, if I’m able, invest in something or start a business for my mother to run.”
Mile after mile, this baby-faced young man, now 18 with a whispy black chin-beard, is constantly thinking of home and his mom and 5-year-old brother.
“When I go to eat, I wonder if they have eaten, where they are, if they are in good health,” Murillo said. “I spend all day thinking about them, until I close my eyes and sleep.”
’They're going to kill you’
If there’s any doubt about Honduras being a dangerous place, one need only talk to Joshua Belisario Sanchez Perez, a soft-spoken young man who worked odd jobs in the capital, Tegucigalpa. Back home, he had the misfortune of living in one of the most dangerous neighborhoods in a city full of them.
He spoke with The Associated Press in an interview this week that aired on TV back home, and afterward gang members showed up at his mother’s home angry that he had talked about the violence that forced him to flee.
“Because I had talked about all the gangs, and all the crime,” Sanchez said.
“My mother said, ‘They came to the house and they saw you on the news,’” he continued. “’If you come back they’re going to kill you.’“
For Honduran migrants in caravan, the journey is personal
For Honduran migrants in caravan, the journey is personal
- The caravan of Central American migrants traveling through southern Mexico has increased from 2,000 to 7,000 people, nearly all Hondurans.
- While they commonly cite the same core reasons for migrating — poverty, violence — their stories are deeply personal
US appeals court grants dismissal of Trump documents case
- The appeals court granted Smith’s request to dismiss the case without comment
WASHINGTON: An appeals court on Tuesday granted a request by prosecutors to drop the case against US President-elect Donald Trump for mishandling classified documents.
Special Counsel Jack Smith had asked the court on Monday to dismiss the case because of a long-standing Justice Department policy of not prosecuting a sitting president.
A Trump-appointed district court judge in Florida threw out the documents case earlier this year, but Smith had appealed the ruling to the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals.
The appeals court granted Smith’s request to dismiss the case without comment.
Smith is continuing, however, to pursue the case against Trump’s two co-defendants, his valet, Walt Nauta, and Mar-a-Lago property manager Carlos De Oliveira.
Trump, 78, was accused of removing large quantities of top secret documents after leaving the White House at the end of his first term and obstructing efforts to retrieve them.
The former president was also accused by the special counsel of conspiring to overturn the results of the 2020 election won by Joe Biden. A judge on Monday granted a request by Smith to drop that case.
The special counsel paused both federal cases this month after Trump defeated Vice President Kamala Harris in the November 5 presidential election.
The former and incoming president also faces two state cases — in New York and Georgia.
He was convicted in New York in May of 34 counts of falsifying business records to cover up a hush money payment to porn star Stormy Daniels on the eve of the 2016 election to stop her from revealing an alleged 2006 sexual encounter.
Judge Juan Merchan has postponed sentencing while he considers a request from Trump’s lawyers that the conviction be thrown out in light of the Supreme Court ruling in July that an ex-president has broad immunity from prosecution.
In Georgia, Trump faces racketeering charges over his efforts to subvert the 2020 election results in the southern state, but that case will likely be frozen while he is in office.
Trump won about 2.5M more votes this year than he did in 2020. This is where he did it
- Trump’s team and outside groups supporting him knew from their data that he was making inroads with Black voters, particularly Black men younger than 50, more concentrated in these urban areas that have been key to Democratic victories
WASHINGTON: It’s a daunting reality for Democrats: Republican Donald Trump’s support has grown broadly since he last sought the presidency.
In his defeat of Democrat Kamala Harris, Trump won a bigger percentage of the vote in each one of the 50 states, and Washington, D.C., than he did four years ago. He won more actual votes than in 2020 in 40 states, according to an Associated Press analysis.
Certainly, Harris’ more than 7 million vote decline from President Joe Biden’s 2020 total was a factor in her loss, especially in swing-state metropolitan areas that have been the party’s winning electoral strongholds.
But, despite national turnout that was lower than in the high-enthusiasm 2020 election, Trump received 2.5 million more votes than he did four years ago. He swept the seven most competitive states to win a convincing Electoral College victory, becoming the first Republican nominee in 20 years to win a majority of the popular vote.
