Antony Blinken leads officials to Mexico as US seeks to stem migration

Top US officials have arrived in Mexico, as pressure grows on the White House to address massive levels of migration at the southern border.

Secretary of State Antony Blinken has led the US delegation to meet Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador.

The summit will focus on ways to stem what the state department called “unprecedented irregular migration”.

It comes as a surge in border crossings has seen up to 10,000 people a day entering into the US.

In a call earlier this week, Mr López Obrador and President Joe Biden agreed that urgent action was needed to address border security. Mr López Obrador told reporters after the call that Mexico was “going to help, as we always do” to tackle the flow of migrants to the US.

“Now we have an extraordinary situation because the number of migrants passing through our country with the purpose of reaching the United States has increased,” Mr López Obrador said. “We have a proposal to strengthen our plans, what we’ve been doing.”

In a statement earlier this week, the state department said the meeting in Mexico City, which will also include Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, would focus on “unprecedented irregular migration in the Western Hemisphere and identify ways” each country can address border security challenges

But Wednesday’s meeting comes as record numbers of migrants cross into the US from Mexico. The number of people apprehended at the US southern border exceeded two million, both in the 2022 and the 2023 fiscal years.

US Customs and Border Protection [CBP] officials said in a statement on Friday that there were more than 190,000 apprehensions in November alone.

The figures have become a political vulnerability for Mr Biden, with the Republican-controlled House of Representatives refusing to allocate new military funding to support Ukraine without a commitment to reinforce the border.

“We are facing a serious challenge along the southwest border and CBP and our federal partners need more resources from Congress – as outlined in the supplemental budget request – to enhance border security and America’s national security,” Troy Miller, acting head of US Customs and Border Patrol, said on Friday.

And the meeting comes as attention in US media has turned to a migrant caravan of about 7,000 people which is making its way towards the US from southern Mexico.

The caravan left from the southern Mexican city of Tapachula, near the country’s southern border with Guatemala, on Christmas Eve. Its leaders carried a banner reading “Exodus from poverty”.

So far, the caravan – reportedly made up of migrants from Honduras, El Salvador, Venezuela, Haiti and other countries – is about 1,000 miles south of the US border.