Mexico has hailed US President Joe Biden’s order to halt construction of Donald Trump’s wall along the US-Mexican border, as well as his other immigration-linked reforms, while stranded migrants say his inauguration is giving them new hope.
“Mexico welcomes the end of the construction of the wall, the immigration initiative in favour of DACA and a path to dual citizenship,” Foreign Minister Marcelo Ebrard wrote on Twitter on Wednesday (local time).
He was referring to the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program to regularise the immigration status of young people who arrived illegally as children, which Mr Trump tried to shut down.
The Republican sparked anger during his 2016 election campaign when he branded Mexican migrants “rapists” and drug dealers, and vowed to build a wall across the southern US border.
The order to stop work on the hulking steel fence was one of Mr Biden’s first acts after he was sworn in on Wednesday.
The Democrat also plans to send a bill to Congress to revamp immigration policies and give millions of undocumented migrants living inside the country a path to citizenship, according to his aides.
Mexican President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador was one of the last high-profile leaders to congratulate Mr Biden on his election victory, saying he wanted to wait until legal disputes were resolved in Mr Trump’s quest to have the result overturned.
Relations between the neighbours have also been strained over the case of a former Mexican defence minister accused by the US of cartel ties.
Mr Lopez Obrador on Wednesday wished Mr Biden success ahead of his inauguration and said that he agreed with his policy priorities, including on migration.
‘We feel hopeful again’
Meanwhile, migrants stranded on the Mexican-US border on Wednesday said that Mr Biden’s arrival in the White House had given them a new sense of optimism after years of Mr Trump’s harsh policies.
“We’re very happy. We feel hopeful again,” said Nicaraguan Jessica Valles, who has been waiting in the Mexican border city of Ciudad Juarez for 18 months.
She watched Mr Biden’s inauguration on television in a shelter along with other migrants stuck in northern Mexico.
“It makes us feel more confident and we see that the new president is not putting us to one side and is thinking of us,” said a woman named Fatima, a migrant from El Salvador who has been in Mexico for two years.
“We are all human beings and we all have the right to a better life.”
Mr Trump’s “zero tolerance” policy launched in 2018 saw thousands of children separated from their parents at the frontier, a tactic apparently meant to frighten the families, before the government backed down.
Guatemalan soldiers and policemen form a human barricade to stop Honduran asylum seekers walking on a highway near to Chiquimula, Guatemala.
AAP
Under Mr Trump’s “Remain in Mexico” program, tens of thousands of non-Mexican asylum seekers – mostly from Central America – were sent back over the border pending the outcome of their asylum applications.
Under Mr Biden’s plans to revamp immigration policies, arriving migrants will be permitted to apply for asylum and have their cases reviewed, his Homeland Security Department nominee Alejandro Mayorkas said on Tuesday.
“Politicians promise a lot, but we hope that this will be the case, that we will be given the opportunity,” said Dennys Lopez, a migrant from Cuba.
Hopes that Mr Biden will be more welcoming to migrants than Mr Trump spurred thousands of would-be asylum seekers to join a northward march this month from Honduras towards the United States.
But their dreams were dashed after security forces in Guatemala broke up the caravan and Washington warned the migrants not to “waste your time and money”.
