This year it has smashed the records of migration to the United States. More than 1.7 million encounters, the term used to call the arrests of Customs and Border Protection (CBP) authorities, make the last twelve months the most intense ever seen in the United States. more than 3,000 kilometers of border with Mexico. This year’s registry triples the average of arrests in the years 2012 to 2020. The climatic catastrophes, assassinations, waves of violence and the poverty that plague several Latin American countries have expelled hundreds of thousands of people who have seen in the Joe Biden’s America the answer to your problems. The Democratic government, which took office last January, does not seem to have calculated the scale of the problem, which has become the most pressing issue of its first year in office.
Mexico has become the main expulsion of migrants in fiscal year 2021, between October 2020 and September 2021. 608,000 Mexicans were detained by United States border authorities, according to CBP data that have been advanced by The Washington Post. These were followed by citizens of the Northern Triangle of Central America: Hondurans (309,000 detainees), Guatemalans (279,000 detainees) and Salvadorans (96,000 detainees). Another 367,000 migrants from various countries in the region, including Haiti and Venezuela, were also detained in the same period.
Some of these arrests may represent the same person, so the number of people who made the crossing will be less.The Biden government has maintained Title 42, an emergency measure adopted by Trump during the pandemic, but which has served to Democrats as a tool to vent an already pressing situation. This allows the authorities to expel an immigrant, mainly adults who make the trip alone, and who are not legally prevented from trying again. The number of repeat offenders has grown by 25% in recent months, CBP figures point out, which confirm that 61% of those detained were expelled under Title 42.
The Biden administration focused its earliest efforts on discouraging travel north from Central America, an area that became a problematic focus during the administration of President Donald Trump. This led Vice President Kamala Harris, appointed by Biden as responsible for the situation at the border, to make her first official trip to Guatemala and Mexico, where she asked the migrants not to make the trip to her country. The message sparked controversy among the most progressive sectors, who expected a shift in US immigration policies since Trump’s tough initiatives.
The numbers of detained migrants, however, reflect the failure of the message. In April, 178,799 migrants were apprehended at the southern border of the United States. The number became a record then and has not dropped since. In July there were 213,534 arrests. August registered a slight decrease of 2.2% (208,887). The number of arrests for September is expected to be published in the coming days, which according to The Washington Post was 192,000. It would be the third month with the most meetings in the fiscal year. And among these would be the 15,000 Haitian migrants whose passage through Del Rio, Texas, left one of the worst images of the government’s management of this crisis. The lack of results is one of the elements that has weighed down the popularity of Vice President Harris.
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The United States should discuss the management of this crisis with the Mexican authorities. Members of the Democratic Administration recently told a court that they are ready to begin again, in mid-November, the implementation of the Stay in Mexico program, one of Trump’s immigration pillars. In August, the Supreme Court revived the initiative, considered inhumane by its critics, which forced 60,000 asylum seekers to wait in Mexico for the processing of their case.
Since the ruling, the government has invested in temporary facilities in border cities to house hundreds of immigrants for weeks. Blas Nuñez-Neto, a border agent, said on October 15 that the negotiation with Mexico was showing progress. The Mexican president, Andrés Manuel López Obrador and his foreign minister, Marcelo Ebrard, have openly rejected this program, but would be willing to host it, according to Nuñez-Neto, if the Biden government presents an improved version compared to the one implemented by the Trump administration. and a clear timeline for the processing of petitions, so that they do not last for more than six months.
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