Blackmail at the border: Give us $50,000 each and we’ll go home, migrants demand

by WorldTribune Staff, December 12, 2018

Caravan migrants at the U.S. southern border have a proposal for President Donald Trump – give them each 50 grand and they’ll go back to their countries of origin.

Migrants line up for a free meal in Tijuana. / AP

The blackmail attempt was in a list of demands reportedly sent to the U.S. consulate in Tijuana.

Washington Times columnist Cheryl K. Chumley noted on Dec. 12 that the list of demands went something like this: “Pay us $50,000, and we’ll go home. Don’t pay us, and we’ll stay. Oh, and in the meantime, speed up the asylum process so more of us can enter the United States.”

Chumley wrote: “This isn’t just audacious. It’s outright extortion.”

According to the San Diego Union-Tribune, the migrants each want $50,000 and there are two groups of caravaners calling for the blackmail fee. The first group, about 100 in number, was led by Honduran migrant Alfonso Guerrero Ulloa.

“It may seem like a lot of money to you,” Ulloa said to the San Diego Union-Tribune. “But it is a small sum compared to everything the United States has stolen from Honduras.”

Another group demanded the White House admit 300 asylum seekers each day at the San Ysidro Port of Entry in San Diego. Currently, 40 to 100 are processed and admitted per day.

Fox News reported that the second group said in a letter that “In the meantime, [while we wait for processing], women and children who have fled our countries continue to suffer and the civil society of Tijuana continue to be forced to confront this humanitarian crisis, a refugee crisis caused in great part by decades of U.S. intervention in Central America.”

Of the roughly 6,000 migrants who’ve traveled from Central America to Tijuana, around 700 have returned home, 300 have been deported and 2,500 have applied for humanitarian visas in Mexico, according to Xochtil Castillo, a caravan member who met with Mexican officials on Dec. 11.

Chumley noted that “The migrants who demanded speedier entry gave the United States 72 hours to answer. The migrants who demanded $50,000 for each and every member of their caravan – so they can use the money to go home and start a small business, dontcha know – didn’t put a deadline for receipt of their payments. It’d be humorous – except for the fact these migrants are no doubt serious.”

Trump, Chumley wrote, should send the migrants “a thank-you note. They’re really the best argument for a border wall that’s come in a while. And so timely, just as Congress and the White House are jumping back into the fray over border wall funding.”


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