The White House is not denying it is sending COVID-19 vaccine doses to Mexico in return for help curbing the flow of migrants from Central America.
The Biden administration announced earlier this week it will ship 2.5 million doses of AstraZeneca’s coronavirus vaccine to Mexico, along with over 1 million to Canada. That prompted some contentions from Biden critics that the new president is using the inoculations to compel Mexican officials to stop groups of migrants heading to their northern border with the United States.
White House principal deputy press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre was pressed on whether part of the vaccine deal was a sort of quid pro quo on rounding up groups of Central Americans — which would amount to the Biden administration reviving a Trump administration policy by luring Mexican officials to help ease an influx at the border.
“So, as you can imagine, when you’re, when you’re having … conversation with countries, different countries … you’re talking about different issues, right,” she told reporters traveling with President Biden to Georgia on Air Force One. “And so that is … what’s happening there, there are just conversations on different issues, and yes [the] pandemic, which is, you know, unprecedented, is part of those conversations that we’re having in a parallel way.”
At another point in her back-and-forth with an NPR reporter, Jean-Pierre said the COVID-19 virus knows “no borders.” That means the U.S. wants to help its neighbors with efforts on “mitigating the infections.”
She then appeared to link the Mexican vaccine shipments directly to migrant flows, saying it is also key to be “getting help on the Central American migration, getting help from Mexico.”
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Thousands of migrants have flocked to the U.S.-Mexico border since Biden was sworn in on Jan. 20, including many unaccompanied children. More than 4,000 children seeking asylum are being held at facilities inside the U.S., the administration said earlier this week.
Top Biden administration officials are resisting calling the situation at the border a “crisis,” though Jean-Pierre’s boss, press secretary Jen Psaki, slipped during a briefing and did just that — before correcting herself.
Instead, Psaki has called it an “enormous challenge.”
Some GOP lawmakers have harshly criticized the Biden White House for the influx of migrants, saying the Democratic chief executive’s early moves to roll back some of former President Donald Trump’s strict immigration policies gave Central Americans new incentive to head north — or send their children.
Former Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Lindsey Graham, a close Trump ally, this week even called for Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas to resign over the situation.
“It is clear to me the Biden Administration has lost control of the border. Under its current leadership, it doesn’t have either the will or capability to fix the problem,” Graham said in a statement issued Thursday. “It is time for DHS Secretary Mayorkas to change course or change jobs. The situation is bad and only going to get worse. Unless there is immediate and drastic change, the worst is yet to come — by far.”
But Jean-Pierre questioned why Republicans are not responding to the border situation by negotiating with the White House on an immigration reform bill.
She called immigration “a bipartisan issue,” adding, “it has been for a very long time” even though the last serious reform measure, in 2013, that had Republican and Democratic support in the Senate died quietly in the GOP-run House.
The Trump White House never struck an immigration deal with Democrats, who accused the 45th president of not being serious about even wanting one. They claimed the hard-line proposals his team put forward were merely meant to please his conservative base.
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Trump shot back that all Democrats support “open borders.”
“You know, if they want to come to the table and help with the challenge that we’re seeing,” Jean-Pierre said, adding the White House hopes Republicans will “come to the table.”
