Thousands of migrants in Mexico moving north

As Mexico's President Andrés Manuel López Obrador opened talks on immigration and other issues with his North American counterparts in Washington, D.C., a new migrant caravan was making its way north from the southern Mexican city of Tapachula Thursday morning.

The new group served as a fresh reminder of the urgent need to address migration in the region, which López Obrador hopes to convey in his meeting with President Joe Biden.

About 2,000 mostly Central American and Haitian migrants make up the latest caravan.

Alex Leyva of Honduras said he was attempting to travel north in a caravan for the second time.

The first time he left with another caravan in October he got sick and had to drop out.

"My country is in the worst economic, crime, hunger situation," Leyva said.

The earlier caravan that Leyva had travelled with is now in southern Veracruz state but has dwindled to several hundred migrants, down from some 4,000.

Luis García Villagran, a spokesperson for the Center for Human Dignity travelling with the migrants, said the migrants are demanding documents that allow them to be in all of Mexico.

The Mexican government had relied on a strategy of containing migrants in the southernmost part of the country to alleviate pressure at the U.S. border.

But those states are the poorest and there is far more opportunity to find work in Mexico's north.

López Obrador named addressing migration in the region as one of his priorities for Thursday's North America Leaders' Summit.

The dwindling caravan in Veracruz was the first to advance so far into Mexico in the past two years, but the grueling conditions of the trek and the government's offers to regularize migrants' status has led the majority to drop out.

Caravans began several years ago as a way for migrants who did not have the money to pay smugglers to take advantage of safety in numbers as they moved toward the U.S. border.

However, more recently Guatemala and Mexico have become more aggressive in quickly dissolving the caravans with security forces.