WashPost: Mexico Ends Trump-Era Border Cooperation

MESA, AZ - JUNE 24: An undocumented Guatemalan immigrant, chained for being charged as a c
John Moore/Getty Images
Neil Munro

Mexico has stopped accepting the return of most migrants caught at the U.S. border, prompting U.S. officials to release them into the United States, according to the Washington Post.

The newspaper reported Wednesday:

The Mexican government has stopped taking back Central American families “expelled” at the U.S. border under a Trump-era emergency health order related to the coronavirus, a shift that has prompted U.S. Customs and Border Protection to release more parents and children into the U.S. interior, according to five U.S. officials.

[…]

Mexico’s new policy has been applied unevenly. In Nogales, for example, families continued to be returned to Mexico — deposited on the streets rather than taken to family shelters. In a number of border cities, families continue to be returned to Mexico.

The newspaper posted a statement from the Customs and Border Protection Agency:

CBP has seen a steady increase in border encounters since April 2020, which, aggravated by COVID-19 restrictions and social distancing guidelines, has caused some facilities to reach maximum, safe holding capacity. Whenever feasible we are seeking alternatives to detention in cases where the law allows.

However, Mexico is accepting the return of single adults, the Post said.

Biden’s decision to restart the catch and release of migrants during the epidemic will likely encourage many more poor migrants to take the risky trek to jobs in the United States. The exodus will further damage their home countries’ economies and then flood into the U.S. job market, even as millions of blue-collar Americans seek jobs amid the coronavirus recovery.

Until recently, Mexico was cooperating with the agencies’ block on the arrival of migrants amid the Coronaviru epidemic. The rule, dubbed Title 42, allowed border agencies to block almost 200,000 migrants and end them back into Mexico, despite the migrants’ attempt to claim asylum.

Foreign Affairs magazine reported February 1:

Mexico’s president is spoiling for a fight, and Washington must not wait for risks to become inevitabilities that could imperil containment of the pandemic and recovery from the disruption it has wrought.

[…]

[President Andrés ] López Obrador does not fear Biden the way he feared Trump. And so a politically calculated discourse of national sovereignty and anti-Americanism is again more useful than costly. With it, López Obrador can rally his base in advance of the midterm elections in July 2021, when 15 governorships and control of Congress will be at stake. He can make Biden a foil and a distraction from Mexico’s deep economic recession and the ravages of COVID-19.

The U.S. border agencies do not appear to be detaining any of the mothers, teenagers, and children or prosecuting them for illegal migration. Instead, they are being released to join their illegal-alien spouses and fathers throughout the United States. This reunification will reduce pressure on illegal migrants to leave the United States. Many of the teenagers are expected to take jobs in the growing child-labor market.

The return of catch and release is driven by Biden’s campaign promises, which denounced the policy of filing criminal charges against migrants who brought children as they broke U.S. border laws. The criminal charges required the temporary operation of people from their children, who were kept in child shelters while the adults were held in jails.  On February 2, Biden signed an Executive Order that creates the new “Family Unification” directive:

Section 1.  Policy.  It is the policy of my Administration to respect and value the integrity of families seeking to enter the United States. … My Administration will protect family unity and ensure that children entering the United States are not separated from their families, except in the most extreme circumstances where a separation is clearly necessary for the safety and well-being of the child or is required by law.

Pro-migration groups along the border welcome the renewed migration:  Team Brownsville, a group that helps migrants move north, reported on its Facebook page.

There’s nothing that escapes people’s notice in the {Mexican migrant] camp in this time of connectivity, and they already know that CBP is releasing some families at our Brownsville bus station. We don’t know the specifics of why there is an increase in people leaving CBP custody to travel to their sponsors, but we have received about 50 people a day at our bus station for the past several days.

Some of the migrants are so poor they will need further aid when they arrive at their target cities and towns, the Brownsville group reported:

Volunteers will eventually be needed countrywide to receive these families, orient them, and help them adjust to their new homes. Too often, we’ve gotten desperate calls from families who have arrived at their sponsor’s home only to realize that there is no room, not enough money to feed everyone, and no resources to help.

The economic migration into Americans’ jobs is expected to grow rapidly as coyotes escort more fee-paying migrants through the emerging “family unification” policy loophole in U.S. border laws.

Roughly half of the 3.5 million migrants who arrived between 2014 and 2020 are still in the United States, according to a December report by the Department of Homeland Security.

For years, a wide variety of pollsters have shown deep and broad opposition to labor migration — or the hiring of temporary contract workers into the jobs sought by young U.S. graduates.

The multiracial, cross-sex, non-racist, class-based, priority-driven, and solidarity-themed opposition to labor migration coexists with generally favorable personal feelings toward legal immigrants and immigration in theory.

The deep public opposition is built on the widespread recognition that migration moves money from employees to employers, from families to investors, from young to old, from children to their parents, from homebuyers to real estate investors, and from the central states to the coastal states.

 

 

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