Staff Reports
In an exclusive meeting, Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas sat down with Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador to discuss the ongoing flood of illegal immigration at the US-Mexico border. This powwow, which lasted a solid three hours, saw the high-ranking US officials and US Ambassador to Mexico Ken Salazar huddling with López Obrador in Mexico City to hash out some solutions.
The timing of this meeting couldn’t have been better, as new records were being set for daily illegal border crossings, with Arizona and Texas feeling the brunt of the overwhelming surge. To add fuel to the fire, two commercial rail links had to temporarily shut down due to the chaos, and a caravan of approximately 8,000 migrants was looming on the horizon.
The Border Patrol numbers spoke volumes, indicating a staggering single-day record of 14,509 migrant encounters on Dec. 18, along with a sustained monthlong streak of high detention figures. These eye-popping statistics painted a dire picture of the crisis that had been boiling over for far too long.
The big question on everyone’s mind was whether Blinken and Mayorkas managed to strike a deal with Mexican authorities to beef up security along their southern border, a move that could potentially put the brakes on illegal migrant crossings from Central and South America. It’s the typical tug-of-war between diplomacy and border security, and it’s a dance that’s been going on for far too long.
John Kirby, a spokesman for the National Security Council, disclosed that both Biden and López Obrador shared a common concern about the recent surge in migratory flow. They kicked around some vague ideas about what Mexico could do to slow down the influx, like setting up checkpoints on rail lines and highways and ramping up the presence of the Mexican Armed Forces in the south.
Before the big meeting, the left-leaning Mexican leader even suggested that easing US sanctions on the leftist authoritarian governments of Cuba and Venezuela could be the ticket to reducing immigration, as well as a boost in US development aid to countries with restless citizens.
It’s no secret that the border has been a thorn in the side of Democrats, with former President Donald Trump touting his success in coercing Mexican leaders into amping up troop levels along the border during his tenure. Recent polls have unveiled that immigration is a weak spot for Biden, and his approval ratings have taken a sizable hit in that department.
López Obrador himself had credited Biden’s welcoming approach and policies with sparking the border crisis shortly after the new administration took over in 2021. The phone conversations between the two leaders in December only scratch the surface of the larger issue at hand.
The Biden administration’s swift actions soon after taking office — halting border wall funding and ending the “Remain in Mexico” policy for asylum seekers, among others — seemed to have inadvertently fueled the surge at the border, and it’s been an uphill battle ever since.
With Vice President Kamala Harris at the helm of the effort to address the root causes of migration in Central America, the numbers kept climbing, and now the situation has snowballed into an even bigger mess with the influx of migrants from various regions outside the Western Hemisphere.
The border apprehension figures under Biden’s administration dwarf those of previous years, with nearly 2.5 million people nabbed after illegally crossing the border in fiscal year 2023, and an estimated 670,000 others slipping through the cracks. This is miles ahead of prior annual totals and paints a grim picture of the state of the border.
The recent pivot in policy, with Mayorkas green-lighting the resumption of 20 miles of wall construction in South Texas, was a shocking about-face. Although Biden sought to distance himself from the move, citing a necessity to spend funds appropriated by Congress, the shift in stance hints at the administration’s acknowledgment of the gravity of the border crisis.
