The president of the United States, Joe Biden, will visit the border with Mexico for the first time this Sunday, where records are being broken in the arrival of migrants, before moving to the neighboring country to meet his Mexican counterpart, Andrés Manuel López Obrador , and the Prime Minister of Canada, Justin Trudeau.
Biden will arrive this afternoon in the city of El Paso, Texas, one of the epicenters of the current migratory wave, where he will meet with local officials and visit the Las Americas border bridge, which connects the US territory with Mexico.
The president will also visit one of the city’s migrant service centers that receives federal funds and meet with community leaders.
The president will be accompanied by the Secretary of National Security, Alejandro Mayorkas.
Biden’s trip comes days after his government announced new immigration restrictions, which have been criticized by both members of his party and human rights organizations.
As part of an agreement with Mexico, the US will begin expelling migrants from Haiti, Nicaragua and Cuba who cross the border irregularly. The López Obrador government agreed to receive up to 30,000 migrants a month, according to US authorities.
With this measure, the Biden Executive expands the use of Title 42, a controversial health regulation that was imposed by then-President Donald Trump (2017-2021) and that the current Administration has maintained under court order.
The announcement brought to eight the nationalities that are subject to the restriction, Venezuela being the most recent, when migrants from this country began to be expelled from US territory last October. Citizens of Mexico and the countries of the Northern Triangle of Central America (Honduras, Guatemala and El Salvador) are also subject to Title 42.
The Department of Homeland Security justified the expansion of Title 42 to these other three nationalities citing a 90% reduction in the number of arrests of Venezuelans at the border after it began applying the restriction in October.
However, hundreds of migrants from this country continue to enter the country through illegal crossings, without being detected by immigration authorities and exposing themselves to situations of greater risk.
A group of four influential Democratic senators, including New Jersey legislator Bob Menéndez, chairman of the House Foreign Relations Committee, rejected the government’s news.
“Continuing to use this failed and inhumane Trump-era policy will do nothing to restore the rule of law at the border,” Menéndez, Ray Luján, Alex Padilla and Cory Booker wrote in a statement.
Since it went into effect in 2020, Title 42 has allowed the arrest of more than 2.5 million migrants at the border, according to data from the International Rescue Committee.
SOURCE: EFE
