The President of the United States, Joe Biden, visited this Sunday the Las Américas Bridge, which connects the city of El Paso, Texas, with Ciudad Juárez, in Mexico, during his first visit to the border in his two years in office.
Biden, accompanied by Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, met with Border Patrol agents and watched a series of demonstrations of tactics used by authorities to seize people and vehicles at the border crossing.
Minutes after landing in the city, President Biden held a brief meeting with the governor of Texas, the Republican Greg Abbott, a controversial figure and critic of the current government, who for the past year led the sending of migrants on buses from the border to different cities in the northeast of the country, such as Washington DC and New York.
Abbott handed Biden a letter, telling him his border visit is too late and accusing him of pursuing an “open borders” policy.
“This chaos is a direct result of their failure to enforce US immigration laws,” the governor said in the letter.
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Secretary Mayorkas told reporters on the flight from Washington to El Paso that his agency has already sent more than 100 new Border Patrol agents to El Paso and that a new facility will open that will process up to 1,000 people per day.
Migration
And it is that Biden’s trip to the border comes just days after his Government announced new immigration restrictions, which were criticized both by members of his party and by organizations in defense of human rights.
The new plan presented by Biden on Thursday and applauded by the Mexican government contemplates delivering 30,000 humanitarian permits per month for Venezuelan, Cuban, Nicaraguan and Haitian migrants who have a sponsor in the United States.
(You can read: Immigration in Canada hits record; country seeks more workers)
Instead, those who cross the border without permission will be immediately returned to Mexico and barred from entering the country for five years.
According to Biden, the López Obrador government agreed to accept the return of 30,000 people of these four nationalities every month. White House Security Council spokesman John Kirby said at a pre-trip news conference that this is “an example of close cooperation on migration” between the United States and Mexico.
Migrants will be expelled under Title 42, a controversial health policy established by former Republican President Donald Trump (20117-2021) and which remains in force by order of the Supreme Court.
The announcement brought to eight the nationalities that are subject to the restriction, Venezuela being the most recent, when migrants from this country began to be expelled from US territory last October.
Citizens of Mexico and the Northern Triangle countries of Central America (Honduras, Guatemala and El Salvador) are also subject to Title 42. The Department of Homeland Security justified the expansion of Title 42 to these other three nationalities citing a 90% reduction in the number of arrests of Venezuelans at the border after the restriction began in October.
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However, hundreds of migrants from this country continue to enter the country through illegal crossings, without being detected by immigration authorities and exposing themselves to situations of greater risk.
The region is experiencing a record migratory flow with 2.76 million migrants detained at the United States border with Mexico in fiscal year 2021.
More about the summit in Mexico
The border crossing is an intermediate stop for Biden on his way to Mexico City, where he arrived on Sunday night and where starting this Monday he will participate in the North American Leaders Summit with the president of Mexico, Andrés Manuel. López Obrador, and the Prime Minister of Canada, Justin Trudeau.
Fentanyl trafficking, the capture of Ovidio Guzmán and Mexican energy policy promise to strain the North American Leaders Summit following Biden’s trip to El Paso, Texas.
The first meeting since November 2021 of “Los Tres Amigos”, as this group is known, will take place in the midst of the controversy over the arrest of Ovidio Guzmán, one of the sons of Chapo most wanted by the US and whose detention led to violent acts that left 29 dead in Sinaloa, in northwestern Mexico.
President López Obrador denied that the operation had anything to do with the summit, but the United States and Canada intensified alerts for drug trafficking, particularly fentanyl, a synthetic drug made in Mexico with chemical precursors brought from China.
(Keep reading: Title 42: ‘chaos’ at the US-Mexico border after court order)
The drug enforcement agency of that country (DEA), in fact, seized enough fentanyl during 2022 to “kill the entire population” of the United States.
On the economic side, the meeting comes amid the energy consultations of the Treaty between Mexico, the United States and Canada (T-MEC) in which Washington and Ottawa question the Mexican nationalist policy that favors state companies.
Both Biden and Trudeau are facing pressure at home to persuade López Obrador to change his energy policy.
INTERNATIONAL WRITING*
*With information from AFP and EFE
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