Mexico’s Leader Looms Large in America’s Presidential Election

MEXICO CITY—If President Biden is to win this year’s presidential election, he badly needs some help from Mexico’s Andrés Manuel López Obrador in holding back a surge of migrants across the southern border.

The migrant crisis is shaping up as one of the most pressing issues in November’s vote, and there are signs that Biden can sometimes pressure Mexico to get results. January saw a sharp drop in illegal migrant crossings at the U.S. border as Mexico stepped up enforcement efforts, erecting checkpoints, detaining migrants and increasing deportations to Central and South America.

But it is also a presidential election year in Mexico, and whoever succeeds López Obrador—he has reached his term limit and can’t run again—would quickly face questions about their ability or willingness to sustain those efforts.

Migration data since 2014 show that Mexico can contain the flood of migrants only for short periods. Human smugglers tend to adapt quickly to enforcement measures, and migration usually decreases in winter and picks back up in spring.

At times, López Obrador has taken flak from his political opponents for doing what they say is the U.S.’s dirty work, deploying soldiers to keep migrants from reaching the border and diverting resources from tackling the drug violence that undermines Mexico’s own security. The deaths of 40 people in a fire in a migrant detention facility last year led to the indictment of the head of Mexico’s immigration agency amid rising public scrutiny over its treatment of migrants.

Nor has the Mexican leader gained much ground with the Biden administration in pushing his own proposals to solve the immigration crisis, such as lifting U.S. sanctions on Cuba or removing sanctions on Venezuela, or providing the billions of dollars in investment that he says could create jobs in Central America and induce impoverished migrants from the region to stay home. Another of López Obrador’s requests—that Mexican migrants who have been longtime U.S. residents be protected from deportation—has largely been ignored by this and past administrations. These are problems López Obrador’s successor will also likely face.

“Mexico can lessen migration flows, but only for a while,” Jorge Castañeda, Mexico’s former foreign minister, said in an interview.

With domestic pressures building and a potential spring surge approaching, he likened the political consequences to Fidel Castro’s Mariel boatlift in 1980, when the Cuban leader announced that anyone could leave the island and 125,000 refugees arrived in Miami in a makeshift flotilla of boats. It helped to sink Jimmy Carter’s bid for re-election.

Mexico could play a similarly crucial role in this year’s race for the White House, especially after the collapse of a bipartisan immigration agreement on Capitol Hill that proposed new measures for how the U.S. treated asylum applicants—leaving the Biden administration relying even more on López Obrador to stem the flow of migrants.

Highlighting the stakes, both President Biden and Donald Trump will pay dueling visits this week to the southwestern border in Texas where they will likely lay out their contrasting visions for handling migration, with Biden pushing his gradualist reforms and Trump vowing tougher action.

Both their agendas are heavily dependent on Mexico’s cooperation. Biden is likely to praise López Obrador’s efforts during his visit, and U.S. officials have been careful to treat the Mexican president with kid gloves, recent incidents show.

López Obrador was furious in recent weeks after reports emerged that U.S. officials had looked into possible cash contributions by drug gangs to his election campaigns in 2006 and 2018. The reports, by ProPublica, the New York Times and other publications, said there was no indication that López Obrador knew about the alleged financing. The U.S. government said the 2006 investigation was closed for lack of evidence. The 2018 inquiry didn’t become a formal investigation, U.S. officials said.

The Mexican leader, though, demanded a response from the U.S. government, which said there was no investigation. He also refused to receive a delegation of U.S. officials led by Elizabeth Sherwood-Randall, the White House’s homeland security adviser, to discuss joint efforts to curtail migration and drug trafficking.

López Obrador relented two days later after receiving a call from President Biden.

Meanwhile, nerves are wearing thin on the southern border. The number of migrants arrested in December, before the Mexican government began staunching the flow, hit 250,000, according to U.S. government data—nearly as many in all of 2017 and an early indication of what could happen if López Obrador eases off the pressure.

Texas Gov. Greg Abbott that month signed into law a measure giving state and local police authority to arrest and deport migrants crossing the border illegally, challenging both the Biden administration and Mexico, which filed diplomatic complaints against a floating barrier installed by Texas last year.

As illegal border crossings reached new highs, a delegation led by Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas flew to Mexico. One U.S. official said such a visit was unusual just two days after Christmas.

López Obrador this month said Mexico is caught in a political dispute between Democrats and Republicans. “Mexico isn’t a punching bag for anybody,” he said.

The Mexican and U.S. governments agreed during the visit led by Blinken to have regular, high-level meetings to tackle migration and drugs, which helped lead to the sharp falloff in border crossings in January as Mexico increased detentions and deportations, often bussing migrants to southern Mexico to deter them from trying again.

The government also stepped up enforcement at key railway points in central Mexico to prevent migrants from jumping on U.S.-bound freight trains.

A U.S. official involved in negotiations with Mexico said that, so far, Mexico has kept up the high level of enforcement, but that the Biden administration doesn’t know how long it will last. On Wednesday, Blinken and other senior Biden administration officials hosted a trilateral meeting with top Mexican and Guatemalan officials in Washington to discuss migration.

The U.S. often asks Mexico to do more to stem the flow of migrants.

When López Obrador introduced what he called a humanitarian approach to migration, fast-tracking more than 13,000 Mexican visas to migrants from Central American, a surge of people overwhelmed U.S. border facilities in the spring of 2019. President Trump responded by threatening to impose tariffs on Mexican exports if López Obrador didn’t do more to deter migrants.

Mexico then deployed some 32,000 members of the National Guard. Migrant detentions across Mexico jumped 40%.

“Your  bluff  worked,” Jared Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law and senior adviser, told the president, according to Kushner’s memoirs published in 2022.

Soon after President Biden was elected, smugglers spread the word that the border was open, sparking another surge after the Covid pandemic. It picked up again after human smugglers switched tactics, moving from major crossings to more remote spots, challenging U.S. immigration officials who lack the facilities or staff to handle huge numbers of people.

“Fentanyl, migrants, and security—all of the elements of the electoral narrative of the Republican party—go through the border,” said Arturo Sarukhan, a former Mexican ambassador to the U.S.

When Mexico steps up immigration enforcement, criminal violence tends to flare up in other parts of the country because security resources are used to hold the line on migration, Castañeda, the former foreign minister, said.

Mexican authorities also say budget constraints have weakened the enforcement capacity of the country’s migration agency, which is understaffed and underfunded. It has 5,600 officers, fewer than in 2018, when López Obrador took office, according to Mexican government data. Its current $112 million budget is nearly a fifth lower in real terms, and a fraction of the $20 billion that goes to the U.S. Customs and Border Protection.

With few options for legal migration to the U.S., Mexico’s government can’t sustain its measures for the long term if the U.S. Congress is unable to agree how to process migrants at the border, said Andrew Selee, president of the Migration Policy Institute in Washington.

“I suspect we’ll still see high numbers this year, but how high depends on whether there’s an agreement on a border bill or other measures to create a more orderly process at the border,” said Selee.

–Michelle Hackman contributed to this article.

Write to Juan Montes at [email protected] and José de Córdoba at [email protected]