Immediately after Joe Biden’s inauguration in 2021, the southern border exploded. Families started crossing en masse, and the Border Patrol released them to non-profits, which bused them to cities around the country. As reporter Todd Bensman reveals in this new book, “Overrun,” the Mexican government had been plotting to push this wave of illegal immigration as soon as Biden was elected — knowing he would do nothing to stop it.
The Mexican government was not happy with President Trump’s Remain in Mexico policies.
Facing threats of debilitating trade tariffs from Trump, Mexico had been forced to take on the burdens of housing, feeding, and caring for hundreds of thousands of migrant family groups either expelled by Trump or unable to proceed over the border. Many could not be easily deported to Africa, Cuba, Haiti, or one hundred other countries.
Once Trump’s expulsion policies took full effect, as the Texas Tribune put it, Mexico was quickly “overwhelmed by the number of migrants in its border cities.” Women with very young children that Trump expelled soon became a headache for Mexico, which by law had to care for them somewhere, somehow. They filled Mexico’s 58 detention centers to capacity.
And when those centers filled up, squalid camps began to form in parks or in the central squares of northern Mexican cities like Nuevo Laredo, Piedras Negras, Juarez, Acuña, and especially so in Tamaulipas State across from South Texas in the cities of Reynosa and Matamoros, long the most heavily trammeled border-crossing areas into the United States.
So Mexico began closely eyeing the American election, looking for the soonest possible relief should Joe Biden win.
Immediately after the election, the Mexican congress secretively passed a new and unusual law that had been pre-written and a pathway for its quick approval cleared.
On November 6, 2020 — within 72 hours of Joe Biden’s election — the “Various Articles of the Migration Law and the Law on Refugees are Reformed, Complementary Protection and Political Asylum in the Matter of Migrant Children” was on President Andrés Manuel López Obrador’s desk for signing.
On November 11, President Obrador signed it with no formal announcement or press coverage.
The law would be implemented 60 days later, on January 11, just before Trump was to leave office. Boiled down, the law prohibited federal detentions of migrant families with minor children — with or without parents — in all 58 Mexican detention facilities nationwide. To remain in compliance with Mexico’s laws requiring the feeding and sheltering of migrant children, the new law required the government to merely refer them to voluntary-stay shelters.
This meant that after January 11, 2021, Mexico could start emptying its detention centers, and thousands of families with their young children could travel freely inside the country, which everyone knew meant the U.S. border.
But what to do about Title 42, the COVID pandemic rule Trump had used to keep out those who tried to cross? The law addressed that: It gave individual Mexican states authority to refuse U.S. Title 42 expulsions — if the states deemed the private shelters as too full or to be closed for COVID. —>Read the rest from Todd Bensman HERE
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