Migrant caravan leader says 15,000 asylum-seekers could reach US border

The radical activist leading the latest massive migrant caravan from Mexico to the US was once sentenced to 40 years in prison and has already led tens of thousands of asylum-seekers to the border.

Luis Garcia Villagran, a self-proclaimed Evangelical Christian who hails from Mexico, was at the forefront of a mass migration once again this week, bringing an estimated 8,000 migrants on a Christmas Eve march through Mexico to a US border already in crisis — and predicting the number of asylum-seekers could easily nearly double to 15,000 along the way.

“We try to help people least protected, especially women and child migrants,” the media-savvy frontman told The Daily Caller in a July 2022 interview. “Simply, we apply what is in the law.”

Villagran, who heads the Center for Human Dignity, boasted at the time that he had guided 40,000 migrants to the border since September 2021 — a figure that has multiplied since then and is expected to swell even more in the coming weeks and months.

The organizer told the outlet that he is not financed or assisted by external organizations — and is motivated by his faith and a belief in the right of migrants to exit their impoverished origins.

Villagran was previously arrested in the Mexican state of Chiapas in 1997 on kidnapping and conspiracy charges, allegations he denied. He was convicted by a judge and sentenced to 40 years behind bars, but working with several human rights groups, he appealed his case and was eventually freed in 2010.