Here We Go Again
The caravan, the tariff threat, and the signal Washington sent
On Thursday, President Trump went on Truth Social and said the quiet part in capital letters.
"Here we go again! They will not be accepted. MEXICO MUST STOP THEM, NOW, and if they do not do so, the Tariffs on Mexico will be IMMEDIATELY DOUBLED. There will be no leniency!"
Here is what is actually on the ground, because the record matters more than the volume.
Reuters reporters are in Tapachula, in Mexico's far south. A caravan calling itself Dios con Nosotros, God With Us, left that city on Tuesday. A Chiapas state government source puts it at about 1,500 people, most of them Central American families. They are walking toward Mexico City first, more than 600 miles away, a trip measured in weeks, not days. This is the third caravan to set out since September, according to AFP. Mexico stopped the first two inside its own southern states.
And here is the detail that tells you everything. The people walking told Reuters why they are walking. Last week's Democratic victory in the midterm elections raised their hopes that American immigration policy is about to get more welcoming.
President Sheinbaum answered Thursday. She acknowledged the groups moving north and then said the thing that proves the current policy works: no migrant caravan has reached the northern border since President Trump returned to office in January 2025. She said one group in Chiapas had shrunk from several hundred people to fewer than 100 after Mexican officials told them plainly that entry into the United States does not exist. She ruled out force. Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin closed the American side of it: this caravan will not be allowed into our country. Period.
So let us be precise. No new Congress has been sworn in. The border did not open. Enforcement still runs through the White House, and the numbers show it. Border Patrol recorded 98,708 apprehensions in fiscal 2026, against more than 1.8 million a year in the Biden years, according to CBP figures reported in the press.
And still, 1,500 people picked up their children and started walking on the strength of an election result.
Let us put the responsibility where it belongs. This is happening because the Democrats won the midterms. The signal went out, the world heard it, and people started walking. That is solely on the Democrats.
That is the story. The signal is the magnet. The world does not wait for a law to change. It listens for a change in tone, and it moves first and sorts out the law later. We ran that experiment during the Biden years. Cities filled up, the border drowned, and everyone in Washington acted surprised. We cannot have another influx like that. Not again.
That is what the tariff threat is for. It is not really about trade. It is leverage aimed at the one government that can stop this column while it is still a thousand miles from Texas, and Mexico has already passed this test three times this fall by breaking these groups up in its own south. Doubling the tariffs is the bill Mexico pays if it decides to look away this time.
Watch what Mexico does, not what anybody says. If Dios con Nosotros keeps walking north week after week, the pressure failed. If it dissolves in Chiapas like the ones before it, the pressure worked, and every future caravan organizer in Central America will have gotten the message for free.
The caravan heard the election results. The question is whether it also hears the answer.