US President Joe Biden will visit the border with Mexico for the first time this Sunday, where records of migrant arrivals are being broken, before moving on to the neighboring country to meet his Mexican counterpart, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, and the Prime Minister of Canada, Justin Trudeau.
Biden will arrive this Sunday afternoon in the city of El Paso, Texas, one of the epicenters of the current wave of immigration, where he will meet with local officials and visit the Las Americas border bridge, which connects the territory of the United States with Mexico.
The president will also visit one of the migrant service centers of the city receiving federal funds and will meet with community leaders. The president will be accompanied by the secretary of national security, Alejandro Mayorkas.
He will then meet with President López Obrador in Mexico City on Monday and Canada’s Prime Minister Justin Trudeau will join the conversation on Tuesday. with the celebration of the North American Leaders’ Summit, known as the “Three Amigos” meeting.
(It may interest you: The presidents of Mexico, Canada and the United States will discuss migration and security)
This is Biden’s first trip to Latin America since taking office two years ago. The last US president to visit Mexico was Barack Obama in 2014.
On the negotiating table of the “Summit of the Three Amigos”, which last met in Washington in 2021, there are a wide variety of issues, such as immigration, drug trafficking, trade and the crisis climate.
Following his border visit, Biden will travel to Mexico for a summit with Amlo and Trudeau.
Migration
And it is that Biden’s trip to the border and the summit with Mexico and Canada comes just days after his government announced new restrictions on immigration, criticized both by members of his party and by human rights organizations.
The new plan presented by Biden on Thursday and applauded by the Mexican government provides for the delivery of 30,000 humanitarian permits a month for Venezuelan, Cuban, Nicaraguan and Haitian migrants who have a sponsor in the United States.
(You can read: Immigration to Canada hits record; country seeks more workers)
Instead, those who cross the border without permission will be immediately deported back to Mexico and barred from entering the country for five years.
According to Biden, the government of López Obrador has agreed to accept the return of 30,000 people of these four nationalities each month. White House Security Council spokesman John Kirby said at a press conference before the trip that this was “an example of close cooperation on migration” between the United States and Mexico.
Migrants to be deported under Title 42, a controversial health policy established by former Republican President Donald Trump (20117-2021) and which remains in effect by order of the Supreme Court.
Migrants gather outside a shelter in El Paso, Texas.
The announcement brought the restricted nationalities to eight, Venezuela being the most recent, when migrants from this country began to be expelled from US territory last October.
Nationals 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 extending Title 42 to these other three nationalities by citing a reduction of 90% of the number of arrests of Venezuelans at the border after the restriction began in October.
(Also: This is how I crossed ‘El Hueco’ three times to enter the US)
However, hundreds of migrants from this country continue to enter the country through illegal crossings, without being discovered by the immigration authorities and exposing themselves to situations of greater risk.
The region is experiencing a record migration flow with 2.76 million migrants detained at the US border with Mexico in fiscal 2021.
Read more about the summit in Mexico
Fentanyl trafficking, the capture of Ovidio Guzmán and Mexican energy policy will also put a strain on the summit of US leaders 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 Chapo’s sons most wanted by the US and whose detention led to acts violence that caused 29 deaths in Sinaloa, in northwestern Mexico.
President López Obrador has denied that the operation had anything to do with the summit, but the United States and Canada have stepped up alerts over drug trafficking, especially fentanyl, a synthetic drug produced in Mexico with chemical precursors brought from China.
(Read on: Title 42: ‘Chaos’ at US-Mexico Border After Court Order)
Presidents Joe Biden and Andrés Manuel López Obrador and Prime Minister Justin Trudeau
ROBERTO SCHMIDT / AFP // EFE / Presidency of Mexico // GEOFFROY VAN DER HASSELT /AFP
That country’s Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA), in fact, during 2022 seized enough fentanyl to “kill the entire population” of the United States.
On the economic side, the meeting comes in the midst of 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-owned companies.
Both Biden and Trudeau are facing internal pressure to get López Obrador to change his energy policy.
INTERNATIONAL WRITING*
*With information from AFP and EFE
