U.S. will send Mexico surplus vaccines as it seeks help on immigration
WASHINGTON — The Biden administration has agreed to supply Mexico with excess doses of coronavirus vaccine, and Mexico is moving to help the United States contain a migration surge along its southern border, according to senior officials from both countries involved in the conversations.
The decision to send AstraZeneca vaccine to Mexico as well as to Canada is expected to be announced Friday. Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador and Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau had asked President Joe Biden to help them fill vaccine shortfalls in recent talks.
Mexican and U.S. officials who described the agreement said it was not a quid pro quo conditioning the delivery of vaccine doses on an enforcement crackdown. Rather, the United States made clear it sought help from Mexico managing a record influx of Central American teenagers and children. Mexico pledged to take back more Central American families “expelled” under a U.S. emergency health order, while also urging Biden to share the U.S. vaccine supply, said the officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the conversations.
“Our top priority remains vaccinating the U.S. population, but the reality is that this virus knows no borders, and ensuring our neighbors can contain the virus is mission-critical to protecting the health and economic security of Americans and for stopping the spread of covid-19 around the globe,” a White House official said.
While cautioning the plan was “not fully finalized yet,” as details are worked out with AstraZeneca, White House spokesperson Jen Psaki told reporters that of 7 million “releasable” doses of the vaccine in the government stockpile, the plan is to send 2.5 million to Mexico and 1.5 million to Canada. Repayment of the “loan,” she said, “could be future AstraZeneca doses, or other doses.”
On Thursday, after this story was published, Mexican Foreign Minister Marcelo Ebrard confirmed that Mexico would receive vaccine from the United States.
“They ask me if it is true that there is a vaccine agreement with the United States to follow up on the conversation between Presidents López Obrador and Biden. Yes, the information is correct. Tomorrow at 9 am I will give you the details because we are still working on it. Good news!” he wrote in a tweet.
Mexico announced Thursday that it would close its southern and northern borders to non-essential travel due to the pandemic. While the United States has kept its border with Mexico closed to non-essential travel during almost the entirety of the pandemic, the closure of Mexico’s southern border appears in part to be an attempt to make migration from Central America more difficult.
The requests for more migration cooperation fit an increasingly familiar pattern in which the United States turns to the Mexican government for enforcement help during moments of crisis.
In recent weeks, Mexico has staged and publicized a number of anti-migration operations, largely along its southern border with Guatemala. Mexico’s national guard has raided the northbound trains that Central American teenagers ride to the U.S. border, stopped migrants with counterfeit United Nations documents and detained migrants crammed in trailers.
Those kinds of operations are not new in Mexico, but they have increased in recent weeks, according to current and former Mexican officials, as the number of Central American migrants passing through the country has grown. Mexican officials have said its immigration enforcement actions are conducted independently of the United States, with an aim to applying its own laws regulating the flow of migrants.
A more visible Mexican immigration enforcement effort is expected to be announced soon, according to current and former Mexican officials.
“It seems that what we’re going to see in the coming days is a reactivation of the Mexican immigration enforcement that Trump negotiated and pressured in 2019. But it appears that the new agreement is with the Biden government, as a reaction to increased migratory flows,” said Tonatiuh Guillén, the former head of Mexico’s migration agency who resigned in 2019.
The new enforcement effort will consist partially of a larger deployment of Mexico’s national guard and – unlike the train raids – will more closely target migrants traveling with smugglers, often in private vehicles.
Roberto Velasco, a spokesman for Mexico’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs, said the two countries “share the common objectives of addressing the root causes of migration in southern Mexico and northern Central America and that of fighting covid-19.”
“On the one hand, both governments cooperate on the basis of an orderly, safe and regular migration system,” Velasco said in an interview. “On the other hand, our governments cooperate against covid-19, from regulating our supply chains to running clinical trials of vaccines against covid-19 in both Mexico and the U.S.”
“However, these are two separate issues, as we look for a more humane migratory system and enhanced cooperation against covid-19, for the benefit of our two countries and the region,” he said.
––– Biden said Tuesday that the administration was “talking with several countries” about the U.S. stockpiled doses of the British-developed AstraZeneca product, which has not been approved for use in the United States. Appeals have also come from Europe.
Key to the decision, U.S. officials said, was first determining whether there was enough vaccine to meet all American needs. That determination was made last week, following FDA approval of a third vaccine, by Johnson & Johnson, in addition to those produced by Pfizer-BioN
Tech and Moderna.
The United States is well ahead of virtually all other countries in the number of total covid-19 deaths but is now also at the top of the list of vaccine distribution. Biden said last week that all Americans 18 and over would be eligible to receive doses by May 1.
In recent weeks, Ebrard has worked closely with Secretary of State Antony Blinken as well as Roberta Jacobson, the former U.S. ambassador to Mexico who Biden has named as a southern border coordinator, officials from both countries said.
“It’s not a quid pro quo. It’s a parallel negotiation,” said a senior Mexican diplomat who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the conversations. “If there is no mass vaccination campaign in Mexico, it makes it more difficult to open the border to nonessential activities. So vaccinations in Mexico are a benefit to the U.S.”
Similarly, the diplomat added, “if migration is under control, it diminishes the image of a crisis and facilitates the approval of immigration reforms that are key for both countries.”
Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas hinted at possible help from Mexico in a statement Tuesday. “We are working with Mexico to increase its capacity to receive expelled families,” he said, without going into detail, while warning the United States is “on pace to encounter more individuals on the southwest border than we have in the last 20 years.”
Mexican officials have told the Biden administration they are willing to alter or delay the implementation of a law passed in November that limits their ability to detain minors. b
Mexican officials cited that law in late January when they stopped taking back some family groups the United States was seeking to return across the border using the public health authority known as Title 42, which President Donald Trump implemented last March.
The law requires children to be held in family-appropriate shelters. Mexican officials have told U.S. authorities those facilities have been full in the state of Tamaulipas, opposite South Texas, and it could not take back parents with younger children.