Thousands of migrants from Central America, Cuba, Venezuela and other countries made their way through Mexico to the US border Sunday ahead of a visit by Secretary of State Antony Blinken.
Blinken will arrive in Mexico City to negotiate new agreements to control the influx of migrants seeking to enter the United States.
The caravan, estimated at about 6,000 people, many of them families with young children, is the largest in the past year. It is a clear indication that the joint efforts of the Biden administration and the government of President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador to curb migration are proving insufficient.
The caravan set off on Christmas Eve from the town of Tapachula, near the country’s southern border with Guatemala. Security forces monitored the march, repeating a tactic from past years in which authorities waited until marchers were tired to continue marching and then offered them temporary legal status, which many use to continue their journey north. Cristian Rivera, traveling alone, having left his wife and child in his native Honduras:
We’ve been waiting here for three or four months without an answer. Hopefully with this march there will be a change and we can get the permission we need to head north.
In May, López Obrador agreed to accept migrants from countries such as Venezuela, Nicaragua and Cuba, whom the US has barred from entering the country for failing to comply with rules providing new legal avenues for asylum and other forms of migration.
But the deal’s measures to curb the post-Covid migration surge appear insufficient as the number of migrants rises again, disrupting bilateral trade and fuelling anti-migrant sentiment among conservative voters in the US.
As many as 10,000 migrants have been apprehended daily at the US southwest border this month. At the same time, US Customs and Border Protection was forced to suspend cross-border rail service in the Texas cities of Eagle Pass and El Paso as migrants arrived on goods trains.
On Friday, López Obrador said he was willing to work with the US again to solve migration problems. But he also urged the Biden administration to ease sanctions on the leftist governments of Cuba and Venezuela, where about 20 per cent of the 617,865 migrants welcomed across the country in October and November are from, and to send more aid to developing countries in Latin America and elsewhere.
López Obrador said at a press briefing Friday following a phone conversation the day before with President Joe Biden to pave the way for the high level US delegation:
That is what we are going to discuss, it is not just contention.
The US delegation that will meet with the Mexican president on Wednesday will also include White House homeland security adviser Liz Sherwood-Randall and Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas.
However, Mexico’s ability to provide US aid may be limited. In December, the government suspended a programme to repatriate and relocate migrants within Mexico due to a lack of funds. Mexico has found more than 680,000 migrants living in the country illegally this year, and the number of foreigners seeking asylum in the country has reached a record 137,000.
