The President of the USA, Joe Biden, has visited this Sunday for the first time since he arrived at the White House the border of Mexicocoinciding with a record arrival of immigrants. The leader has come to the city of Step, in Texas and one of the epicenters of the current migratory wave. There he has met with local leaders and has visited the Las Américas border bridge, which connects the United States with its neighbor to the south. Then Biden will travel to Mexico, to meet his Mexican counterpart, Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador and the Prime Minister of Canada, Justin Trudeau.Some 2.3 million arrests and expulsions of migrants undocumented in fiscal year 2022; 108,000 drug overdose deaths in 2021: Migration and drug trafficking will be at the center of the meeting between Biden and López Obrador, this Monday in Mexico City. They will be joined by Trudeau on Tuesday, for a North American Summit.
Before traveling to El Paso, the president announced a migration program limited to four countries: Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua and Venezuela, mired in deep crisis, although the incessant flow includes several other nations. The monthly entry of up to 30,000 people will be allowed for two years, hardly a palliative, acknowledges Biden, who blames Republicans for blocking a more ambitious plan. Concerted with Mexico, the program also reinforces the expulsions of those who enter illegally.
The US Secretary of Homeland Security, Alejandro Mayorkas, who is accompanying Biden on the trip, emphasized that the immigration problem goes far beyond the United States and Mexico. “This is something that is not unique to the United States,” he told ABC’s “This Week.” “It is taking over the hemisphere, and a regional challenge requires a regional solution.”
fentanyl
The Biden-AMLO bilateral meeting will also be marked by the fentanyl tragedya synthetic drug 50 times more potent than heroin, whose production and trafficking are controlled by mexican cartels with chemical precursors from China, according to the DEA, the US drug enforcement agency.
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Almost two thirds of the 108,000 overdose deaths registered in the United States in 2021 involved synthetic opioids. And in 2022 alone, more fentanyl was seized than would be needed to kill the entire population of the United States, the agency says.
For this reason, Biden seeks to “expand the exchange of information” with Mexico on precursors and “strengthen prevention,” said the head of US diplomacy for Latin America, Brian Nichols.