Biden now circumventing talks with GOP Senate to instead conduct emergency border negotiations with Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador.
President Joe Biden is demoting critical border negotiations with Republicans to, instead, conduct emergency border negotiations with Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador.
The diplomatic switch comes as Biden’s flood of several million illegal migrants is further damaging his 2024 poll ratings, and as GOP leaders are using their Senate clout to demand real border reforms.
“Everything revolves around getting the Mexican government to do targeted operations” against the cartels’ migration business, one U.S. official told the Washington Post.
Biden’s problem is that he “is refusing to enforce immigration law,” Mark Krikorian, director of the Center for Immigration Studies, noted, adding, “The [migration] numbers are unprecedented. The legacy media is starting to notice. … [So Biden] is begging Mexico for help to fix the problem instead of just using the [legal] tools he has to fix the problem right now.”
The president’s outreach to Mexico is also complicating the high-profile U.S. negotiations between the White House and GOP senators. Democrats had included Biden’s pro-migration border chief — Alejandro Mayorkas — in the Senate talks. “We made sure Mayorkas was in the room,” the Democrats’ leader in the Senate, Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-NY), said. “He’s very, very helpful. He knows the details,” Schumer told Politico:
