The president of the United States, Joe Biden, will begin his first visit to Mexico this Sunday since his arrival at the White House, a day earlier than expected, on a trip with immigration as the predominant issue.
Biden will arrive on the afternoon of January 8 at the Felipe Ángeles International Airport, as reported by the Mexican Foreign Minister, Marcelo Ebrard, on his Twitter account. “He will be welcome to Mexico,” proclaimed the minister, whose country will host the North American Leaders Summit.
Before traveling to Mexico, Biden will visit the United States border with this country amid an increase in migrant arrivals: 1.2 million people were expelled in 2022 for entering the United States without proper legal authorization, according to the data from the United States Customs and Border Protection (CBP) Office, and after the reluctance expressed in recent months from the White House about a visit that could be understood as a gesture to appease the spirits with the president’s conservative critics.
The visit also comes just weeks after the Supreme Court decided to indefinitely preserve so-called Title 42, a Trump-era directive applied during the pandemic, which allows migrants seeking asylum at the border to be sent to Mexico.
The Secretary of Homeland Security of the United States, Alejandro Mayorkas, acknowledged this past Wednesday that the influx of migrants is “pushing the system to the limit,” according to the newspaper ‘Washington Post’. “We are operating within a system that is fundamentally broken, I think no one doubts that. We just can’t seem to agree on a solution and the solution is long, long overdue,” he explained.
