Ten thousand migrants are heading to the U.S. border on a daily basis, Mexico’s president said this week.
Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador made the remarks Monday, saying the thousands of migrants making their way north through his country often hail from other countries, the Associated Press reported.
About 6,000 migrants a day have come into Mexico from Guatemala in the last week, contributing to the surge at the U.S. border, Obrador said.
Obrador criticized the U.S. for economic sanctions on Cuba and Venezuela, saying the sanctions are contributing to the stream of migrants heading to America. Many of the migrants currently arriving at the southern border are fleeing economic and political upheaval in Venezuela.
Last week, the Mexican president also criticized the U.S. for giving large amounts of aid to Ukraine, saying the U.S. could instead invest in developing the poor Latin American countries from which many migrants come.
“They don’t do anything,” Obrador said of the U.S. on Friday.
“It’s more, a lot more, what they authorize for the war in Ukraine than what they give to help with poverty in Latin America and the Caribbean,” the Mexican president said.
Meanwhile, the migrant crisis at the border has been ramping up in recent months, and U.S. border authorities have struggled to handle the huge influx of people crossing illegally.
In August, there were nearly 233,000 migrant encounters at the southern border, the highest August on record, Customs and Border Protection (CBP) said. That number marks a jump from under 184,000 encounters border authorities saw in July.
Last month’s numbers are also a significant rise from August a year ago, when there were only 204,000 migrant encounters. September’s numbers are already tens of thousands of encounters higher than last year as well.
Some border communities are so impacted by the problem that they have sent migrants up north.
The Democratic mayor of El Paso, Texas said last month that the city has reached “a breaking point” chartered five buses to take migrants to New York, Chicago, and Denver over the weekend.
El Paso was seeing more than 2,000 migrants per day last month, pushing the border city’s shelters and resources past capacity.
Up north, major cities are battling the migrant crisis as they attempt to shelter the thousands of people arriving weekly.
New York City is struggling to metabolize more than 113,000 migrants who have shown up in the city since last spring, nearly 60,000 of whom are still being housed on the city’s dime.
The city has already spent more than $1.2 billion on the migrants and is projected to spend up to $5 billion.
“This issue will destroy New York City,” Mayor Eric Adams, a Democrat, said last month. “We’re getting 10,000 migrants a month. … Every community in this city is going to be impacted.”
Chicago has been scrambling to respond to a migrant crisis before the cold winter months arrive. The country’s third-largest city has experienced an influx of about 14,000 migrants recently, many from Venezuela, and has already spent at least $250 million on the issue.