Illegal immigration from Mexico to the U.S. is hitting the highest levels in years, and the Biden Administration is struggling to find a solution.
A report from the Center for Immigration Studies found that the U.S. cooperation with the Mexican government to stop illegal immigration into the U.S. has done little to stop the steadily rising flow of migrants, which is the highest it has been in over a decade.
“The 100,000 illegal aliens apprehended in February – a 15-year record high – indicate that the Mexican military deployment in southern Mexico is not effective,” said Todd Bensman, a national security expert for CIS. “The deployment worked in 2020 because it was part of a bigger plan that included push-back policies at the American border. The ‘Remain in Mexico’ Migrant Protection Protocols and assertive ICE repatriations of deportable illegal immigrants by air back to home countries worked to encourage untold thousands of aliens to stay home. But that powerful combination no longer exists.”
The Mexican government has set up a series of checkpoints and almost 9,000 Mexican National Guard troops, but so far the system has been easy to bypass for migrants.
According to CIS, the Mexican government has been issuing “humanitarian visas” that allow migrants traveling from South and Central America to bypass safeguards when traveling through the country bound for the U.S.
“I just showed it to the soldiers whenever they confronted me, and they just let me go through,” one immigrant told CIS researchers, referring to his humanitarian visa.
Other migrants use a combination of trains, planes and bribery to circumvent protections.
President Joe Biden has taken fire for his immigration policies — including detaining children — something Democrats attacked President Donald Trump for during his administration.
A poll by Yahoo News/YouGov reports that 62 percent of Americans consider the situation at the southern border a “crisis.” Only 23 percent of Biden supporters “strongly approve” of his immigration efforts. The poll found majority of Americans believe the crisis at the Southern border has worsened under the Biden Administration.
To address the immigration crisis, Biden sent a delegation to Mexico earlier this month to discuss ways to partner to slow the migration to the U.S.
“If the Biden administration plans to rely entirely on Mexico’s ability to stop the wave of illegal immigrants it conjured, no amount of U.S. development assistance cash and Covid-19 vaccine is going to plug the widening holes in Mexico’s southern cordon,” Bensman said.
Recent reporting from The Epoch Times found that while individuals crossing into the country illegal are still being expelled, families seeking to enter the country are largely being released into the U.S.
As much as 85 percent of families who are stopped at the border are later allowed in, according to the report.
“The only people we’re not going to let sit there on the other side of the Rio Grande with no help is children,” Biden said last week. “No previous administration has done that either, except Trump. I’m not going to do it, not going to do it.”
