CARAVAN USED BABIES, WOMEN, ELDERLY AS 'HUMAN SHIELDS'

Guatemalan Official: Caravan Used Babies, Women, Elderly As 'Human Shields'

By Susan Jones | October 31, 2018 | 7:19 AM EDT

Children in the migrant caravan are lifted over a gate at the Guatemala-Mexico border on October 19, 2018 in Ciudad Tecun Uman, Guatemala. The caravan of thousands of immigrants, most from Honduras, pushed past Guatemalan police before clashing with Mexican riot police. (Photo by John Moore/Getty Images)

(CNSNews.com) - Guatemalan security forces were not able to hold back the thousands of people, many from Honduras, who broke through a chain-link fence into Mexico earlier this month.

Videos posted online show the moment when the border was breached and members of the "caravan" – the first of two -- dashed into Mexico, on their way to the United States.

Why couldn't Guatemalan security forces hold them back? Fox News's Laura Ingraham asked Mario Duarte, the Guatemalan Secretary of Strategic Intelligence, on Tuesday night:

"Central American countries, we have these agreements since 2006 or 2008 that our citizens can freely move between the countries as long as they carry their national I.D. and go through a regular immigration process or a border checkpoints,” Duarte responded.

“Now, these caravans as you have seen from different videos, it was a very, very big group of over 3,000 people. And Guatemalan security forces, let me say really quickly, we put over 2,000 police officers and close to 1,000 military--"

"Yeah, But you couldn't hold them back, Mr. Secretary," Ingraham interrupted.

"We tried very hard, as you could have seen in the videos," Duarte responded. “The issue is that these people put babies, women and the elderly at the front, almost like human shields, so when they started pressing them against our security personnel we had to do all our best to protect their lives,  to protect their human rights and protect their dignity as well," Duarate said.

“With that in there, we always put life first. And we had to protect these people, and obviously that is when the rest of the caravan over passed our security forces.”

President Trump has now sent 5,200 active duty troops to the U.S.-Mexico border to reinforce the 2,092 National Guardsmen and thousands of Border Patrol agents already stationed there.

As the caravans move north, liberal media outlets continue to bash Trump for using what they call scare tactics ahead of the election.

A case in point: CNN's Chris Cuomo told his viewers Tuesday night, "There is no invasion crisis at the border. There is none coming soon. There is a credibility crisis, though, and it's all around us," Cuomo said.

"Facts first," Cuomo continued after a commercial break.

The president wants you to believe we're about to be invaded -- an army of diseased drug dealers and murderers are almost at the door. No more terrorists. The terrorists used to be part of the sell, but it proved to be too foolish to flourish as an idea and so he's taken that part out. The problem is, it is all untrue. These migrants are more than 800 miles away, right now, about a month if you're really healthy and walking really fast all the time. That's the earliest they would be at the border. So you're going to have attrition, OK?. Even if they ran a marathon every day, they wouldn't be here by December.

But that's not what the president is really worried about, all right. This is -- people voting. And that's a whole lot closer, right that's a week away today. The initial monsters in our midst attack had big holes blown in it by us in the media because trump was grossly exaggerating what he knew. And here's the proof, when I say he knows they're not coming, I say that because he knows they're not coming.

His own intelligence clearly tells him they expect a small percentage of the people in the caravan will ever make it to this country. So the monster madness needed some fluffing up and that's where another offer you can't refuse came from.

Cuomo then launched into an attack on Trump's proposal to end birthright citizenship by executive order.

And Cuomo isn't alone: 

MSNBC's Rachel Maddow commented Tuesday night on Trump's deployment of U.S. troops to the Mexican border -- "to stop what he is continually calling 'that invasion there,'" she said.

"There is no invasion on the U.S. Border," Maddow continued. "And sending as many troops to the border as are currently in Iraq won't change that. But it turns out when you call it an invasion, when you try to rally everybody about a fear of an invasion, it turns out lots of people across the country have different ideas about what might be a good way to stop that invasion. I mean, what could be too extreme if the country is in fact being invaded by shoeless moms and kids who are a thousand miles away.

"The Fox News channel has now recently started claiming that these invaders are bringing disease, that they specifically have smallpox. That they're coming here to kill us all with smallpox and stuff..."

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