Harris promises Mexican president more vaccines amid COVID case surge
Vice President Kamala Harris has told Mexican President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador the US government will send additional COVID-19 vaccine doses on top of the more than 4 million that have already been delivered south of the border.
The two spoke by phone Monday amid a surge of new infections in both countries, including among people illegally crossing into the US.
A White House readout of the call said that Harris and Obrador discussed “ongoing bilateral cooperation” to tackle the problem of illegal immigration – or “irregular migration” as the Biden administration described it.
Harris is President Biden’s point person on stemming the flow of illegal immigration at the US-Mexico border, but her efforts are facing bipartisan scrutiny as the number of people caught illegally crossing the border continued to surge despite her early June trip to Mexico and Guatemala to enlist those countries’ help.
The White House added the American vice president and the Mexican president agreed to focus on boosting Central American economies, “particularly through investment in agriculture and climate resilience.”
Harris has said she is focused on the so-called “root causes” of illegal immigration from the Northern Triangle countries of El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras. About 189,000 people illegally crossed the border in June, up from more than 180,000 in May, itself a 21-year high.
According to a recent Department of Homeland Security document reported by NBC News, more than 18 percent of family units crossing the border and about 20 percent of unaccompanied minors recently tested positive for COVID-19. The document did not give the timeframe of the sample.
US Immigration and Customs Enforcement has had to scramble to remove infected illegal immigrants from flights to resettle them farther away from the border, NBC reports.
Former President Donald Trump highlighted the report in a Monday statement.
“Just reported that over 20% of the people coming across our Southern Border have Coronavirus (sometimes referred to as the China Virus), many of them being immediately released into our communities—and then our ‘Government’ tells you how to mask up, use three if possible, and how to otherwise act as highly infected people pour into our Country,” Trump wrote.
“Finish the wall in one month, stop paying contractors billions of dollars for NOT building the wall, and stop allowing some of the worst prisoners and criminals anywhere in the world into our Country—jails of other countries are being emptied into ours. Such a thing has never happened to any nation before.”
The more contagious Delta variant of COVID-19 has fueled a spike in new cases in Mexico and the United States, particularly in areas with lower rates of vaccination.
The Biden administration has a policy of allowing all unaccompanied minors to remain in the US. A Trump-era COVID-19 policy still in effect allows the immediate expulsion of most migrants, but families also increasingly have been allowed to stay.
Lopez Obrador has attributed the migrant crisis to Biden’s policies.
Harris’ trip to Guatemala and Mexico in early June was dogged by questions about her refusal to visit the US-Mexico border, which she ultimately did after returning to the US.
Lopez Obrador has attributed the migrant crisis to Biden’s policies.
“Expectations were created that with the government of President Biden there would be a better treatment of migrants. And this has caused Central American migrants, and also from our country, wanting to cross the border thinking that it is easier to do so,” he said in March.
Republicans also blame Biden’s border policies, his campaign rhetoric about welcoming asylum seekers and Democratic legislation that would legalize most illegal immigrants for sparking the rush to the border.
Biden has said the surge is “seasonal” and the result of pent-up demand after numbers dropped in 2020 during the height of the pandemic. The Biden administration says some people are detained multiple times after being expelled from the US.
