Washington, D.C. (February 14, 2021) -
A new migrant caravan reportedly is gathering, testing yet again whether Guatemala and Mexico are willing to stop the crowd and take the political heat, sparing the Biden administration the terrible optics of their arrival at the U.S. border. In January, international human rights groups pummeled Guatemala for using force to block a caravan of an estimated 9,000 migrants headed to the U.S. border, motivated by Joe Biden's promises that all who wished to cross the U.S. border would
find a warm embrace inside the United States.
Central American nations and Mexico allowed their territories to be used as migrant transit superhighways to the US until President Donald Trump threatened them with debilitating economic sanctions and loss of foreign aid unless they stopped the caravans.
According to a Reuters report, the Biden administration has been privately "encouraging" Mexico and Guatemala to keep up their border enforcement against northward migration just as they did under Donald Trump. The report quoted its sources saying that: "any rush to the US border could hand Biden's political opponents ammunition to sink the rest of his immigration agenda, which includes providing a pathway to citizenship for immigrants already in the United States and reducing asylum application backlogs."
Todd Bensman, the Center for Immigration Studies' Senior National Security Fellow who was in Mexico in 2019 and again last month to cover the issue, said, "The important difference between Trump and Biden is that Biden will never openly own this like Trump did. And he should, out of obligation to just play straight with immigration policy hawks and the doves on his own side who may be horrified at this."
The Biden administration is demanding a terrible favor of these countries, which may explain why all of the officials cited in the Reuters story are anonymous. Reuters gamely notes that the administration has not explicitly asked Mexico and Guatemala to use force against the caravan migrants. But no serious observer believes caravans can be stopped by any other means.
The Biden administration has effectively demanded that these countries use force against the next migrant caravans for its "political expedience" and also that the countries that do so take all the heat from the international human rights community.
Bensman writes, "If this next caravan is broken up by force, that will be on Biden, who will have adopted the exact goals and objectives of his hated predecessor through the same violent means."
