Use of tear gas ‘very safe’: Trump

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Border agents actions on migrants ‘overkill’: critics

SAN DIEGO, Nov 27, (Agencies): President Donald Trump is strongly defending the US use of tear gas at the Mexican border to repel a crowd of migrants that included angry rock-throwers but also barefoot, crying children. Critics denounced the border agents’ action as overkill, but Trump kept to a hard line.

“They were being rushed by some very tough people and they used teargas,” Trump said Monday of the previous day’s encounter. “Here’s the bottom line: Nobody is coming into our country unless they come in legally.”

At a roundtable in Mississippi later Monday, Trump seemed to acknowledge that children were affected, asking, “Why is a parent running up into an area where they know the tear gas is forming and it’s going to be formed and they were running up with a child?”

He said it was “a very minor form of the tear gas itself” that he assured was “very safe.” Without offering evidence, he also claimed that some of the women are not really parents but are instead “grabbers” who steal children so they have a better chance of being granted asylum in the US. The showdown at the San Diego- Tijuana border crossing has thrown into sharp relief two competing narratives about the caravan of migrants hoping to apply for asylum but stuck on the Mexican side. Trump portrays them as a threat to US national security, intent on exploiting America’s asylum law, but others insist he is exaggerating to stoke fears and achieve his political goals.

The sheer size of the caravan makes it unusual. “I think it’s so unprecedented that everyone is hanging their own fears and political agendas on the caravan,” said Andrew Selee, president of the Migration Policy Institute, a nonpartisan think tank that studies immigration. “You can call it scary, you can call it hopeful, you can call it a sign of human misery. You can hang whatever angle you want to on it.” Trump rails against migrant caravans as dangerous groups of mostly single men. That view featured heavily in his speeches during the midterm election campaign when several were hundreds of miles away, traveling on foot. Officials have said some 500 members are criminals but haven’t backed that up with details on why they think so.

On Monday, Trump tweeted that the caravan at the border included “stone cold criminals.” Mario Figueroa – Tijuana’s social services department director who is overseeing operations at the sports complex where most of the migrants in the caravan are staying – said as of Friday that of the 4,938 staying there, 933 were women, 889 were children and 3,105 were men, which includes fathers traveling with families along with single men. The U.S. military said Monday that about 300 troops who had been deployed in south Texas and Arizona as part of a border security mission have been moved to California for similar work. The military’s role is limited largely to erecting barriers along the border and providing transportation and logistical support to Customs and Border Protection.

Tactics
Democratic lawmakers and immigrant rights groups blasted the border agents’ Sunday tactics. “These children are barefoot. In diapers. Choking on tear-gas,” California Gov-elect Gavin Newsom tweeted. “Women and children who left their lives behind – seeking peace and asylum – were met with violence and fear. That’s not my America.”

US Customs and Border Protection Commissioner Kevin McAleenan said the administration’s concerns about the caravan “were borne out and on fully display” Sunday.

Meanwhile, as a group of migrants prepare to form a new caravan to set out from El Salvador for the promised land of the United States, eager participants exchange messages over social media. How will they cross the border? What should they bring? Mothers and their children, youngsters fleeing violent gangs, men hoping to find a way to feed their families: the caravan attracts all sorts. As soon as one caravan leaves, plans for the next one swamp social media.

Hundreds of interested parties fire off questions, engage in discussions or share their hopes and fears. “My aim is to reach the United States. In the caravan, no one will be able to touch me,” said one rasping voice in an audio post on a chat for the last caravan to leave El Salvador. The day before it departed, migrants spent the night on the El Salvador del Mundo square in the capital San Salvador, a place dominated by a huge column upon which Jesus stands atop a globe.

Since October, more than 5,000 central American migrants have set out on the long, arduous journey of thousands of kilometers, either by foot, bus or hitch-hiking northwards towards the US. “I found out about the caravan on Facebook. Someone posted a link in a WhatsApp chat,” a 38-year-old widow with children aged 11 and 13, told AFP. “People exchange information, there are no leaders.” Her face shaded by a baseball cap, she refuses to give her name for fear that gangs will harass her. They might one day have their eyes on her eldest, a pretty brunette with long, curly hair. These gangs strike fear across not just El Salvador but the whole central American region, whether by murder, forcing boys to join them or raping girls.

The widow quit her $6-a-day job making corn tortillas to join the caravan. She has no other way of trying to reach the US. “We poor people, we don’t have the $8,000 that a coyote demands,” she says, referring to people smugglers. “It’s also safer in the caravan,” she adds. Another mother was forced to abandon her house under threats from gangsters who had already kidnapped her husband. The 39-year-old said the caravan offered an opportunity to give her 12- and 14-year-old sons “a better future.” On the El Salvador del Mundo square, families gathered with children in tow to witness the official decorating of the city’s Christmas tree amid fireworks and singing

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