A US delegation to meet with Mexican government for talks on the surge of migrants at border
MEXICO CITY — A top U.S. delegation is meeting with the Mexican president on Wednesday in what many see as an effort to push Mexico to do more to stem a wave of migrants reaching the U.S. southwestern border.
Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador has said he is willing to help, but also says he wants to see progress in U.S. relations with Cuba and Venezuela, two of the top senders of migrants, and more development aid for the region.
Both sides are under intense pressure to reach an agreement after previous steps, such as limiting direct travel to Mexico or deporting certain migrants, failed to stem the influx. This month, as many as 10,000 migrants were arrested daily at the southwestern U.S. border.
The US is struggling to process thousands of migrants at the border or house them once they reach northern cities. Mexico's industry took a hit last week when the U.S. briefly closed two crucial railroad crossings in Texas, arguing that border patrol agents should be redeployed to deal with the surge.
Another non-rail border crossing remained closed in Lukeville, Arizona, and operations were partially suspended in San Diego and Nogales, Arizona. U.S. officials said these closures were made to reassign officials to help process migrants.
US Secretary of State Antony Blinken left open the possibility that border crossings could be reopened if Mexico provided more aid.
“Secretary Blinken will discuss unprecedented irregular migration in the Western Hemisphere and identify ways that Mexico and the United States will address border security challenges, including actions to enable the reopening of key points of entry across our shared border,” said his office in a prior statement. to Wednesday's meeting.
Mexico has already assigned more than 32,000 soldiers and National Guard officers – about 11% of the total force – to enforce immigration laws, and the National Guard now detains far more migrants than criminals.
But the shortcomings of that approach were on display Tuesday, when National Guard officers made no attempt to stop a caravan of about 6,000 migrants, many from Central America and Venezuela, as they passed through Mexico's main immigration inspection point. in the south of the state of Chiapas. the border with Guatemala.
In the past, Mexico has allowed such caravans to pass through, confident that they would tire themselves walking along the highway. No caravan has ever walked the 1,000 miles (1,600 kilometers) to the U.S. border.
But exhausting it — by forcing Venezuelans and others to hike through the jungle-covered Darien Gap, or barring migrants from passenger buses in Mexico — no longer works.
Many have simply found other ways. So many migrants have been hopping freight trains across Mexico that one of the country's two largest railroads was forced to suspend trains in September over safety concerns.
Actual police raids to remove migrants from train cars — the kind of action Mexico took a decade ago — could be something the U.S. delegation would like to see.
US Secretary of Homeland Security Alejandro Mayorkas and Homeland Security Advisor Liz Sherwood-Randall will also attend the meeting.
One thing the US has already done is show that one country's problems on the border quickly become the problems of both countries. The railroad closures in Texas hampered freight moving from Mexico to the U.S., as well as the grain needed to feed Mexican livestock moving south.
López Obrador confirmed last week that U.S. officials want Mexico to do more to block migrants at its southern border with Guatemala, or make it more difficult to move through Mexico by train, trucks or buses, a policy known as “conflict '.
But the president said that in return he wanted the United States to send more development aid to the migrants' home countries and reduce or eliminate sanctions on Cuba and Venezuela.
“We are going to help, as we always do,” López Obrador said. “Mexico is helping to reach agreements with other countries, in this case Venezuela.”
“We also want something to be done about the (US) differences with Cuba,” López Obrador said. “We have already proposed to President (Joe) Biden to open a bilateral dialogue between the US and Cuba.”
“That's what we're going to discuss, it's not just a twist,” he said.
Mexico says it detected 680,000 migrants moving through the country in the first 11 months of 2023.
In May, Mexico agreed to accept migrants from countries such as Venezuela, Nicaragua and Cuba that had been turned away by the U.S. for not following rules that provided new legal pathways to asylum and other forms of migration.
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