They Wanted The World To Pay Attention To Migrants. But The Attention Came At A Price.

[Judi Lynn]

Never before had the organizers of a group of Central Americans seeking asylum in the United States faced such opposition from a president of the United States. It was a lesson in the consequences, in the age of Trump, of getting the attention you thought you wanted.

Posted on June 3, 2018, at 8:01 a.m.
Adolfo Flores
BuzzFeed News Reporter

No one saw it coming, the wave of television crews, camera lights, and reporters that crashed onto an outdoor sports arena in a small town in Mexico’s Oaxaca state.

I certainly didn’t. And neither did the hundreds of exhausted migrants camped out on blankets and inside empty buildings in the town of Matías Romero. Or the volunteers with Pueblo Sin Fronteras tasked with guiding a caravan of up to 1,500 people who’d formed the largest Central American group ever to have departed the Mexico–Guatemala border headed toward the United States. Or even the reporters and photographers who hadn't covered the caravan's initial days because they didn't realize that this one's size made it different from the ones that had come before it, annually.

But a series of tweets from President Donald Trump changed that, thrusting this group of Central Americans into the unforgiving glare of the international spotlight and upending what had been the usually unseen journey of people fleeing to the United States.

Gina Garibo, a fast-talking political science professor at the Ibero-American University in the Mexican city of Puebla and a volunteer organizer for Pueblo Sin Fronteras, stood on the grass of the sports arena and watched as camera crews set up tripods and reporters rushed to get quotes from the Central Americans sitting next to a soccer field. A drone flew over the crowd. The glow of camera lights would be a constant in their lives for the weeks that followed.

More:
https://www.buzzfeed.com/adolfoflores/migrant-caravan-mexico-trump-asylum?bfsplash&utm_term=.euRWawX6D#.fdo193Wlw