Biden sends a delegation to negotiate new immigration measures with López Obrador

A high-level delegation will travel on Wednesday to Mexico representing the president of USA, Joe Biden, to negotiate urgently with the Mexican president, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, new immigration measures that stop border crossings.

The delegation will be led by the US Secretary of State, Antony Blinken, accompanied by the Secretary of Homeland Security and person in charge of US immigration policy, Alejandro Mayorkas, and the White House Security Advisor Liz Sherwood-Randall.

This trip was agreed upon by the two leaders just last Thursday when Biden called López Obrador concerned about the magnitude of the immigration crisis, which has led the United States to close several border ports for a few days.

The State Department reported in a statement that the delegation led by Blinken will meet face to face with López Obrador to address ““unprecedented irregular migration” in the region and seek the adoption of “measures” that allow the reopening of all border ports.

In addition, the head of US diplomacy will insist on compliance with the Los Angeles Declaration, in which twenty Latin American countries, including Mexico, committed to providing legal means of stay for migrants so that not all of them go to the United States. .

For its part, the Mexican Foreign Ministry said in a statement that it was López Obrador who invited the US delegation to visit Mexico. “in order to dialogue on human mobility.”

For the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the meeting represents an opportunity to cooperate in the “regular management of migratory flows” and to insist on the need to keep border crossings open to avoid impacts on trade.

Additionally, López Obrador will emphasize the need to address the root causes of forced migration, such as poverty in Central America.

The United States Customs and Border Protection (CBP) detained 242,000 migrants on the border with Mexico in November and detected a historic spike in undocumented arrivals in the first days of December.

Last week, the United States closed the railroad crossings of Eagle Pass (Texas) with Piedras Negras (Coahuila) and El Paso (Texas) with Ciudad Juárez (Chihuahua) for five days.

The CBP justified the measure because it had to allocate its personnel at those points to processing migrants, while Mexican employers reported million-dollar losses in bilateral trade.

In recent days, the United States has also closed the crossings of vehicles and people in Lukesville (Arizona) and San Ysidro (California).

At the same time, the Democratic Administration is negotiating with the Republicans on new restrictive measures at the border to get the conservatives to lift the veto they maintain in Congress on sending aid to Ukraine.

In that sense, the White House is evaluating the possibility of restoring the controversial Title 42, a policy applied during the Covid-19 pandemic by former President Donald Trump that allowed undocumented immigrants to be deported quickly without giving them the opportunity to request asylum.

The application of this measure would directly affect Mexico since the majority of people are returned to that country.

The Biden Administration lifted Title 42 in May and replaced it with other measures that attempted to limit the arrival of people at the border and restrict access to asylum.

However, it has not achieved the desired effect, amid a global increase in the movement of people, motivated by the search for better economic opportunities in the US and fleeing different social and political crises in America and other places in the world. .

On the eve of the US delegation’s visit, a caravan of more than 10,000 migrants left Mexico’s southern border for the United States on Christmas Eve.