Woman in US bound caravan gives birth

MEXICO CITY: A Guatemalan woman traveling with a US-bound caravan of Central Americans gave birth in Mexico, a human rights group said on Thursday.

It was the first birth recorded during the journey by these people fleeing poverty and gang violence, the National Human Rights Commission said on Wednesday. The woman had a baby girl while the caravan was traveling through the southern state of Oaxaca. The mother and the child are fine, the commission said without specifying which day the baby was born.

The caravan once had as many as 7,000 people but its coordinators now say it numbers fewer than 4,000. Most of them are from Honduras. These travellers have infuriated President Donald Trump and fueled his anti-immigrant message ahead of next week’s congressional election in the US.

The caravan set out from Honduras on October 13. As of Thursday it was in a town in Oaxaca called Juchitan. It is still weeks and many hundreds of miles from the US border. A second, smaller group is on the move further to the south.