Mexican officials claim they have a deal to help guard Americans’ open border against millions of President Joe Biden’s economic migrants.
“Mexican officials vowed to carry out a series of 15 actions as part of the [claimed] agreement, some in coordination with [U.S.] Customs and Border Protection and [a Mexican railroad company] Ferromex … It will also allow US border patrol agents to expel [some] migrants through the Ciudad Juárez international bridge, which connects to El Paso,” said a September 24 report by CNN.
More importantly, Mexican officials also dangled a deal to stop or reduce the flood of migrants from Venezuela, Cuba, and other countries, according to CNN:
[Mexico] said it will carry out negotiations with the governments of Venezuela, Brazil, Nicaragua, Colombia and Cuba to confirm receipt of their citizens deported from the US-Mexico border.
However, U.S. officials have not announced any deal, even as they posted a vague press release about continued negotiations with Mexico.
“We are continuing to work closely with our partners in Mexico to increase security and address irregular migration along our shared border,” said a September 24 statement from Troy Miller, the stand-in temporary Commissioner of the U.S. Customs and Border Protection agency.
The Mexican claims of a deal likely are a negotiating tactic with Biden, who is vulnerable to election-year pressure from Mexico because Mayorkas opened the border to a very unpopular wave of migrants. For example, Mayorkas refuses to detain asylum-seekers — as required by law — and released 260,000 more migrants in August.
RELATED: Texas Military Convoy Heads to Ground Zero of Resurgent Border Crisis
“Mexican Secretary of Foreign Affairs Alicia Bárcena … [said] that Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador wants to meet US President Joe Biden in Washington in November to discuss migration, along with drugs and firearms trafficking,” CNN noted.
The claimed deal could be good for Biden because it would hide election-year migration –while redirecting inevitable criticism from Biden’s pro-migration progressive and business allies towards Mexico.
But any Mexican curbs would be difficult to implement if Biden and other U.S. officials let migrants get jobs in the United States. As long as migrants believe they will get U.S. jobs, they will borrow money to pay coyotes and bribe Mexican police.
Existing Deals
Mayorkas has quietly negotiated quid-pro-quo deals with Mexico to grow and hide the flood of migrants up to and through the U.S. border. Many of those migrants are being aided by Mayorkas-funded non-profit groups and are moved by U.S.-funded buses up to the U.S. border.
The existing deals are likely intended by Mayorkas to avoid a repeat of the 2021 Del Rio PR disaster, when Mexico directed about 30,000 Haitian migrants to cross the Rio Grande at Del Rio, Texas. That extraordinary scene was covered briefly on the evening networks, causing significant damage to Biden’s poll ratings.
But Mexico also gains from the border cooperation.
For example, Mayorkas allows 50,000 Mexicans to settle each month in Americans’ communities, regardless of Congress’ immigration law. The monthly transfer of 50,000 Mexicans adds up to 600,000 Mexicans each year being allowed to get Americans’ jobs, homes, government resources, and political power.
RELATED — EXCLUSIVE: 1,500 Migrants Cross Border into Texas in Six Hours
Mexico’s president, Obrador, has repeatedly called for a border deal. In January 2023, for example, Obrador used a press conference with Biden to celebrate Mexican migration into the United States, saying:
Just imagine: There are 40 million Mexicans in the United States — 40 million [including people] who were born here in Mexico, [or] who are the children of people who were born in Mexico.
But he also demanded a U.S. amnesty for Mexico’s illegals — and praised Biden’s pro-migration policies:
I fully trust President Biden … I’ve asked President Biden to insist before the U.S. Congress to regularize the migration situations of millions of Mexicans who have been in the States working, living in the United States, and contributing to the development of that great nation, which is the United States of America.
…
We do celebrate the fact that the U.S. administration has … made the decision, rather, to have an orderly migration flow in the case, for instance, of our Venezuelan brothers and sisters … [and] a lot of migrants from Venezuela, from Nicaragua, Colombia, Ecuador.
Amid the U.S.-Mexican negotiations over migration, Biden has not negotiated any significant deal to stop the flow of Mexico’s deadly drugs into Americans’ communities. The opioid drugs kill at least 70,000 Americans each year — or more than the 55,000 Americans who died in Vietnam — even as Washington D.C. does little to threaten or bribe Mexico to stop the drug smuggling.
Numbers
Biden’s deputies welcomed about 260,000 migrants across the border in August. That is 23 times the inflow of 11,652 migrants in President Donald Trump’s last full month before his defeat in the 2020 election.
Biden’s growing inflow is intended to help Biden’s business allies and progressive supporters. But it is difficult to hide the unpopular inflow from the voters — and it is expected to surpass 400,000 this month.
The far smaller inflow under Trump was enabled by Trump’s willingness to apply trade pressure against Mexico. That economic pressure quickly prompted Mexico to curb migration — but it ended once Biden was inaugurated in January 2021.
Border Crisis: Video Shows Baby Clothes, Opened Condom Wrapper on Southern Border
The 260,000 Biden arrivals in August 2023 include 232,972 migrants allowed across the border as Title 8 migrants, plus the monthly inflow of roughly 30,000 migrants each month who are being invited to fly into U.S. airports from their home countries.
The August inflow also included 55,502 Mexican migrants, even though Mayorkas has the legal authority to send the migrants back over the U.S.-Mexican border.
Details
CNN reported the deal on Sunday:
As part of the agreement, Mexico agreed to “depressurize” its northern cities, which border the El Paso, San Diego and Eagle Pass, Texas, where the mayor has declared a state of emergency. They will also implement more than a dozen actions to prevent migrants from risking their lives by using the railway system to reach the US-Mexico border, according to Mexico’s National Migration Institute.
The TexasTribune.org described the claimed deal:
Mexico will deport certain migrants from some of its northern border cities as part of an agreement with U.S. immigration officials who have reported a sharp increase of migrants attempting to cross the border in recent weeks, according to Mexico’s immigration enforcement authority.
Mexico’s [government-run] National Migration Institute said that it wants to “depressurize” the border cities of Ciudad Juárez, Piedras Negras, Tijuana and the northern state of Tamaulipas, where large numbers of migrants have recently crossed the border and where U.S. Border Patrol agents have arrested thousands of them.
The institute didn’t say when the deportations will begin or how long they will last, adding that it will first negotiate with Venezuela, Brazil, Nicaragua, Colombia and Cuba to make sure those countries will receive its citizens.
Mexico’s migration agency issued a statement about the meeting, complete with a photo of Mayorkas’s deputies.