Amid a mounting migration crisis at both Mexico’s northern and southern borders, President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador has urged his U.S. counterpart to “stop talking and act” on promised regional investment to alleviate the economic hardship suffered by millions of Central Americans.
During his presidential campaign, Joe Biden vowed to “immediately do away with Trump’s draconian immigration policies and galvanize international action to address the poverty and insecurity driving migrants from the Northern Triangle to the United States.” (See joebiden.com/centralamerica.)
“They committed to investing four billion dollars, two billion for Central America and two billion for Mexico. Nothing has come,” Lopez Obrador said at his regular morning press conference Wednesday.
To pay for “this investment in the future of our region,” Biden said he would “reprioritize money away from the Department of Homeland Security’s budget for detention, which has skyrocketed under Trump’s inhumane and unnecessary policies, in favor of more effective and cost-efficient alternatives to detention.”
Biden and Lopez Obrador’s immediate concern, however, is the wave of Haitian migrants gathered on the banks of the Rio Grande, along with hundreds more sequestered on Mexico’s southern border, waiting and hoping to travel northwards.
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