Unable or unwilling to secure the border alone, President Biden has decided to outsource the job to Mexico — and it’s working.
After a horrific December, illegal activity at the southwestern border has cooled in the first part of January, coinciding with Mexican officials stepping up efforts to block illegal immigrants from reaching the U.S. boundary in the first place.
Mexico has pulled migrants off trains and begun flying or busing those it catches near the U.S. border further south — some back to Venezuela.
The result is a significant drop in the daily numbers at the U.S. southern border, giving agents a desperately needed reprieve.
In Arizona, the Border Patrol’s Tucson sector had been slammed with about 2,700 migrants a day in mid-December. That dropped to about 1,300 a day in mid-January.
In San Diego, the daily flow has dropped from about 1,200 in early December to about 600 in January.
Administration officials were quick to celebrate, pointing to negotiations by Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas as helping goose America’s southern neighbor. Mexican President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador also said he’d suddenly solved a budget snafu that left him with money to restore immigration enforcement efforts.
During a meeting last week in Washington, Mr. Blinken and Mr. Mayorkas celebrated the drop in crossings, pointing to what the State Department called “positive results” from the December meeting.
That Mexico can derail much of the flow of people is no secret, particularly to Trump administration veterans who likewise enlisted Mexico’s help in 2019 to solve a migrant surge.
They said it’s never been a question of ability but rather one of motivation.
President Trump approached Mexico with a large stick, threatening crippling trade tariffs unless Mr. Lopez Obrador started cooperating.
“It drove Mexico to step up, not just to do something — to fundamentally change how they had participated in this crisis in our lifetime,” said Mark Morgan, who ran Customs and Border Protection for Mr. Trump.
That included agreeing to deploy tens of thousands of forces to patrol the southern border and step up interior enforcement. Mexico also agreed to facilitate Mr. Trump’s Remain in Mexico policy, taking back migrants the U.S. had caught and who were hoping to claim asylum but were made to wait outside the U.S.
Mexico also facilitated interior deportation flights, which sent people back deep into Mexico, making it much tougher — and more expensive — for them to attempt another crossing.
The result was almost instantaneous. CBP recorded 144,116 illegal immigrant encounters at the southern border in May 2019. Two months later, that number was down to 81,777, and by November 2019, it was just 42,643. The pace remained fairly low through the rest of the Trump administration, aided in part by pandemic-era expulsion powers.
By contrast, this past November, Mr. Biden’s team presided over 242,418 illegal immigrant encounters at the southern border — an increase of 468%.
The difference? Mr. Biden spent three years erasing Mr. Trump’s deterrent policies, calling them cruel and an affront to American values. That included scrapping Remain in Mexico and ushering in an era of catch-and-release that helped spur the largest wave of unauthorized immigration in U.S. history.
“They basically gave Mexico the tacit approval to stop doing what they were doing,” Mr. Morgan said.
He said a lot of that was the tone. When Mr. Morgan was CBP’s acting commissioner, he said he could tell Mexican counterparts that Mr. Trump would hear about the results of their conversations.
“To be able to say that was powerful,” Mr. Morgan said. “I guarantee you those discussions aren’t happening right now.”
Instead, he said, Mr. Biden is trying to refashion some of the Mexican deterrent on his own terms.
One major question circulating among immigration experts is what the Biden administration promised Mexico in exchange for the new cooperation.
Mr. Morgan said Mexico might be storing up goodwill that it plans to collect from Mr. Biden later.
But Mexico also has some significant financial interest in playing ball. Mr. Lopez-Obrador hinted that his country’s cooperation helped get the U.S. to reopen several border crossings, including two critical freight rail bridges that had been shut down in December because of the border chaos.
Analysts said he may also be rewarding the Biden administration for its more lenient approach toward unauthorized migrants from Mexico. New Homeland Security data shows CBP caught and released a record 135,000 Mexicans in fiscal year 2023.
The average Mexican sends nearly $400 a month home in remittances, so those 135,000 would be worth nearly half a billion U.S. dollars to Mexico’s economy.
Adam Isacson, a border expert at the Washington Office on Latin America, said Mexico’s help does push the border numbers down, but eventually, they rise again.
He said even Mr. Trump’s policies had begun to wear off when the pandemic hit in March 2020, ushering in the new expulsion policy.
Mr. Isacson said Mexico could do more to help by trying to tackle corrupt officials, smugglers and other criminals who conspire to prey on migrants.
“Mexican forces maintain a lot of checkpoints, but somehow hundreds of thousands of migrants per month keep getting waved through,” he said.
But more fundamentally, he said, relying on Mexico isn’t a sustainable answer when the flow of people is increasingly coming from beyond the traditional Mexican and Central American populations. Asians, Africans, Eastern Europeans, Cubans, Venezuelans and Nicaraguans now populate the daily encounter tally sheets.
“Trying to block these people and cage them in Mexico is futile,” Mr. Isacson said.