Mexican President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador requested his American counterpart, Joe Biden, to lift the trade sanctions imposed on Venezuela and Cuba.
Yesterday, Mexican President López Obrador urged the US President in a phone call to “suspend sanctions against Venezuela” and “lift the blockade imposed on Cuba” in order to reduce the flow of migrants from both countries, according to the Mexican presidency statement.
According to the statement, the left-wing Mexican president told Biden, “Any law that is adopted within this framework and ignores the causes of the migration phenomenon and does not address it is destined to remain just words on paper.”
The White House, on its part, stated that both parties agreed to “continue their fruitful partnership” in addressing the challenges of immigration.
This contact comes at a crucial stage, expected to announce an agreement negotiated by a group of Republican and Democratic members of the Senate that will strengthen the immigration policy in the United States.
Awaiting to know whether Congress will approve the text, Biden said that this agreement constitutes the “most stringent set of reforms” in the history of the United States and will allow for the “closure of the border” with Mexico “when it experiences a surge” of immigrants.
The details of the agreement are still unknown, but it is expected that it will tighten immigration and asylum policies.
Republicans insist on tightening immigration policy in exchange for releasing an additional budget of nearly $100 billion to meet urgent needs, including securing supplies for Ukraine, aiding Israel, and strengthening the border with Mexico.
On Saturday, 11 people, including nine Cuban immigrants, were killed in a collision between a small truck, a motorcycle, and a large truck on a road in western Guatemala.
In a statement, the Guatemalan government’s Institute of Migration said that the Cuban immigrants “were crossing Guatemalan lands on their way to the United States.”
Mexico shares a border of over 3,000 kilometers with the United States, and is considered a transit and detention country for migrants, most of whom come from Central American countries suffering from violence and poverty (Honduras, Guatemala, and El Salvador) and from the Caribbean region (Haiti and Cuba) or from Venezuela, and they face restrictions imposed by the United States.