Trump cut into places where Harris needed to overperform to win a close election. Now Democrats are weighing how to regain traction ahead of the midterm elections in two years, when control of Congress will again be up for grabs and dozens of governors elected.
There were some notable pieces to how Trump’s victory came together:
Trump took a bite in Northern metros
Though Trump improved across the map, his gains were particularly noteworthy in urban counties home to the cities of Detroit, Milwaukee and Philadelphia, electoral engines that stalled for Harris in industrial swing states Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania.
Harris fell more than 50,000 votes — and 5 percentage points — short of Biden’s total in Wayne County, Michigan, which makes up the lion’s share of the Detroit metro area. She was almost 36,000 votes off Biden’s mark in Philadelphia County, Pennsylvania, and about 1,000 short in Milwaukee County, Wisconsin.
It wasn’t only Harris’ shortfall that helped Trump carry the states, a trio that Democrats had collectively carried in six of the seven previous elections before Nov. 5.
Trump added to his 2020 totals in all three metro counties, netting more than 24,000 votes in Wayne County, more than 11,000 in Philadelphia County and almost 4,000 in Milwaukee County.
It’s not yet possible to determine whether Harris fell short of Biden’s performance because Biden voters stayed home or switched their vote to Trump — or how some combination of the two produced the rightward drift evident in each of these states.
Harris advertised heavily and campaigned regularly in each, and made Milwaukee County her first stop as a candidate with a rally in July. These swings alone were not the difference in Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, but her weaker performance than Biden across the three metros helped Trump, who held on to big 2020 margins in the three states’ broad rural areas and improved or held steady in populous suburbs.
Trump’s team and outside groups supporting him knew from their data that he was making inroads with Black voters, particularly Black men younger than 50, more concentrated in these urban areas that have been key to Democratic victories.
When James Blair, Trump’s political director, saw results coming in from Philadelphia on election night, he knew Trump had cut into the more predominantly Black precincts, a gain that would echo in Wayne and Milwaukee counties.
“The data made clear there was an opportunity there,” Blair said.
AP VoteCast, a nationwide survey of more than 120,000 voters, found Trump won a larger share of Black and Latino voters than he did in 2020, and most notably among men under age 45.
Democrats won Senate races in Michigan and Wisconsin but lost in Pennsylvania. In 2026, they will be defending governorships in all three states and a Senate seat in Michigan.
Trump gained more than Harris in battlegrounds
Despite the burst of enthusiasm Harris’ candidacy created among the Democratic base when she entered the race in July, she ended up receiving fewer votes than Biden in three of the seven states where she campaigned almost exclusively.
In Arizona, she received about 90,000 fewer votes than Biden. She received about 67,000 fewer in Michigan and 39,000 fewer in Pennsylvania.
In four others — Georgia, Nevada, North Carolina and Wisconsin — Harris won more votes than Biden did. But Trump’s support grew by more — in some states, significantly more.
That dynamic is glaring in Georgia, where Harris received almost 73,000 more votes than Biden did when he very narrowly carried the state. But Trump added more than 200,000 to his 2020 total, en route to winning Georgia by roughly 2 percentage points.
In Wisconsin, Trump’s team reacted to slippage it saw in GOP-leaning counties in suburban Milwaukee by targeting once-Democratic-leaning, working-class areas, where Trump made notable gains.
In the three largest suburban Milwaukee counties — Ozaukee, Washington and Waukesha — which have formed the backbone of GOP victories for decades, Harris performed better than Biden did in 2020. She also gained more votes than Trump gained over 2020, though he still won the counties.
That made Trump’s focus on Rock County, a blue-collar area in south central Wisconsin, critical. Trump received 3,084 more votes in Rock County, home of the former automotive manufacturing city of Janesville, than he did in 2020, while Harris underperformed Biden’s 2020 total by seven votes. That helped Trump offset Harris’ improvement in Milwaukee’s suburbs.
The focus speaks to the strength Trump has had and continued to grow with middle-income, non-college educated voters, the Trump campaign’s senior data analyst Tim Saler said.
“If you’re going to have to lean into working-class voters, they are particularly strong in Wisconsin,” Saler said. “We saw huge shifts from 2020 to 2024 in our favor.”
