A 600-Person Caravan Is Falling Apart in Mexico. Trump's No. 2 Diplomat Says It Had 'Zero Chance' Anyway

Three days before the midterms, a migrant caravan is walking north through southern Mexico. It is shrinking, fighting with itself and nowhere near the United States. And the man who used to be America's ambassador to Mexico says it never had a shot.

"Even now, they continue to organize caravans that have ZERO CHANCE of entering our country," Deputy Secretary of State Christopher Landau wrote on X Saturday morning. Landau, the State Department's No. 2, served as U.S. ambassador to Mexico from 2019 to 2021, the last time caravans were a weekly headline.

Not a march. A business.

Landau's bigger point was about who runs these things. "Some people mistakenly believe that human 'caravans' seeking to enter our country illegally are an organic phenomenon. They are assuredly not," he wrote. "They are meticulously organized on social media, and—under the prior Administration—became a massive and lucrative business, primarily for criminal enterprises. The people themselves are just the pawns, often subject to inhuman and degrading treatment along the way."

Think of it like a ticket scalper. The scalper only makes money if there's a show to get into. Under the last administration, there was one. "Under the leadership of @POTUS @realDonaldTrump, all of this stopped immediately and we now have THE MOST SECURE BORDER IN HISTORY," Landau wrote. "But the criminals and caravan organizers have not vanished or given up."

He also credited the neighbors. "We commend the Guatemalan, Honduran, and Mexican governments for their recent decisive and effective actions," he wrote. "By setting up checkpoints and working closely with @DHSgov, these authorities halted mass illegal travel in its tracks. Enforcing border security at the source delivers results."

Eleven days on the road

Here is what the caravan Landau is talking about actually looks like, from the Mexican reporters walking alongside it.

Oct. 13. The group left San Pedro Sula, Honduras, under the name "Sin Fronteras," or "Without Borders," according to La Jornada. It crossed into Mexico in two waves and rested in Tapachula, the city just over the Guatemala line.

Oct. 20. More than 600 people, most of them Central American, set out from Tapachula's Bicentennial Park on the coastal highway, now calling themselves "Fe y Esperanza" No. 2, "Faith and Hope." State police, Mexico's National Guard and the National Migration Institute (INM) escorted them out, La Jornada reported.

Oct. 26 to 28. In Mapastepec, a Honduran man was attacked and hurt in the back, and a Venezuelan man was detained as the suspected attacker. Another Honduran was wounded with a knife before the group left town. Another fight broke out earlier in Huixtla. At least four migrants have been hurt in fights inside the caravan, La Jornada Estado de México reported. By Oct. 28, estimates put the group at around 500. A Tapachula paper, El Orbe, counted about 400 and reported fevers, muscle pain and foot injuries, with no offer yet of the transit permits that would let them ride instead of walk.

Oct. 31. The caravan was resting in Pijijiapan and preparing for the next leg to Tonalá, which El Orbe called a hard stretch for exhausted women and children. Civil Protection, the National Guard and the INM are still with them, El Orbe reported, hoping to persuade them to break up "in the coming hours."

Their stated goal is Mexico City, not Texas, according to El Orbe. Pijijiapan sits on Mexico's southern Pacific coast, at the far end of the country from the U.S. line.

The hole in the story

Most coverage stops at "caravan heads north." The part left out is how the last one ended. A first "Fe y Esperanza con Dios" caravan walked the same Chiapas coast in September. After three weeks, Mexican authorities broke it up at the Oaxaca line, and the INM gave members transit permits that let them board buses and keep moving on their own, La Jornada reported.

That is the real test for this one. A caravan that dissolves on camera is a win. A caravan that dissolves into a hundred bus tickets north just moves the problem to the border, where it lands on the Border Patrol. Landau's "at the source" strategy only works if Mexico keeps saying no all the way up the map.

Why the border can take it

The numbers say the border itself is not the weak point anymore. The Border Patrol made 98,708 apprehensions at the southwest border in all of fiscal 2026, Customs and Border Protection announced Oct. 16. That full year was 60% lower than the Biden administration's single worst month, 249,740. September was the 17th straight month with zero Border Patrol releases, CBP said.

In plain terms, a caravan of 500 is less than two days' worth of what the entire southwest border saw in August, and none of them are getting waved through. Under the old rules, the same group would have been a rounding error in a month of nearly a quarter-million.

What comes next

Watch Tonalá, and watch for transit permits. If the INM talks the group into breaking up without handing out permits to travel north, Landau's checkpoint strategy wins another round. If it ends like September, the next stop is the U.S. border, where the answer for 17 straight months has been the same.

Either way, Landau's warning stands: the organizers "have not vanished or given up." Election Day is Tuesday.