Customs and Border Protection (CBP) reported the busiest November on record last month, with encounters at the southern border totaling 242,418. U.S. officials, Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Secretary of Homeland Security Alejandro Mayorkas, met with Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador on December 27 to address the unprecedented flow of illegal immigrants on the U.S.–Mexico border.
The State Department announced that the meeting discussed the “unprecedented irregular migration in the Western Hemisphere and identify ways Mexico and the United States will address border security challenges”. President López Obrador has expressed his willingness to assist and emphasized the need for increased development aid for the region to address the migration issue.
However, just hours before the meeting, Mr. López Obrador said that Congress should focus on investing in people instead of building walls to secure the border. Both sides are under pressure to cope with illegal immigration and previous measures have not effectively reduced the increasing influx.
In May, Mr. López Obrador declared his readiness to receive migrants from Cuba, Venezuela, Nicaragua, and other nations that were rejected by the United States for noncompliance with regulations establishing alternative legal routes to asylum and other migration categories. As the number of migrants rises once more, it appears that the agreement, which was supposed to quell a surge in migration following the COVID-19 pandemic, was far from adequate.
U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) reported the busiest November on record last month with encounters at the southern border totaling 242,418, with nearly 80 percent of those encounters outside ports of entry. U.S. border officials had never recorded more than 80,000 encounters in November before 2022.
Total drug seizures increased by 35 percent from October to November of this year, and CBP has documented 483,404 encounters since fiscal year 2024 began. Additional personnel and resources have been dispatched to address this ongoing border surge, the agency said.
A large group of migrants from Central American countries, Venezuela, Cuba, and other nations moved through Mexico on their way to the U.S. border just before U.S. officials arrived in Mexico City to work out new rules to control the large number of people trying to get into the United States. Mr. López Obrador expressed his willingness to collaborate with the United States but asked for more aid to developing nations in Latin America and beyond. He also requested that the United States ease sanctions on regimes in Cuba and Venezuela, from which approximately 20 percent of the migrants encountered in the United States between October and November originated.