US Secretary of State Anthony Blinken and other top Biden administration officials will visit Mexico on Wednesday to discuss common security issues, including the smuggling of the synthetic opioid fentanyl, as well as the arms trade and rising immigration.
The latest round of the High Level Security Dialogue brings together Blinken, US Attorney General Merrick Garland and Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, among others, with their Mexican counterparts for two days of talks.
Increased immigration flows are expected to be discussed as the Biden administration comes under increasing pressure from Republicans and mayors from the president’s own party to do more to slow immigrant arrivals.
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Blinken was scheduled to discuss immigration on Wednesday with Mexican Foreign Minister Alicia Barcena, as well as the foreign ministers of Colombia and Panama.
New York Mayor Eric Adams was also due to arrive in Mexico City on Wednesday as part of a Latin American tour aimed at learning more about asylum seekers’ routes to the US
Mexican Foreign Minister Alicia Barcena, left, appears with Secretary of State Anthony Blinken, Friday, Sept. 29, 2023, in Washington. (AP Photo/Mark Schiefelbein)
In August, the U.S. Border Patrol made 181,509 apprehensions on the border with Mexico, a 37 percent increase from July but little changed from August 2022 and well below the more than 220,000 in December, according to data released in September.
On Tuesday night, hundreds of migrants arrived in the northern Mexican border city of Ciudad Juarez, across the border from El Paso, Texas, by freight train. They got off the train and immediately made their way to the border where they stopped at coils of barbed wire.
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Elizabeth Romero, 32, left Venezuela three months earlier with her husband and 6-year-old son. She was three weeks pregnant at the time and spent her first trimester hiking across the jungle-clad border of Colombia and Panama and more recently spent three days on the freight train that brought her to the US-Mexico border.
She and her son, who celebrated his 6th birthday on a boxcar this week, came down with a fever. They left Venezuela because they could not make ends meet financially. Her family remains there.
“We hope the United States welcomes us and gives us the support we need,” Romero said. They planned to turn themselves into US authorities at the border because they had already waited three months without receiving an appointment to claim asylum through CBP One, a mobile app.
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The US tried to persuade Mexico and countries further south to do more. In April, the US, Panama and Colombia announced a campaign to slow migration through the treacherous Darien Gap that separates Colombia and Panama. But migration through the jungle has accelerated and is expected to reach around 500,000 people this year.