Trump boosted 2020 totals as Arizona turnout dipped
Of the seven most competitive states, Arizona saw the smallest increase in the number of votes cast in the presidential contest — slightly more than 4,000 votes, in a state with more than 3.3 million ballots cast.
That was despite nearly 30 campaign visits to Arizona by Trump, Harris and their running mates and more than $432 million spent on advertising by the campaigns and allied outside groups, according to the ad-monitoring firm AdImpact.
Arizona, alone of the seven swing states, saw Harris fall short of Biden across small, midsize and large counties. In the other six states, she was able to hold on in at least one of these categories.
Even more telling, it is also the only swing state where Trump improved his margin in every single county.
While turnout in Maricopa County, Arizona’s most populous as the home to Phoenix, dipped slightly from 2020 — by 14,199 votes, a tiny change in a county where more than 2 million people voted — Trump gained almost 56,000 more votes than four years ago.
Meanwhile, Harris fell more than 60,000 votes short of Biden’s total, contributing to a shift significant enough to swing the county and state to Trump, who lost Arizona by fewer than 11,000 votes in 2020.
Rightward shift even in heavily Democratic areas
The biggest leaps to the right weren’t taking place exclusively among Republican-leaning counties, but also among the most Democratic-leaning counties in the states. Michigan’s Wayne County swung 9 points toward Trump, tying the more Republican-leaning Antrim County for the largest movement in the state.
AP VoteCast found that voters were most likely to say the economy was the most important issue facing the country in 2024, followed by immigration. Trump supporters were more motivated by economic issues and immigration than Harris’, the survey showed.
“It’s still all about the economy,” said North Carolina Democratic strategist Morgan Jackson, a senior adviser to Democrat Josh Stein, who won North Carolina’s governorship on Nov. 5 as Trump also carried the state.
“Democrats have to embrace an economic message that actually works for real people and talk about it in the kind of terms that people get, rather than giving them a dissertation of economic policy,” he said.
Governor’s elections in 2026 give Democrats a chance to test their understanding and messaging on the issue, said Democratic pollster Margie Omero, whose firm has advised Wisconsin’s Democratic Gov. Tony Evers in the past and winning Arizona Senate candidate Ruben Gallego this year.
“So there’s an opportunity to really make sure people, who governors have a connection to, are feeling some specificity and clarity with the Democratic economic message,” Omero said.
Teen who lied about beheaded French teacher’s class says ‘sorry’
- Paty had used the Charlie Hebdo magazine as part of an ethics class to discuss free speech laws in France, where blasphemy is legal and cartoons mocking religious figures have a long history
PARIS: A teenager whose lies about her teacher are accused of contributing to the educator’s murder by an Islamist radical apologized to his family in a French court on Tuesday.
Eight people have been on trial since early November, charged with contributing to the climate of hatred that led to an 18-year-old of Chechen origin beheading teacher Samuel Paty outside Paris in 2020.
They include Brahim Chnina, the 52-year-old Moroccan father of the adolescent testifying Tuesday.
Then aged 13, the adolescent falsely claimed that Paty had asked Muslim students to leave his classroom before showing caricatures of the prophet Mohammed.
She was not in the classroom at the time.
“I would like to apologize to the family,” the 17-year-old, who has not been named, told the court. “I destroyed your lives, I am sorry.”
Also on trial is Abdelhakim Sefrioui, a 65-year-old French-Moroccan Islamist activist.
He and Chnina spread the teenager’s lies on social networks with the aim, according to the prosecution, of “designating a target,” “provoking a feeling of hatred” and “thus preparing several crimes.”
Both men have been in pre-trial detention for the past four years.
The teenager told the court that she lied to her mother to justify why she had been suspended from school for two days over her behavior and repeated absences.
“I was in panic and stress,” she said. “I told her I had been in class and that I wasn’t happy with what went on there and that the teacher excluded me. That we looked at cartoons.”
Sefrioui posted a video describing Paty as a “teaching thug.”
He also staged an “interview” with the teenager outside the school, whispering to her what to answer. The adolescent dutifully reiterated the falsehoods.
“I thought somebody would stop me in my lying, but nobody ever said that I wasn’t in class,” she told the court Tuesday.
She stuck to her story even after Paty’s death. Only following her arrest and 30 hours of interrogation did she admit to investigators that she had made it all up.
