White House cheers Mexico’s ‘swift action against migrants.’ Experts say it’s purely visual

The White House is praising Mexico for taking “swift action against migrants” in the days since senior Biden administration officials met with their counterparts in Mexico City, but experts say the celebration in Washington is much ado about nothing.

A White House National Security Council spokesperson shared information with the Washington Examiner expounding on the takeaways from the Dec. 27, 2023, meeting between Mexican President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador and U.S. State and Homeland Security leaders.

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“Our trip to Mexico last month came at a critical moment to continue building on our cooperation and the significant efforts of our Mexican partners,” the NSC spokesperson wrote in an email. “We are already starting to see the results and DHS has reopened multiple ports of entry along the border recently, in large part, thanks to Mexico’s augmented enforcement efforts.

“Specifically, our Mexican partners have taken swift action against migrants bordering rail and buses, and last week took steps to initiate repatriation flights to Venezuela as part of our regional migration strategy under the Los Angeles Declaration,” the NSC official continued. “We thank Mexico for joining us and we hope other countries will follow suit.”

Mexico’s very public takedowns of an immigrant caravan, border camp, and deterrence of immigrants riding atop northbound freight trains have made headlines since the bilateral talks, but some have suggested the actions were specifically done to garner attention while having the least impact on the crisis overall.

Adam Isacson, defense oversight director for the Washington Office on Latin America, said Mexico had negotiated with Venezuela the ability to deport by plane select Venezuelan immigrants in Mexico.

“There’s been a couple of flights,” Isacson said during a phone call. “That probably has a ripple effect.”

But Isacson and Simon Hankinson, senior research fellow for Heritage Foundation’s border security and immigration center, suggested that it was part of the Mexican government’s overall attempt to do the bare minimum necessary to appease the Biden administration’s request that more be done to deter and stop immigrants who are traveling to the U.S.

“There was no progress that I could see,” Hankinson said in a phone call. “There was absolutely no change that Mexico was making that would stem the flow of people from their southern border to our southern border, which hasn’t ceased since I’ve been at Heritage, and basically since Biden took office, they’ve been doing their absolute best to get people as fast as possible, off their territory and onto ours.”

Illegal immigration by way of the southern border has gone unchanged for 35 months with anywhere between 150,000 and 300,000 immigrants encountered at the southern border per month, and even higher numbers last month.

Lopez Obrador said the U.S. reached out for help days before Christmas. What Biden described in a post on X as a U.S. request to reopen closed border crossings to trade and traffic, Lopez Obrador said was a private plea.

During a press conference on Dec. 28, Lopez Obrador recalled the phone call he received from Biden.

“He was worried about the situation on the border because of the unprecedented number of migrants arriving at the border,” López Obrador said as he recalled the Dec. 20 conversation. “He called me, saying we had to look for a solution together.”

Two days later, the White House announced that Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, Secretary of State Antony Blinken, and White House Homeland Security Advisor Liz Sherwood-Randall would travel to Mexico City to meet with Lopez Obrador on Dec. 27.

But the Lopez Obrador administration used the opportunity to suggest concessions from the U.S. before it changed or appeared to change its approach to the immigration problem. Mexico told the U.S. it needs to reestablish relations with specific authoritarian regimes and reopen closed ports of entry at the shared border.

“[Lopez Obrador’s] solution is that we should cut our sanctions on Venezuela and Cuba and open up our relations with them,” Hankinson said.

Mexican Foreign Minister Alicia Barcena told journalists after the bilateral meeting that she had called on the U.S. to lift port of entry closures — more of a concern for Mexico than for the U.S.

“We are going to help, as we always do,” Lopez Obrador said. “Mexico is helping reach agreements with other countries, in this case Venezuela.”

Mexico was motivated to help out of its own interest that the ports be reopened because of how badly its inability to export goods was affecting its economy. The closures of two railway border crossings between Ciudad Juarez, Chihuahua, and El Paso, Texas, and Piedras Negras, Coahuila, and Eagle Pass, Texas had cost $100 million per day in delayed shipments, according to the Mexican Employers’ Association.

“I think Mexico really wanted those border crossings reopened and was willing to do some things,” Isacson said.

The very visual actions that Mexico took following the talk included giving several thousand immigrants legal status to transit the country, which Isacson explained would allow immigrants to take buses all the way to the U.S. without being stopped by Mexican soldiers or immigration officers.

“That’s not exactly cracking down,” Isacson said.

“They go down there with the begging bowl in their hand and say, ‘Hey, please, could you do something?'” Hankinson said. “So [Lopez Obrador] will do something purely visual, like he’ll break the migrant caravan of 10,000 people up into five caravans of 2,000, but the net result is the same number of people end up at the U.S. border.”

In one instance, Mexican soldiers deployed in northern Mexico stood by and lined a dirt path that immigrants walked to get to the Rio Grande and cross into the U.S. Soldiers stood by and watched without attempting to prevent the crossings.

An immigrant camp set up across the river from Brownsville, Texas, in Matamoros, Tamaulipas, was shut down by the federal military this week. The camp once held 1,500 immigrants, most of whom have crossed into the U.S., leaving just 200 people remaining on site who were forced out by the military.

Numbers reported by the Associated Press revealed that the Mexican military has just 11% of its troops assigned to enforce immigration laws, leaving hundreds of thousands of others potentially available to help with the heavy lift of sealing Mexico’s southern border.

“They don’t really have the infrastructure any more than we do to take on hundreds of thousands of people from Colombia, Venezuela, Central America, Africa, India, Bangladesh, I mean, pretty much every country in the world in proportion,” Hankinson said. “If we were to politely put pressure on Mexico, they could seal off their southern border. They can make it a lot harder for people to cross into Mexico and to come up to our southern border. But the Biden administration just has never had that will or that intent.”

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House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) warned Biden on Wednesday that action to curtail the flow of immigrants through Mexico and to the U.S. was non-negotiable.

“If President Biden wants a supplemental spending bill focused on national security, it better begin by defending America’s national security,” Johnson said during a press conference in Eagle Pass. “It begins right here on our southern border. We want to get the border closed and secured first.”