a man posing for a picture in front of the border wall.

These migrant families walked north for safety. Now they face coronavirus.

After fleeing violence in Honduras, three migrant families grapple with lost jobs, illness, and uncertainty in the wake of COVID-19.

After two months of traveling on top of trains, buses and on foot, Moises Cubas stands at the U.S.-Mexico border, a little leaner, sunburnt, and tired. Cubas joined the migrant caravan leaving Honduras in 2019. Now, he waits for asylum in the border city of Mexicali, in Baja California, which has the third-highest number of cases of coronavirus in Mexico.

Photograph by Tomás Ayuso

Young parents flee their homeland carrying their child on their backs; a pregnant mother leaves her partner behind at the border; a family relies on a network of relatives to survive in the American heartland. These harrowing, disparate journeys are connected by a single origin point: migrant caravans.

Starting in late 2018, thousands of Central Americans joined caravans heading north, determined to reach the U.S. border via Guatemala and Mexico. Fleeing desperate conditions at home, they hoped that the caravans would bring safety in numbers, protecting them from gangs and human traffickers that prey on migrants. These journeys continued until the Mexican government deployed security forces to the border with Guatemala to deter them in January 2020.

Honduras was at

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