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Joe Biden has ordered some of his most senior officials, including the secretary of state, to travel to Mexico in the coming days for talks with the Mexican president amid a surge in migrants trying to enter the US that has prompted the closing of several border crossings.
Biden and his Mexican counterpart, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, spoke about troubles along the US’s southern border on Thursday and agreed “additional enforcement actions are urgently needed” to reopen shuttered crossings, said John Kirby, spokesperson for the US national security council.
The Mexican outreach comes as the surge in arrivals along the nearly 2,000-mile US-Mexico border has become a significant political, economic and diplomatic problem for the US president.
In recent days, Biden’s efforts to cajole Congress into passing a sweeping foreign aid package, including billions of dollars in support for Ukraine and Israel, have been held up by Republican objections that he is not directing enough resources to securing the southern border.
The White House has attempted to redirect criticism to Congress, arguing that measures to increase border patrol agents and speed up asylum applications are being held up by a failure to pass funding legislation.
“Look, the president has done everything that he can, right, on his own,” White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre told reporters, noting the Biden administration had already increased the number of border patrol agents this year.
But Raj Shah, deputy chief of staff for Mike Johnson, the Republican Speaker of the House, issued a statement saying such claims were “an insult to the American people”.
“In fact, it has been this administration’s policies . . . that have led to the historic crisis we are seeing on a daily basis,” Shah added.
Antony Blinken, secretary of state; Alejandro Mayorkas, secretary of homeland security; and White House homeland security adviser Liz Sherwood-Randall are to meet López Obrador and his team “to discuss further actions that can be taken together to address current border challenges,” Kirby said. Blinken and Sherwood-Randall last visited Mexico in October.
The number of border “encounters” reported by US authorities — including migrants claiming asylum at ports of entry and those detained after illegally crossing — surged to a record 2.5mn in the 12 months to the end of September. The figure is up from 2.4mn in 2022 and 1.7mn in 2021.
US Customs and Border Patrol has been overwhelmed by the surge in arrivals, prompting the closure of several crossings between the US and Mexico as officers are redeployed to stem the flow. This week, US authorities were forced to shut down rail bridges into the Texas cities of El Paso and Eagle Pass — some of the busiest crossings between the two countries.
Johnson and other Republicans have called on the administration to demand Mexico take more aggressive steps to stem the flow. They have also demanded the White House reverse certain policies, including “catch and release”, where migrants are allowed to stay in the US while they await an immigration hearing.
Biden’s predecessor Donald Trump took a more antagonistic approach to the border, famously vowing to build a wall that was never completed. Trump has raised border security again in his 2024 run for the presidency, using inflammatory language while criticising Biden for lack of action.
The number of border encounters also reached record levels during the Trump administration, before dropping off during the Covid-19 pandemic.
The current crisis has prompted scathing rebukes from southern state governors. Katie Hobbs, the Democratic governor of Arizona, this month blasted “federal inaction” as she ordered National Guard troops to the border in response to what she described as an “unmitigated humanitarian crisis”.
Texas’s Republican governor Greg Abbott has repeatedly clashed with the federal government which he says has left the state “to fend for itself”. The Biden administration successfully sued him over the erection of a barricade of buoys and razor wire in the Rio Grande, though he has vowed to appeal against the decision as far as the Supreme Court.
This week Abbott prompted further accusations of overstepping state powers by signing new legislation that will allow state and local law enforcement to arrest people entering the state without authorisation — a power previously reserved for federal agents.
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