Biden once rejected Trump's migrant policies. Now his ideas echo them

The Biden administration’s diplomatic push across the region also hasn’t always delivered results.

Despite regular courting of Mexican President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, known as AMLO, his government deported less than half as many migrants last year as the year before.

In December, Biden dispatched two rounds of top officials to Mexico City to get AMLO’s government to restore funding for deportations that had run out. One group had to endure lecturing from the nationalist leader on the superiority of Mexican family values against social ills like drug use before he agreed to dedicate more funding and make a greater effort.

“Lopez Obrador has been blackmailing the Biden administration and getting a pass on other things in exchange for what little cooperation he provides on migration,” said Veronica Ortiz, the former head of the Mexican Council on Foreign Relations. U.S. officials disagree, pointing out that Mexico has stepped up patrols in recent months to catch migrants. A spokesperson for AMLO’s office didn’t respond to a request for comment.

Elsewhere, administration outreach has extended to leaders who might otherwise have gotten the cold shoulder were it not for their help on migration. In Guatemala, the third-largest source of migrants, the U.S. has gambled on an outsider anti-corruption activist who won presidential elections last year. Washington steadily upped sanctions pressure on his establishment opponents — including some who’d once enjoyed U.S. support — to block their efforts to keep him from taking office, something the U.S. feared could spur a bigger flow of people out of the troubled country. Guatemala has been a bright spot for the administration, with its citizens showing up at the U.S. border in lower numbers in the last two years.

But for all the efforts in Mexico and Central America, arrivals at the border from South America for the first time last year topped those from the traditional "Northern Triangle" of Honduras, El Salvador and Guatemala — the focus of many of the administration’s "root-cause" efforts.

That was a surprise for the administration, officials said.

“We have these waves of migrants that are the product of the sometimes contradictory, stop-and-go signals the United States sends,” Costa Rican President Rodrigo Chaves said in an interview in May 2023, as his country was struggling to handle tens of thousands of migrants who’d come from farther south. “Aid has been few and far between in amounts that are not very large.”

Biden later hosted Chaves at the White House and the two countries ultimately agreed on a new program to reduce the flow of migrants, diverting them to legal channels.

No place symbolizes the transformed nature of the challenge better than the Darien Gap, a stretch of roadless rainforest between Colombia and Panama linking South and Central America. For centuries, it was considered all but impassable. But last year, more than 520,000 people went through it on the way north.

“We are witnessing a constant increase,” said Ricardo Valenzuela, head of mission support at Doctors Without Borders operations in Colombia and Panama, where the group maintains two medical-assistance centers for migrants at the Darien Gap.

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(With assistance from Michael McDonald and Andreina Itriago Acosta.)