A girl from Honduras holds a sign asking President Joe Biden to let her in during a demonstration demanding that U.S. immigration policy should be clearer, March 2, 2021.
Mexican President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador revealed earlier this month his concern that Biden’s asylum policy is encouraging illegal immigration and fueling human trafficking at the border.
“They [illegal immigrants] see him [Biden] as the immigration president, so many feel they can reach the United States,” Mexican President Obrador said after a video meeting with Biden on the morning of March 1, Reuters reported.
“We need to work together to regulate the flow (of illegal immigrants) because this business can’t be dragged out from one day to the next to deal with it.” Obrador added.
The number of illegal border crossings at the U.S. southern border has steadily increased since October 2020. According to Customs and Border Protection (CBP), patrols encountered 296,259 crossings at the southwest border between October 2020 and January 2021, a 79.6 percent increase from 164,932 during the same period last year.
In February of this year alone, the number of patrol encounters across the border soared to 100,441, approaching the mid-2019 level of 144,116, a 15-year high recorded that year.
Since the Biden Administration was sworn in Jan. 20, Mexico has been calling on the U.S. to provide development assistance to Central American countries to stem the tide of illegal immigration. A Mexican official noted on condition of anonymity that criminal groups “have shifted since the day Biden took office” and “evolved” their modus operandi.
The official said the cartels now operate at an “unprecedented” level of sophistication, including: smugglers use social media to list real-Time updates on the status of border checkpoints and possible transportation options along the route to the border, helping many evade detection by the U.S. Border Patrol.
Smugglers also advise their clients to register with U.S. authorities claiming they are victims of extortion or to tell young people that they face death threats from street gangs.
Mexican officials added, “Migrants have become a commodity. Human smuggling is now as lucrative for local gangs as drug smuggling. But if a package of drugs is lost in the ocean, it’s gone. If migrants are lost, we’re talking about people.”
According to Reuters, Mexico’s assessment of testimony and intelligence gathered concluded that Biden’s policies would “incentivize immigrants” to come to the United States.
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