The Story Behind Mexico’s Effort to Rescue Biden from His Own Border Crisis

FAIR Take | January 2025
We know how Americans feel about President Biden’s immigration record. A Gallup poll conducted in the final weeks of Mr. Biden’s presidency found that 64 percent of the American public that immigration matters got worse during his time in office (along with just about everything else they care about).
The historic border crisis and its impact on American society was a story that was largely ignored by The New York Times – the self-described paper of record – until after November’s election put Trump back into office. Now, just days before President Biden left office, the Times reported on the turmoil that the Biden Border Crisis was causing at the highest levels of the Mexican government.
It is well known that the 94 executive actions taken by the Biden administration, nearly all of which encouraged migrants to come here illegally, enriched the criminal cartels that shepherd people from across the globe through Mexico to the U.S. border. But the surge of illegal migration was also facilitated by corrupt government officials who also profited from the crisis before the Biden administration induced Mexico to stanch the flow.
According to the Times, multiple Mexican officials, including Mexico’s immigration minister, Francisco Garduño Yáñez, cashed in on America’s open border. The Times reports that “Garduño’s agency has also been accused of essentially waving migrants through to the northern border for bribes. In interviews, migrants said they had to pay Mexican migration agents to travel through the country to reach the United States.”
It seems that all the key players – including Homeland Security Secretary Mayorkas, the corrupt Mexican officials and the cartels – were happy with this arrangement until the fall of 2023, when former President Biden (or those advising him) realized that the border crisis posed a monumental liability to his reelection bid. In October, he sent Mayorkas and Secretary of State Antony Blinken to Mexico City to beseech the Mexican government to do his dirty work for him. The goal of the Biden administration was to get Mexico to control the flow of illegal migrants to the U.S. border, without incurring the wrath of the Democratic Party’s far-left base that shared Mayorkas’ open-borders ideology.
Garduño’s bosses, who either didn’t know, or pretended not to know how many illegal migrants the Mexican immigration agency was allowing to pass through the country, ordered him to stop issuing work permits to the migrants. These permits essentially allowed the migrants to move easily to the U.S. border where they were confident they would be allowed to cross. Garduño complied, but a budget crisis in Mexico quickly ensued essentially shutting down parts of the government, including his agency. The result was the largest monthly surge of illegal aliens crashing our border in December 2023, with the U.S. Customs and Border Protection agency recording nearly a quarter of a million Southwest border encounters.
Curiously, after a December call between Biden and former Mexican President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador (AMLO), Mexico found more funding for its immigration agency and Mexico began interdicting illegal migrants before they reached the U.S. border. The number of Southwest border encounters declined steadily throughout 2024, although illegal aliens continued to enter in large numbers due to the Biden administration’s continued abuse of parole authority.
Secretary Mayorkas seems to think this was a successful border policy. A week before being relieved of his duties, Mayorkas sat down for an “exit interview” with National Public Radio, an outlet that he was certain would not ask him any uncomfortable questions about the immigration disaster over which he presided. Notwithstanding the 11 million illegal entries under his watch, Mayorkas gave himself high marks, declaring that the “border right now is more secure than it was at the end of 2019.” Mayorkas, however, did not mention Mexico’s last-minute role in bringing the numbers down. Rather, he claimed credit for providing the incoming Trump administration with its immigration enforcement blueprint. The plan put forth by the new border czar, Tom Homan, “is precisely what we have been doing and have done,” he told NPR listeners. (Let’s hope not.)
Host Steve Inskeep predictably failed to ask Mayorkas about any of the numerous policies he and President Biden had implemented, or the laws they ignored or subverted, all of which caused the border crisis. Nor did Inskeep probe too deeply about why they waited until election year rolled around to enlist Mexico’s assistance to clean up their mess. (It is not clear what was promised in return, but AMLO publicly asked for $20 billion in aid to Latin American countries and more work visas for Mexican nationals.)
Inskeep didn’t really have to, of course. The answer is obvious to everyone: Open borders was the policy of the outgoing administration and would have continued for another four years if President Biden or Vice President Harris had won the election. Mexico’s help would no longer have been required or, perhaps, even welcome.
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