MATIAS ROMERO, Mexico — A caravan of Central American migrants intends to move north and end its journey in Mexico City, leaving anyone seeking to reach the US border on their own, organizers said Wednesday.
The immediate trouble is a lack of transportation to get the group to the next stop, the city of Puebla en route to the Mexican capital.
Organizers have been searching for a way to safely move the roughly 1,000 people who have become a target of President Trump as a symbol of weak border controls and the need for tougher US immigration rules.
But the caravan — organized into a large group to protect against bandits and others — has become more of a showcase of the difficulties facing activists trying to aid migrants and keep them on the move. The first goal is to reach the city of Puebla, about 300 miles away, and then press on for a last leg to Mexico City.
For days, the group has remained stalled on a dusty soccer field in the southern state of Oaxaca.
‘‘If you are looking for a plan, there isn’t one,’’ said Irineo Mujica, Mexico’s director of Pueblo Sin Fronteras, the migrants’ rights group that organized the caravan.
He knew that the last stop would be the capital, and that there would not be a group push to the US border — where some of the migrants say they hope to seek political asylum. ‘‘Our job with the caravan ends in Mexico City,’’ Mujica said.
Rodrigo Abeja, one of the organizers, said they were seeking help from a breakaway faction of Mexico’s teachers union, which has years of experience convening huge protests, and is generally aligned with the country’s leftist presidential candidate, Andrés Manuel López Obrador. But the logistics remain fluid.
The Mexican government has responded by issuing temporary permits to migrants. Foreign Minister Luis Videgaray Caso wrote on Twitter on Tuesday that the caravan had ‘‘gradually dispersed,’’ but that a large contingent remains together seeking to reach Puebla for an immigration law workshop, and then get to Mexico’s capital.
Even before Trump got involved, this had become the biggest caravan — an annual journey to highlight the plight of migrants — that this group of organizers had seen.
Many Hondurans who had fled after the contested presidential election in November already had amassed in the southern Mexican border city of Tapachula and joined the caravan when it set off late last month. Mujica said that ‘‘a minimum of 80 percent’’ of the migrants in the group come from Honduras.
One of them, Maria Elena Colindres Ortega, 43, who had been a congresswoman in Honduras until January, said she joined in the hope that she could eventually apply for political asylum in the United States. More than 20 people were killed in post-election protests, and Honduras has long been dangerous for activists.
‘‘I couldn’t wait for them to kill me,’’ Colindres Ortega said.
Trump has made the migrant caravan a central theme in tweets. He has warned that Mexico must stop the group or risk being penalized in the negotiations over revising the North American Free Trade Agreement.He also has threatened to reduce US aid to Honduras, the home country of many of the marchers.
On Wednesday, Trump repeated his calls for tighter border controls.
For several years, migrants have traveled north in caravans through Mexico around this time of year, to protect themselves from crime and to highlight the plight of those fleeing Central America to escape poverty and danger. Trump’s comments have turned the event into a fresh source of tension between the United States and its southern neighbors.
The Mexican government has denied that it is allowing the migrants to travel unimpeded across its territory.
