President Biden, unable or unwilling to secure the border alone, has decided to outsource the job to Mexico — and it’s working.
After a horrific December, illegal activity at the southwestern border cooled in the first part of January. That coincided with increased Mexican efforts to block illegal immigrants from reaching the U.S. boundary.
Mexico has pulled migrants off trains and begun flying or busing those it catches near the U.S. border farther south — some back to Venezuela.
The result is a significant drop in the daily numbers at the U.S. southern border, giving agents a desperately needed reprieve.
In Arizona, the Border Patrol’s Tucson sector was slammed with about 2,700 migrants per day in mid-December. That dropped to about 1,300 per day in mid-January.
In San Diego, the daily flow has dropped from about 1,200 in early December to about 600 in January.
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Administration officials were quick to celebrate. They said negotiations by Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas helped goose America’s southern neighbor. Mexican President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador also said he had suddenly solved a budget snafu that left him with money to restore immigration enforcement efforts.
During a meeting last week in Washington, Mr. Blinken and Mr. Mayorkas pointed to what the State Department called “positive results” from the December negotiations.
Mexico’s ability to derail much of the flow of migrants is no secret, particularly to Trump administration veterans who likewise enlisted its help in 2019 to solve a migrant surge.
They said the question was never about ability but rather motivation.
President Trump approached Mexico with a large stick. He threatened crippling trade tariffs unless Mr. Lopez Obrador started cooperating.
“It drove Mexico to step up, not just to do something, to fundamentally change how they had participated in this crisis in our lifetime,” said Mark Morgan, who ran Customs and Border Protection for Mr. Trump.
The approach included an agreement to deploy tens of thousands of forces to patrol the southern border and step up interior enforcement. Mexico agreed to facilitate Mr. Trump’s “Remain in Mexico” policy by taking back U.S.-captured migrants who were hoping to claim asylum but were made to wait on the other side of the border.
Mexico also facilitated interior deportation flights, which sent migrants deep into Mexico, making it much tougher and more expensive for them to attempt another crossing.
The result was almost instantaneous. CBP recorded 144,116 illegal immigrant encounters at the southern border in May 2019. The number was down to 81,777 two months later and just 42,643 that November. The pace remained fairly low through the rest of the Trump administration, aided partly by pandemic expulsion powers.
This November, Mr. Biden’s team presided over 242,418 illegal immigrant encounters at the southern border — an increase of 468%.
The difference? Mr. Biden called Mr. Trump’s deterrent policies cruel and an affront to American values and spent three years reversing them. He scrapped “Remain in Mexico” and ushered in an era of catch-and-release that helped create the largest wave of unauthorized immigration in U.S. history.
“They basically gave Mexico the tacit approval to stop doing what they were doing,” Mr. Morgan said.
He said a lot of that was the tone. When Mr. Morgan was CBP’s acting commissioner, he said, he could tell Mexican counterparts that Mr. Trump would hear about the results of their conversations.
“To be able to say that was powerful,” Mr. Morgan said. “I guarantee you those discussions aren’t happening right now.”
Instead, he said, Mr. Biden is trying to refashion some of the Mexican deterrent on his terms.
One major question circulating among immigration experts is what the Biden administration promised Mexico in exchange for the new cooperation.
Mr. Morgan said Mexico might be tallying up goodwill that it plans to collect from Mr. Biden later.
Mexico also has a significant financial interest. Mr. Lopez Obrador hinted that his country’s cooperation helped get the U.S. to reopen several border crossings, including two critical freight rail bridges shut down in December because of the chaos.
Analysts said he may also be rewarding the Biden administration for its more lenient approach toward unauthorized migrants from Mexico. Homeland Security data shows CBP caught and released a record 135,000 Mexicans in fiscal year 2023.
The average Mexican sends nearly $400 per month home in remittances, so those 135,000 would be worth nearly a half-billion U.S. dollars to Mexico’s economy.
Adam Isacson, a border expert at the Washington Office on Latin America, said Mexico does help but the numbers rise again eventually.
He said even Mr. Trump’s policies had begun to wear off when the pandemic hit in March 2020, ushering in the expulsion policy.
Mr. Isacson said Mexico could do more by trying to tackle corrupt officials, smugglers and other criminals who conspire to prey on migrants.
“Mexican forces maintain a lot of checkpoints, but somehow hundreds of thousands of migrants per month keep getting waved through,” he said.
More fundamentally, he said, relying on Mexico isn’t a sustainable answer when the flow of people increasingly comes from beyond the traditional Mexican and Central American populations. Asians, Africans, Eastern Europeans, Cubans, Venezuelans and Nicaraguans now populate the daily encounter tally sheets.
“Trying to block these people and cage them in Mexico is futile,” Mr. Isacson said.
• Stephen Dinan can be reached at sdinan@washingtontimes.com.
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