The Biden administration has reached agreements with Mexico, Honduras, and Guatemala to boost security at their borders in an attempt to curb a surge of migrants to the southern U.S. boundary, White House officials said on Monday.
“The objective is to make it more difficult to make the journey and make crossing the borders more difficult,” White House press secretary Jen Psaki told reporters. “We worked with them to increase law enforcement at the border to deter the travel, which is a treacherous journey … where many lose their lives.”
The agreements were struck in recent weeks, she said.
Psaki said Mexico will maintain 10,000 troops at its southern border, which she said would double the number of interdictions each day. Guatemala will keep 1,500 military and police personnel at its border with Honduras, with 12 checkpoints set up along migration routes.
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Honduras “surged 7,000 police and military to disperse a large contingent of migrants,” she said.
Officials in the two countries have been communicating daily, a senior administration official told reporters last month.
At the time, Mexican officials who briefed the delegation said the country was boosting its enforcement efforts along migration routes and its southern border as spring migrant caravans began to travel upward from Central America.
A top domestic policy official announced the plan during a television appearance earlier in the day, stating that the measures would help to protect unaccompanied minors who are arriving at the southern U.S. border in growing numbers.
“We’ve secured agreements for them to put more troops on their own border. Mexico, Honduras, and Guatemala have all agreed to do this. That not only is going to prevent the traffickers and the smugglers and cartels that take advantage of the kids on their way here, but also to protect those children,” Tyler Moran told MSNBC.
“If you just focus on our border, you’re not addressing why people are actually coming to our border,” said Moran, a special assistant to the president on immigration for the Domestic Policy Council. “And so, the president has a blueprint, and he’s working with the vice president on this.”
Biden has tasked Vice President Kamala Harris, a former California senator and state attorney general, with forging a diplomatic solution to halt the surge of people arriving at the U.S.-Mexico border.
The government has struggled to contain the situation, which Republicans call a “crisis.” The Biden administration has ceased immediately deporting minors, overwhelming federal facilities.
Moran detailed a two-part plan to address the situation, including targeting the root causes of migration and speeding up the processing of minors who have been apprehended and taken into custody.
Last week, the Biden administration made several announcements targeting the Northern Triangle region as Ricardo Zuniga, the State Department’s special envoy to the Northern Triangle, visited El Salvador and Guatemala.
The U.S. Agency for International Development said it would send disaster response aid to three Northern Triangle countries to assist the recovery from two hurricanes that devastated the area last year.
Zuniga also announced a $2 million contribution to a commission focused on eliminating corruption in El Salvador. El Salvador’s President Nayib Bukele refused to meet with him, according to the Associated Press.
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Moran said that core to the president’s and vice president’s “blueprint” is a focus on the root causes of northbound migration.
“So investing in the region, and we’ve already done that. We’ve already sent million dollars of aid to the region to help address the violence, to help address the hurricanes, to do everything from tutoring kids to broken streetlights,” Moran said.
