Mexican officials began cleaning up an encampment of people near the Rio Grande on Tuesday, just a day before U.S. officials were scheduled to meet with Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador to discuss the influx of unlawful migrants.
Segismundo Doguín is the head of the local office of Mexico’s immigration agency and said that the only areas to be cleared out were those that were already empty.
“What we are doing is removing any tents that we see are empty,” explained Doguín, according to the Associated Press.
However, those living in the encampment said everyone was cleared out, and they were forced to do it quickly.
“They ran us out,” explained a man named Jose to the AP. “You had to run for your life to avoid an accident.”
Glady Cañas, the founder of the group Ayudandoles a Triunfar, told the AP that many of the people who had to leave the camp had nowhere to go since “the shelters are saturated.”
This clearout by Mexican officials came just a day before López Obrador spoke with U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken, U.S. Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, and Homeland Security Advisor Liz Sherwood-Randall to discuss the vast number of unlawful migrants entering the U.S. at the southern border.
As previously reported by The Dallas Express, the U.S. Department of State said in a news release that Blinken and López Obrador would “discuss unprecedented irregular migration in the Western Hemisphere and identify ways Mexico and the United States will address border security challenges, including actions to enable the reopening of key ports of entry across our shared border.”
Shortly before the meeting, López Obrador declared the U.S. should support those in need “instead of putting up barriers, barbed wire fences in the river, or thinking about building walls.”
“It is more efficient and more humane to invest in the development of the people and that is what we have always proposed,” asserted the Mexican president at a press conference, according to the Times of San Diego.
A senior Biden administration official said after the meeting that the two sides had a productive meeting and the U.S. would “never draw conclusions” based on specific daily numbers of unlawful migrants, according to the BBC.
“We were really impressed by some of the new actions that Mexico is taking, and we have seen in recent days a pretty significant reduction in border crossings,” the official added, per the BBC.
While the senior official stated that there has been a reduction in border crossings in recent days, U.S. Customs and Border Protection recently confirmed that the agency is on pace for the most encounters with unlawful migrants in a single month, as reported by The Dallas Express.
The current record for the most monthly encounters is 269,735, which came in September, but a new report indicates that this record will likely be broken this month since there have already been more than 250,000 encounters thus far in December.
