By Nick Mordowanec
Staff Writer
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Mexican President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador wants the United States to pay $20 billion to help curb illegal immigration.
The U.S. has experienced a drastic uptick in illegal border crossings in recent months, including 192,000 apprehensions in November on top of 9,600 additional daily migrant encounters during the first three weeks of December. Texas, Florida and New York City have been front and center the past year because of the influx and politicians redirecting them to other areas and states.
House Speaker Mike Johnson, who has called the Biden administration's approach to immigration "an unmitigated disaster," traveled with 64 other House Republicans to the southern border town of Eagle Pass, Texas, on Wednesday to tour what has been a heavily traversed area by migrants. While there, cameras caught migrants traveling through the Rio Grande River to the U.S., just a feet away from the politicians.
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Obrador said during a Friday news conference that he requested U.S. authorities to deploy the $20 billion in funds as part of a cooperative plan to help other countries in Latin America as record numbers of migrants are filing through Central America and Mexico to enter the U.S.
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Newsweek reached out to Obrador's office via email, as well as the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS), for comment.
Obrador also asked the U.S. to grant visas to at least 10 million Hispanic migrants who have worked for more than 10 years in the country, which is a point he reportedly iterated to President Joe Biden during their most recent bilateral meeting in Mexico City.
Mexican Security Minister Rosa Icela Rodriguez said in a Thursday press conference that 32 Venezuelan and Honduran migrants were kidnapped from a bus on December 31 by armed men attempting to extort money from them and their families in the U.S., according to reports.
Twenty-six of them were Venezuelan, six were Honduran, and three have dual nationality with Colombia, officials said.
Biden and Obrador spoke on the phone on December 21 about managing migratory flows, according to a White House readout. The pair reportedly agreed that additional enforcement was necessary at key ports of entry as to reopen them safely to those attempting to cross legally.
U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken, Secretary of Homeland Security Alejandro Mayorkas and White House Homeland Security Advisor Liz Sherwood-Randall were asked by Biden to travel to Mexico.
Last May, Obrador criticized the Biden administration's lifting of the Title 42 immigration policy, claiming that the Trump-era policy initially instituted during the COVID-19 pandemic was encouraging smugglers to enter the U.S. illegally.
Title 42 expired May 11 in sync with the expiration of the COVID-19 health emergency.
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