The left-wing Mexican government is sounding the alarm over President Joe Biden’s border policy, stating that it is “stoking illegal immigration” and “creating business for organized crime.”
The comments from Mexican officials were first reported by Reuters who said Mexico is “worried the new U.S. administration’s asylum policies are stoking illegal immigration and creating business for organized crime.”
“They see him as the migrant president, and so many feel they’re going to reach the United States,” Mexican President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador said while talking about Biden. “We need to work together to regulate the flow, because this business can’t be tackled from one day to the next.”
The report made some damning revelations including how the cartels are “diversifying methods of smuggling and winning clients as they eye U.S. measures that will ‘incentivize migration.’”
- U.S. policies that Mexican officials believe is driving the criminal activity include “support for victims of gangs and violence, streamlining of the legalization process, and suspension of Trump-era accords that deported people to Central America.”
- The Mexican cartels changed their modus operandi “from the day Biden took office” and are now showing “unprecedented” levels of sophistication in their criminal activity, which includes “briefing clients on the latest immigration rules, using technology to outfox authorities, and disguising smuggling operations as travel agencies.” The smugglers communicate with the migrants on numerous social media channels to update them on “impending checkpoints, when freight trains they can jump on pass, where to stay and how to navigate immigration laws.”
- Those trying to enter the U.S. are now traveling in smaller groups and are taking less traveled routes to avoid detection, which the report said were even more dangerous than the already dangerous trek through Mexico.
- The smugglers are telling the migrants to go to their local authorities and make complaints that they have been the victims of crime that way they can apply for asylum in the U.S. and the migrants are being told to bring children so it is easier for them to apply for asylum.
- To ease their passage, smugglers advise Central American clients to register complaints with authorities saying they have been victims of extortion or, for young men, that they have faced death threats from street gangs, the assessments show.
- Mexico is also concerned that “there could be a significant influx in migrants from outside the region – the Caribbean, Asia, Africa and the Middle East – as coronavirus-led border restrictions begin easing.”
The border crisis is getting so bad that the administration is “holding record numbers of unaccompanied migrant teens and children in detention cells for far longer than legally allowed and federal health officials fell further behind in their race to find space for them in shelters” according to the Washington Post.