Julio is 23 from Guatemala. He has 4 children, 2 who are his own and 2 who are his wife’s (who came to live with him after suffering domestic violence from her first husband).
He joined the Migrant Caravan to Tijuana in October 2018 quite spontaneously because someone he was working with left him with a large business debt and the repayments were unaffordable. He says he would have been working and with the repayments his family would have starved.
He made the journey with his brother and said it was hard and dangerous. Unfortunately his brother was arrested by the police for a littering offence (which were one of many petty offences we heard of designed to harass the migrants).
A few days later, his brother was deported back to Guatemala and he is now on his own hoping to get some work locally.