A caravan of migrants, mostly from Central America, head north along a coastal highway just outside of Huehuetan, Chiapas State, Mexico, on Sunday, Oct. 24, 2021. (AP Photo/Marco Ugarte)

The claim: “The Biden-Harris caravan is the population of Minneapolis and will enter our country with no vetting, no criminal background checks, no COVID testing and no vaccine requirements.” — U.S. Rep. Mary Miller of Illinois.

PolitiFact has debunked numerous claims from others that were part of Miller’s statement, including that the Biden administration would allow anyone to cross the border or skip COVID testing and other public safety measures. This fact check on Miller’s claim focuses on the size of the group traveling through the Mexican state of Chiapas.

PolitiFact rating: Pants on Fire! Minneapolis is home to nearly 430,000 people, according to the U.S. census, while the highest estimate for the group leaving the Mexico-Guatemala border town of Tapachula was less than 1 percent of that total.

The migrants featured in a video Miller shared set out Oct. 23 from Tapachula, where tens of thousands of Central Americans and Haitians have been waiting for Mexican authorities to process their asylum claims and permit them to move freely around the country.

Reports from news outlets covering the trek have included estimates ranging from 2,000 to 4,000 migrants, including as many as 1,000 children. None of the experts consulted by PolitiFact had seen any estimates on par with Miller’s comparison.

“This is an exaggeration designed to scare people into believing that we are experiencing an ‘invasion’ at the southern border in an attempt to advance anti-immigrant and anti-asylum policies,” said Nicole Hallett, director of the Immigrants’ Rights Clinic at the University of Chicago Law School.

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The congresswoman’s alarming tweet comes amid an unprecedented surge of migrants crossing the border.

Arrests of undocumented migrants along the border reached a record high of nearly 1.7 million from October 2020 through September 2021, according to U.S. Customs and Border Protection data first reported by the Washington Post. Neither Miller’s tweet nor the video she shared make any reference to total border apprehensions, however.

“It would be fair to say that the number of people encountered at the border was equal to several times Minneapolis’ population,” said Steven Camarota, director of research at the Center for Immigration Studies, a group that advocates for low immigration levels. “But no one caravan could be that size.”

PolitiFact is a fact-checking project to help you sort out fact from fiction in politics. Truth-O-Meter ratings are determined by a panel of three editors. The burden of proof is on the speaker, and PolitiFact rates statements based on the information known at the time the statement is made.

As attempts by migrants to cross the border rise, President Joe Biden has faced increased criticism from Republicans for overturning some of former President Donald Trump’s immigration policies, as well as from migrant advocates for his administration’s continuation of an emergency health provision invoked under Trump to quickly expel migrants during the pandemic.

Though still significantly smaller than caravans in 2018 and 2019, the group that moved out from Tapachula on Oct. 23 is the biggest to trek through southern Mexico since the pandemic started early last year, according to the Associated Press. In January, a caravan left Honduras, but authorities in Guatemala broke it up.

Other groups who have walked out of Tapachula this year have numbered in the hundreds, the AP reported. All were dissolved by Mexican authorities, sometimes with excessive force. Those groups were composed mostly of Haitian migrants.

The new caravan is primarily made up of Central Americans who have dealt with cold weather and illness — including five children and one adult who contracted dengue fever, according to the Mexican government and reporting from Mexico News Daily.

Many residents across the Houston area are still dealing with the lingering effects of Hurricane Harvey, such as mental health issues, unsafe living conditions and financial distress.

By Dug Begley, Sam González Kelly