Mexico vows to tighten its southern border
MEXICO CITY — Mexico’s president acknowledged Friday that controls are lax at dozens of crossings at the country’s southern border, vowing to correct the situation amid U.S. pressure to crack down on migration from Central America.
“We have identified 68 crossings like that, and in all of them there will be oversight,” Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador said at a morning news conference, responding to questioning about checkpoints where cross-border traffic was seen coming and going freely.
The president, who took office Dec. 1, attributed the problem to residual corruption at the National Migration Institute and the customs agency and noted that more than 500 immigration workers have been let go as part of a purge.
“We are cleaning house, but this work takes time,” Lopez Obrador said.
Mexico has promised to deploy 6,000 members of its new, still-forming National Guard to control immigration in its southern border with Guatemala as part of a recent agreement with the United States. U.S. President Donald Trump had threatened stiff tariffs on all imports from Mexico if the country didn’t do more.
Mexican Foreign Relations Secretary Marcelo Ebrard said Friday the Guard deployment will be readied by Tuesday, along with 825 immigration agents and 200 officials from the country’s welfare department.
But there has been no sign so far of any National Guard presence in the southern city of Tapachula, near Guatemala. Nor has there been any notable change at the Suchiate border river, where locals and migrants alike commonly cross.
Police and immigration had already stepped up enforcement in southern Mexico in recent months, setting up highway checkpoints, raiding a recent caravan of mostly Central American migrants and trying to keep people off the northbound train known as “the beast.”
Ebrard called on the United Nations and the international community to help Mexico bring immigration under control and fight human trafficking.
“Do not leave us alone,” Ebrard said.
Meanwhile, Mexico’s immigration chief, Tonatiuh Guillen, presented his resignation Friday and the country’s prisons director, Francisco Garduno, was swiftly nominated to replace him.
The National Immigration Institute did not give a reason for why Guillen presented his resignation.
Trump also shook up his immigration team Friday, appointing a hard-liner to coordinate border policy from the White House.
Thomas D. Homan, his choice for the job, served as the acting head of Immigration and Customs Enforcement early in the administration and retired last year when his nomination for the permanent position stalled in the Senate. Since then, he has been a fierce supporter of the administration’s policies during frequent appearances on Fox News.
“He’ll be a border czar,” Trump said during a phone interview on “Fox & Friends.” “He’ll be reporting directly to me. He’ll be probably working out of the White House but spending a lot of time at the border.”
Stephen Miller, the president’s senior adviser, remains the engine behind the administration’s immigration agenda. But in Homan, the president may have finally found the askno-questions enforcer of the nation’s immigration laws that he has longed for.