Human rights group in Mexico urges US expats to derail Donald Trump

A human rights group is urging the nearly one million US citizens who live in Mexico to vote in hopes of keeping Republican Donald Trump out of the White House, organisers have said.

"We are going to Mobile the almost eight million Americans who live abroad, a million of them in Mexico, and we want them to vote to stop Donald Trump," said Joseph Huff-Hannon yesterday, a campaign leader at Avaaz, an activist organisation for political, environmental and human rights issues.

Under the shadow of Mexico's Angel of Independence monument, about 200 people gathered to register to vote next to a billboard-sized placard featuring an anti-Trump cartoon, one day ahead of the first presidential debate between Trump and his Democratic counterpart Hillary Clinton.

Passersby posed with an effigy of Trump while a mariachi band serenaded them. The bureaucratic complications of registering to vote when Americans are abroad can discourage people from casting ballots and the Avaaz campaign is aimed at making the process easier.

Trump has vowed to cut off billions of dollars in remittances sent by migrants to Mexico to make their country pay for a massive wall across the border. He has also called Mexican migrants "rapists." "Let's hope we never see this gentleman in the White House -- or the wall," Huff-Hannon said.

"Don't forget that in 2000 George W Bush won the White House by something like 500 votes in Florida," he added. Trump has fervently ruled out any legal status for undocumented migrants.

In practice this would mean an extension of a precarious limbo status for millions of migrants, mainly of Mexican origin, who have been waiting for years or even decades to come out of the shadows. Most Americans favour some sort of immigration reform.