President Andrés Manuel López Obrador spoke again this Wednesday about the implications for Mexico of closing the border with the United States. “It is impossible to close the border, this is for people’s peace of mind,” the president said during his morning conference.
The statements come after the executive order of the United States Government to cut the number of asylums and prevent migrants from crossing the border with Mexico. The announcement comes five months before the presidential elections and seeks to have an effect on the demands of the electorate who are asking for more restrictive measures in the face of the immigration crisis.
The Mexican president has avoided making an assessment of the measure and has assured that Biden and he have “a very good relationship” and that they are in constant communication. “We are respectful of the decisions they make in the United States, we have to respect sovereignties,” the president said. The statements come after the United States ordered to restrict asylum requests when the threshold of 2,500 arrests per day is exceeded and to close the border with Mexico. The measure that would completely hit the commercial and economic relations between both countries. Every day more than a million people cross the border in a documented manner.
The decree, which has received much criticism, allows border crossings to be closed from midnight this Wednesday. In the month of May alone there were 118,000 arrests and daily entries reached 3,800 people. The record was reached in December 2023, when 250,000 arrests were exceeded.
This Tuesday López Obrador and Biden held a telephone meeting precisely to address the immigration issue. The López Obrador Government has asked the United States that people be deported to their countries of origin and not end up on the Mexican side to avoid crises like the one that happened at the migrant detention center in Ciudad Juárez last year, where 40 died in overcrowded conditions. people in a fire. “We are helping to ensure that they are accepted in countries where they do not have a good relationship, so that they can take deportation measures, although we would not want them to deport anyone, because migration is not for pleasure, it is out of necessity,” the Mexican president.
Although Mexico has avoided giving its opinion on the measure, López Obrador has reiterated that the causes of migration must be addressed. “That the causes be addressed, that we are no longer thinking about walls, nor about militarizing the border, nor about closing the border,” the president said two days ago. According to figures from the Department of Homeland Security, the Biden Administration is carrying out more repatriation flights than ever with more than 750,000 deportees, the highest number since 2010.
López Obrador has taken advantage of this new situation to demand two things from the United States: the regularization of more than five million Mexicans who work undocumented in the United States and an investment plan aimed at the countries of origin of the migrants.
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