Caravans

[Angrboda]

Nearly 3,000 migrants have accepted offers to apply for asylum in Mexico, authorities there say, and another 500 have given up, asking authorities for help returning home to Central America.

That appears to leave at least 5,000 people, clustered in several groups, who remain on course. How many are likely to complete the journey?

Preliminary assessments of the first caravan by U.S. military planners anticipated only about 20 percent of the travelers would make it to the border. That would be as few as 1,000 people, if accurate. Awaiting them are 7,000 active-duty U.S. troops, 2,000 National Guard personnel and the thousands of Border Patrol agents and customs officers who will have the lead enforcement role.

Perhaps 1,000 is a low-ball estimate, and two or three times that many will reach the border. If they were to reconvene as a single group, they could present U.S. authorities with a crowd-control challenge at ports of entry or along the banks of the Rio Grande.

But in terms of an overall impact on border enforcement, this would not amount to a major surge. Last month, US. authorities took more than 50,000 into custody along the Mexico border. So even if all 5,000 migrants who remain in the caravans were to complete the journey, they would amount to 10 percent of those intercepted each month.

(Washington Post) [emphasis mine]