Mexico a key player in the US election
Leader has sway on immigration
MEXICO CITY — Migrants were streaming across the US southern border in record numbers, international rail bridges were abruptly shut down, and official ports of entry closed.
Desperate for help in December, President Biden called President Andrés Manuel López Obrador of Mexico, who told him to quickly send a delegation to the Mexican capital, according to several US officials.
The White House rushed to do so. Soon after, Mexico beefed up enforcement. Illegal border crossings into the United States plummeted by January.
As immigration moves to the forefront of the US presidential campaign, Mexico has emerged as a key player on an issue with the potential to sway the election, and the White House has worked hard to preserve López Obrador’s cooperation.
The administration says publicly that its diplomacy has been a success.
But behind closed doors, some senior Biden officials have come to see López Obrador as an unpredictable partner, who they say isn’t doing enough to consistently control his southern border or police routes being used by smugglers to bring millions of migrants to the United States, according to several US and Mexican officials. None of them would speak on the record about delicate diplomatic relations.
“We aren’t getting the cooperation we should be getting,” said John Feeley, former deputy chief of mission in Mexico from 2009 to 2012. Feeley said the two countries did more joint patrols and investigations to secure the border during the Obama administration.
“I know what it looks like when there is genuine cooperation,” Feeley said, “as opposed to what we have now, which is being touted as great cooperation but I think is bupkis.”
While in office, President Donald Trump used the threat of tariffs to coerce López Obrador into implementing his crackdown on migration.
Biden needs Mexico just as much but has taken a different approach, focusing instead on avoiding conflict with the powerful and sometimes volatile Mexican leader in hopes it will preserve his cooperation.
“AMLO has correctly assessed his leverage and has acknowledged that we’re using ours,” said Juan Gonzalez, Biden’s former top Latin America adviser, using López Obrador’s nickname.
Liz Sherwood-Randall, US homeland security adviser, said that the White House works “collaboratively at the highest levels with the government of Mexico,” adding: “President Lopez Obrador has been a critically important partner to President Biden.”
Since 2022, Mexico has added hundreds of immigration checkpoints and increased enforcement personnel tenfold, according to figures provided by the US State Department. Mexico is also detaining more migrants than at any point in recent history.
Yet, the numbers arriving at the southern border have remained stubbornly high. There were more than 2 million illegal border crossings in each of the past two fiscal years, twice as many as in 2019, the busiest year for apprehensions under Trump.
The lull at the start of this year was still one of the highest January months on record for illegal crossings, according to US federal data. Apprehensions ticked up again in February.
In Mexico, officials say they have reached the limit of what they are able to achieve in the face of an extraordinary influx that has overwhelmed their country, too.
Migration has spiked because of factors difficult for any one government to control: persistent poverty, raging violence, the effects of climate change, and the lingering impact of the pandemic that have left people desperate for any chance at survival.