MEXICO CITY – Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador has become an unlikely ally in the migration policies of former US President Donald Trump, sending thousands of soldiers across Mexico to prevent Central American asylum seekers from drive to the 2,000-mile border.
Now President Biden is preparing to undo much of Trump’s immigration legacy, while facing differences with the Mexican populist on a number of other bilateral issues, such as security cooperation and climate change.
Cooperation with the Mexican president, despite these differences, will be crucial to managing the immigration issue, say political analysts. Biden promised an immigration reform to provide a path to citizenship for 11 million undocumented migrants, almost half of them Mexicans.
He also wants to end the asylum eligibility restrictions put in place during the Trump years and end a program that required some 70,000 asylum seekers to wait in Mexico while their lawsuits were heard in the United States.
The policy change, which the government says will result in a more humane migration system, has a potential disadvantage: if done too quickly, it could trigger an increase in the number of migrants, which could be politically disastrous for Biden, analysts say.