Mexican President Andrés Manuel Lopez Obrador revealed a series of commands describing what the United States must do in exchange for Mexico’s assistance in curbing illegal immigration.
Lopez Obrador demanded the U.S. give $20 billion to Latin American countries, provide work visas for 10 million migrants who have been in the United States for at least ten years, and end sanctions against Venezuela, according to Fox News.
A Biden administration official told NBC News that Lopez Obrador has a “very ambitious agenda.”
“For some of these things, we would need Congress to act. We share the vision that we need to lift up the region,” they said.
American Faith reported that López Obrador told the Biden administration, “It is more efficient and more humane to invest in the development of the people and that is what we have always proposed.”
“The migration issue is going to intensify,” he stated.
Following the meeting with Mexico’s president, Secretary of State Antony Blinken said on X, “As we made clear in Mexico City today, we are committed to partnering with Mexico to address our shared challenges, including managing unprecedented irregular migration in the region, reopening key ports of entry, and combating illicit fentanyl and other synthetic drugs.”
A recently-released year-end report from U.S. Customs and Immigration Enforcement (ICE) revealed that more than 6 million illegal immigrants are on the non-detained docket.
The number is up more than 30% from FY 2022, when 4.7 million migrants were featured on the docket.
“In FY 2023, the non-detained docket climbed by 30.3% from 4.7 million noncitizens in FY 2022 to more than 6.2 million noncitizens in FY 2023,” according to the report. “Comparatively, the non-detained was at 3.26 million in FY 2020 and 3.6 million in FY 2021.”
“While ICE carefully prioritized its resources to meet these evolving mission needs and agency personnel continued to perform at a high standard, these increased demands have strained a workforce that has remained relatively static for the past decade,” the report says.
