Blinken, Mayorkas meet Mexico prez as border crossings set new records
WASHINGTON — Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas met Wednesday with Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador to talk stemming the record-breaking surge of illegal immigration along the US-Mexico border.
The Cabinet secretaries and US Ambassador to Mexico Ken Salazar joined López Obrador in Mexico City for private talks lasting approximately three hours.
The high-profile meeting took place against a backdrop of new all-time daily records for illegal border crossings, which have overwhelmed authorities in Arizona and Texas and forced the temporary closure of two commercial rail links.
Border Patrol data indicated a single-day record of 14,509 migrant encounters on Dec. 18 — and a sustained monthlong spate of high detention numbers.
It was not immediately clear whether Blinken and Mayorkas left the meeting with a deal in which Mexican authorities would bolster security along their southern border to deter illegal crossings of migrants from Central and South America.
National Security Council spokesman John Kirby told reporters last week that Biden and López Obrador, who spoke by phone Dec. 21, “shared a similar concern about the increase in migratory flow here in recent weeks and months — there has been a dramatic increase.”
The presidents “did talk in broad terms about what can be done inside Mexico to slow that process down,” Kirby said. “And there are some things, like checkpoints on rail lines and on highways and that kind of thing. And the Mexican Armed Forces’ presence in the south also can be important to that as well.
“But that was broadly speaking, and I think more to the point of why Secretary Blinken and [White House adviser] Liz Sherwood-Randall and Secretary Mayorkas will be going down there is to see what can be done to sort of flesh those modalities out a little bit more.”
Ahead of his meeting with Blinken and Mayorkas, the left-wing Mexican leader floated the easing of US sanctions on the left-wing authoritarian governments of Cuba and Venezuela as a way to reduce immigration, along with increased US development aid to countries whose citizens are on the move.
Former President Donald Trump routinely boasts in public remarks that he coerced Mexican leaders into boosting troop levels along the border, including by using the threat of tariffs — and polls show immigration as a liability for Biden as he faces a likely election rematch with Trump next year.
A Harvard CAPS-Harris survey released Dec. 18 showed that 38% of registered voters approve of Biden’s handling of immigration — an eight-point drop from 46% in November.
López Obrador previously credited Biden’s more welcoming rhetoric and policies with sparking the border crisis shortly after his inauguration in early 2021.
“They see [Biden] as the migrant president, and so many feel they’re going to reach the United States,” he said two months after Biden took office.
On his first day as president, Biden halted funding to construct Trump’s US-Mexico border wall. In June 2021, Biden ended the “Remain in Mexico” policy, which required most asylum seekers who reached the southern border to await US court rulings in Mexico.
Biden tapped Vice President Kamala Harris in March 2021 to begin working to address the “root causes” of migration, particularly in Central America. But the initiative failed to dent the mounting number of crossings, which include large contingents from countries outside the Western Hemisphere.
Nearly 2.5 million people were apprehended after illegally crossing the US-Mexico border in fiscal year 2023, which ended Sept. 30, in addition to an estimated 670,000 “gotaways” who eluded authorities. There were nearly 2.4 million arrests in fiscal 2022, following a record-breaking 1.7 million in fiscal 2021.
Many people who illegally cross the border are allowed into the US to await court rulings on their claims of persecution in their homelands. After an initial interval, migrants seeking asylum are entitled to work permits as their claims lie dormant before a badly backlogged system of check-ins and court dates.
The Biden-era border figures are multiples of prior annual totals.
For example, during President Barack Obama’s final full fiscal year in office, from Oct. 1, 2015, to Sept. 30, 2016, there were just 408,870 people arrested for illegal US-Mexico border crossings — fewer than two months’ worth of stops in the current environment.
In a recent pivot, Mayorkas in October said it was necessary to resume 20 miles of wall construction in South Texas, citing an “acute and immediate need to construct physical barriers … to prevent unlawful entries,” but Biden distanced himself from the move and said he was merely fulfilling a requirement to spend money appropriated by Congress for that purpose.