The teenager, whose delivery in court was matter-of-fact, showed emotion only when she talked about her father.
“Without my lies, none of us would be here,” she said, sobbing. “I used my father’s naivete and kindness.”
She added that “my father says you must always respect teachers,” a remark that prompted an astonished “really?” interjected by the court’s presiding judge.
The teenager was sentenced to 18 months of probation in December 2023 after being convicted of slander.
Paty had used the Charlie Hebdo magazine as part of an ethics class to discuss free speech laws in France, where blasphemy is legal and cartoons mocking religious figures have a long history.
His killing took place just weeks after Charlie Hebdo republished the Prophet Muhammad cartoons.
After the magazine used the images in 2015, Islamist gunmen stormed its offices, killing 12 people.
After long wrangling, Blinken to testify in Congress on Afghanistan
- Donald Trump drew criticism for shooting video for his campaign at Arlington National Cemetery where he appeared at a ceremony honoring troops killed in the evacuation
- Democrats have insisted some blame for the messy end of the war should be laid at the feet of Trump, who began the withdrawal process by signing a deal with the Taliban in 2020
WASHINGTON: US Secretary of State Antony Blinken has agreed to testify publicly at a House of Representatives committee hearing on the 2021 withdrawal from Afghanistan, the panel said on Tuesday, after a long dispute with the Republican-led committee.
House Foreign Affairs Committee Chairman Michael McCaul said Blinken had committed to appear at a public hearing on Dec. 11 to discuss the committee’s investigation of the withdrawal three years ago.
The committee and the State Department have been wrangling over Blinken’s appearance for months. Panel Republicans voted in September to recommend Blinken be held in contempt of Congress for failing to comply with a subpoena.
The State Department had contended that the panel was provided with large amounts of information, with Blinken testifying before Congress on Afghanistan more than 14 times and the department providing nearly 20,000 pages of records, multiple high-level briefings and transcribed interviews.
McCaul released a report on Sept. 8 on the committee Republicans’ investigation of the chaotic Afghanistan withdrawal, blasting Democratic President Joe Biden’s administration for failures surrounding the evacuation.
The issue had become intensely politicized before the presidential election on Nov. 5. In his successful bid for a second term, Republican former President Donald Trump drew criticism for shooting video for his campaign at Arlington National Cemetery where he appeared at a ceremony honoring troops killed in the evacuation.
Trump also sought to pin blame for the withdrawal on Vice President Kamala Harris, his Democratic opponent.
Democrats have insisted some blame for the messy end of the war — less than seven months into Biden’s presidency — should be laid at the feet of Trump, who began the withdrawal process by signing a deal with the Taliban in 2020.
The issue could become even more politicized after Trump returns to the White House on Jan. 20, after he spoke during his campaign of firing those responsible for the pullout from Afghanistan.
UN probes sexual exploitation allegations against aid workers in Chad
DAKAR: The UN in Chad has launched an internal investigation, following a report on allegations of sexual exploitation of Sudanese refugees, which included aid workers.
The statement, written days after the story was published, was seen on Tuesday. It said the seriousness of the allegations cited in the AP’s story, warranted immediate and firm measures and that those responsible should be punished.
“Refugees are already vulnerable and traumatized by the events that led them to flee their country and under no circumstances should they be the victims of abuse by those who are supposed to help them,” said Francois Batalingaya, the UN resident and humanitarian coordinator in Chad.
Earlier this month, the accusations were reported by some Sudanese women and girls that men, including those meant to protect them such as humanitarian workers and local security forces, had instead sexually exploited them in Chad’s sites for displaced people. They said the men offered money, easier access to assistance, and jobs. Such sexual exploitation in Chad is a crime.
Hundreds of thousands of people, most of them women, have streamed into Chad to escape Sudan’s civil war, which has killed over 20,000 people.
Sexual exploitation during large humanitarian crises is not uncommon, especially in displacement sites. Aid groups have long struggled to combat the issue, citing a lack of reporting by women, not enough funds to respond and a focus on first providing basic necessities.
Experts say exploitation represents a deep failure by the aid community and that people seeking protection should never have to make choices driven by survival.
The UN said it raised the risk alert level for protection against sexual exploitation of abuse to four, which is very high, especially since Chad was already classified as a country at high risk.
