According to a report by The New York Times, the Biden administration “has been quietly pressing Mexico to ramp up its efforts to limit the flow of migrants.”
During a time when “Democrat President Joe Biden’s border crisis is rapidly spiraling out of control as new reporting on Tuesday evening indicated that the number of unaccompanied children being held in detention facilities is more than 300 percent higher than previously known,” the Biden administration is reportedly looking to a vaccine distribution initiative to help bolster negotiations with Mexico.
“The announcement of the vaccine distribution came at a critical time in negotiations with Mexico,” the Times report continues. “President Biden has moved quickly to dismantle some of former President Trump’s signature immigration policies, halting construction of a border wall, stopping the swift expulsion of children at the border and proposing a pathway to citizenship for millions of immigrants in the United States.”
“But he is clinging to a central element of Mr. Trump’s agenda: relying on Mexico to restrain a wave of people making their way to the United States,” the Times adds.
“Anticipating a surge of migrants and the most apprehensions by American agents at the border in two decades, Mr. Biden asked President Andrés Manuel López Obrador of Mexico in a video call this month whether more could be done to help solve the problem, according to Mexican officials and another person briefed on the conversation,” the report continues, adding that “The Biden administration is facing intense pressure, scrambling to find shelter space for a growing number of migrant children and teenagers held in American detention facilities along the border.”
This news was announced at the same time that “Mexico is reportedly preparing to ‘significantly reinforce’ its efforts to stop illegal immigrants that are entering its southern border with Guatemala as they travel on their way to the U.S.-Mexico border,” according to The Daily Wire.
Mexico will “deploy security forces to cut the flow of migrants, the bulk of whom come from Central America’s so-called Northern Triangle of Guatemala, El Salvador and Honduras, whose economies were battered by the coronavirus pandemic and hurricanes last year,” Reuters reported. “Two of the people said the National Guard militarized police, which led efforts to bring down the number of illegal immigrants entering Mexico from Central America during an increase in 2019, would be at the fore of the containment drive.”
Writing for the Heritage Foundation, James Jay Carafano noted that the current rate of people crossing the border illegally is “six times the crisis level” set by Biden and his current Homeland Security Secretary Mayorkas during the Obama administration.
“When the Trump administration ended, the U.S. was deporting more people than were illegally coming into the country. In less than a month under Biden, the number of people illegally coming into the country is more than 6,000 per day — that’s six times the crisis level as set by the Obama team,” wrote Carafano.