Mexico City, August 24. Mexican President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador celebrated Wednesday the end of the “stay in Mexico” program announced by the United States, but asked Washington to regulate the flow of immigrants and give more work visas.
“Now that the (Supreme) Court (of the United States) has decided that those seeking asylum in the United States can wait in the United States, not necessarily in Mexico, we see that well,” the president declared at his daily press conference. .
His comments come after the US Department of Homeland Security (DHS) promised on August 8 to rescind the Migrant Protection Protocols (MPP) program, known as “Remain in Mexico,” installed by former President Donald Trump in 2019.
The policy has affected more than 75,000 migrants at the Mexican border, where asylum seekers have to wait while their case is resolved in the United States, according to data from the International Rescue Committee (IRC).
“We have never accepted that we constitute ourselves as it is known as a third country, as a camp for migrants to wait for their dissolution in the United States,” Lopez Obrador said, without detailing what would happen to the migrants still on the Mexican ship. the border.
The president criticized that the United States had not agreed to reform the immigration system to regulate nearly 11 million illegal immigrants, half of whom are Mexicans.
He denounced that “there is always opposition to the immigration agreement because it suits them not to order the flow of immigration, because in this way they have cheap and threatened labour.”
In addition, he insisted on his call for an agreement to grant more temporary visas.
“They need a workforce in the United States and Canada, but they haven’t made that decision,” he said.
The region is seeing record flows of immigration into the United States, where Customs and Border Protection (CBP) has intercepted more than 1.7 million people so far in the 2022 fiscal year, which began last October.
Mexico’s government has also received criticism for its treatment of migrants, including deploying nearly 30,000 members of the armed forces to its northern and southern borders to carry out immigration missions.
But Lopez Obrador defended that they have a plan in which the government “constantly” reviews trailers and pickup trucks, as human traffickers transport migrants in high-risk situations, “thus avoiding accidents, kidnappings and “gross violations of human rights.”
“We always go out under any circumstances to take care of immigrants and treat them well and we do that and we have a permanent plan to look after immigrants who cross our country out of necessity,” he said.
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