Biden says US-Mexico border will stay ‘chaotic for a while’
WASHINGTON — President Joe Biden predicted Tuesday that the U.S.-Mexico border would be “chaotic for a while” when pandemicrelated restrictions end, as 550 active-duty troops began arriving and migrants weighed whether or when to cross.
The restrictions have been in place since 2020, and allowed U.S. officials to quickly return migrants over the border. They are ending later this week and the U.S. is putting into place a set of new policies that will clamp down on illegal crossings while offering migrants a legal path to the United States if they apply online through a government app, have a sponsor and pass background checks.
Biden said his administration was working to make the change orderly. “But it remains to be seen,” he told reporters. “It’s going to be chaotic for a while.”
Biden and Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador spoke for roughly an hour Tuesday to discuss the border. Mexico shares a 1,951-mile border with the United States, so the nation is key to the success of any plans by the United States to control immigration at the southern border.
Migrants are already arriving. About 100 people — mostly from Colombia — came across the border before dawn Tuesday and walked nearly two hours through remote, boulderstrewn mountains east of San Diego to a sandy plateau where Border Patrol agents watched over them.
Andres Barra, 39, left Colombia on Friday, flew to Tijuana, Mexico, and paid a smuggler $300 to guide him to a mountain peak near the agents, to whom they surrendered. He fled Colombia because frequent robbery and extortion made it difficult to live.
He said he wanted to enter the United States while the restrictions were still in effect, because he heard it would be more difficult after Thursday.
“It won’t be so easy anymore,” he said.
Agents in the U.S. Border Patrol’s relatively quiet El Centro, California, sector stopped about 260 migrants a day over a four- or five-day period through Sunday, up from about 90 a day the previous week, said Gregory Bovino, the sector chief. On Monday, agents found migrants from 22 countries.
In the Mexican border city of Reynosa, across from McAllen, Texas, groups handed out fliers Tuesday that explained in English and Haitian Creole how to register for the CBP One app that the U.S. has been using to allow migrants to schedule an appointment to try to gain admittance to the U.S.
Standing in Reynosa’s central square Tuesday, Phanord Renel of Haiti said he would not risk deportation to cross. “We don’t want to go back there (Haiti) because the situation is very complicated there,” he said. “If we can’t cross, we have to put up with it here, maybe the government will do something for us, but cross illegally — no.”