Migrants from the Central American caravan camped out at the U.S.-Mexican border have launched a three-day hunger strike to protest the Mexican police blocking their way north.
Members of the thousands-strong caravan began arriving at the border earlier this month and are camped out in Tijuana, across the border from San Diego, Calif.
A 22-year-old Honduran migrant told Reuters Thursday the group’s 72-hour-or-so hunger strike aims to draw attention to the standoff at the border.
“What the police are doing is unfair. The truth is we are fighting for our rights,” Gerson Madrid said. “Why are [the police] treating us like this if we’re not causing them or the Mexican people any trouble?”
The migrants who have already reached the border have been sleeping in an overcrowded shelter since they arrived. Mexican immigration authorities began transporting some of them by bus to another shelter.
The new facility just opened Thursday and is larger than the previous shelter, which could hold about 2,000 people.
