MEXICO CITY — Mexican officials moved to clear a migrant encampment on the banks of the Rio Grande river Wednesday as U.S. officials met with Mexico’s president to press for measures to limit a surge of migrants reaching the U.S. southwestern border.
Mexico began clearing tents, both occupied and unoccupied, from the encampment in the border city of Matamoros, across from Brownsville, Texas, starting Tuesday. The effort, backed by bulldozers and workers with machetes, continued Wednesday as U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken talked with President Andrés Manuel López Obrador in Mexico City.
López Obrador has said he is willing to help, but he wants to see progress in U.S. relations with Cuba and Venezuela, two of the top sources of migrants, along with more development aid for the region.
But Mexico’s top priority appeared to be getting the United States to reopen border crossings that were closed because of the migrant surge.
“We spoke about the importance of the border, and about the economic relationship … the importance of reopening the border crossings, that is a priority for us,” Foreign Relations Secretary Alicia Bárcena said following the meeting in Mexico City, which was also attended by U.S. Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas and homeland security adviser Liz Sherwood-Randall.
This month, as many as 10,000 migrants were arrested daily on the southwest U.S. border. The U.S. has struggled to process thousands of migrants at the border, and house them once they reach northern cities.
Mexican industries were stung last week when the U.S. briefly closed two vital Texas railway crossings, arguing that border patrol agents had to be reassigned to deal with the surge. Another non-rail border crossing remained closed in Lukeville, Arizona, and operations were partially suspended in San Diego and Nogales, Arizona.
The dismantling of the migrant encampment in Matamoros appeared to be a good-will gesture toward the United States. Migrants set up the encampment in late 2022. It once held as many as 1,500 migrants, but many tents were vacated in recent months as migrants waded across the river to reach the United States.
Segismundo Doguín, the head of the local office of Mexico’s immigration agency, said, “What we are doing is removing any tents that we see are empty.”