Washington DC.- At the same time that the expulsions of migrants from third countries to Mexico under Title 42 concluded, the United States began yesterday, for the first time in its history, the return to Mexican territory of citizens of third countries under the figure of “deportations” and “returns”. volunteers”.
In a turn considered historic by US officials, the decision of the government of President Andrés Manuel López Obrador to accept people from Venezuela, Haiti, Cuba and Nicaragua, once the emergency due to the Covid-19 pandemic is over, offers the US a valve escape pressure at the border.
“We reached an agreement that is very important, Mexico agreed to accept 1,000 people per day who cross and do not have legal status in the US from four countries,” US Secretary of State Antony Blinken told PBS.
Without there being exact data yet on the total number of returns carried out yesterday, senior officials of the Biden Administration considered it very valuable that Mexico accepted said “deportations”, something that according to experts has never happened in the history of the two nations.
“The status quo on the ground (at the border) won’t change much, but from a legal perspective this is a seismic shift,” said Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, policy director at the American Immigration Council (AIC).
“At no time in the history of the United States has there been another country that will accept a large number of deportations from the United States of people who are not nationals of that country.”
Agreed upon in a meeting at the National Palace on May 2 between President Joe Biden’s Internal Security Adviser, Liz Sherwood-Randall, and President López Obrador, the returns after the end of Title 42 registered on Thursday, meant a political triumph for the US Executive.
Blas Núñez-Neto, Acting Undersecretary for Border Policy and Immigration of the US Department of Homeland Security (DHS), said that the Biden Administration would begin the new “deportations” and “voluntary withdrawals” to Mexico yesterday.
“These people will be transferred directly to Mexico after being in Border Patrol custody. Those returns will begin today (yesterday).
I refer them to the Government of Mexico for questions about how they will be processed on the Mexican side of the border,” he said.
Since October 2022, the AMLO government had accepted 30,000 returns per month from the same four nationalities in exchange for the Biden Administration opening 30,000 humanitarian permits for people from those countries. According to the US, more than 100,000 migrants have already benefited from these permits.
For his part, Foreign Minister Marcelo Ebrard assured yesterday that Mexico will not receive more than a thousand migrants per day.
During the morning, the official acknowledged that the country would not have the capacity to accept more migrants -than that amount-, nor would it accept it.
