At a press conference on Friday, Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador presented a list of requests to the United States in exchange for Mexico’s help in curbing unlawful migration at the southern border.
The press conference came less than a week after U.S. officials traveled to Mexico to discuss the ongoing border crisis with the Mexican president, who said that the country is “going to help, as we always do,” as previously reported by The Dallas Express.
López Obrador stated that he would like the United States to spend $20 billion in taxpayer money in support of Latin American and Caribbean countries while also granting the right to work and remain in the United States to more than 10 million unlawful migrants who are already in the country, according to NBC News.
The Mexican president also stated that he would like the United States to suspend its blockade of Cuba and remove all sanctions against Venezuela.
The requests were consistent with the objectives López Obrador presented during a preliminary meeting when he said his main goal was to convince the United States to “help poor countries,” per The Dallas Express.
A senior official for the Biden administration responded to the requests by saying that the Mexican president “has a very ambitious agenda.”
“For some of these things, we would need Congress to act. We share the vision that we need to lift up the region,” he added, per NBC News.
López Obrador’s requests come as the United States continues to deal with a large influx of unlawful migrants crossing the southern border, with U.S. Customs and Border Protection reporting record-high numbers of encounters.
CBP reported more than 300,000 encounters at the southern border in December, which broke the monthly record of 269,735 encounters logged in September.
Texas officials have taken multiple steps to help lower these figures, including passing three border security bills the governor recently signed into law.
One of these bills, SB 4, has prompted some pushback since it makes unlawful entry into the state a crime and allows state law enforcement officers to apprehend those suspected of violating the law.
Since the bill was signed into law by Gov. Greg Abbott, the U.S. Department of Justice has announced a lawsuit that alleges the law would “intrude on the federal government’s exclusive authority to regulate the entry and removal of noncitizens, frustrate the United States’ immigration operations and proceedings, and interfere with U.S. foreign relations,” as previously reported by The Dallas Express.
Abbott fired back at these allegations while appearing on Fox News this past weekend, claiming that SB 4 “was drafted in a way that does not conflict with federal law.”
“The Arizona law did conflict with federal law. The state of Texas law does not conflict with federal law, and hence, that’s one reason why we will avoid the preemption allegation made by the federal government,” argued the governor.
