Immigration politics on summit agenda

Immigration politics are on the agenda as US President Joe Biden arrived in Mexico for the North American Leaders Summit a day after his first official visit to the southwest border, where he received a letter critical of White House policy from the governor of Texas.

Mexican President Andre Manuel Lopez Obrador said Monday in the leadup to the summit that starts on Tuesday that he would consider accepting more migrants than previously announced under Biden's plan to turn away people from four nations who cross illegally into the United States.

"We don't want to anticipate things, but this is part of what we are going to talk about at the summit," Lopez Obrador said. "We support (these) type of measures, to give people options, alternatives," he said, adding that "the numbers may be increased.

Lopez Obrador is hosting Biden and Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau between Monday and Wednesday for the first summit between the three since late 2021.

Jake Sullivan, White House national security adviser, cautioned that nothing was decided yet.

"I'll just say that, today, with President Lopez Obrador, President Biden is looking to dive deep on a set of issues that are priorities for his administration, including continued close coordination on migration questions," Sullivan said at a news conference Monday morning in Mexico City.

Biden last week announced a major shift in US migration policy, which had been negotiated with Mexico. Under the plan, the US will send 30,000 migrants per month from Cuba, Nicaragua, Haiti and Venezuela back across the border from among those who entered the US illegally, under Title 42, a World War II era health measure.

But the administration announced that it would allow up to 30,000 migrants from the four countries to enter legally per month.

Democratic US senators Robert Menéndez and Cory Booker of New Jersey, and Ben Ray Lujan of New Mexico and Alex Padilla of California put out a joint statement hours after Biden announced his plan Thursday at the White House.

"While we understand the challenges the nation is facing at the Southern border exacerbated by Republican obstruction to modernizing our immigration system, we are deeply disappointed by the Biden Administration's decision to expand the use of Title 42," wrote the four senators.

There were more than 2.38 million encounters at the border by migrants seeking entry in the fiscal year that ended Sept 30, the first time the number topped 2 million.

"We also will spend a considerable amount of time today, both in the bilateral and inside meetings that members of our Cabinet will be holding on how we can enhance and elevate our cooperation on fentanyl," Sullivan said.

Sullivan said Biden believed he would emerge from the summit with "commitments for stronger cooperation" to address fentanyl, a synthetic opioid blamed for thousands of deaths in the United States.

The leaders also are expected to discuss deepening economic ties, even as disagreements persist over Lopez Obrador's energy policies, which led to Washington and Ottawa launching a formal trade complaint in July.

Christopher Landau, US ambassador to Mexico under former president Donald Trump, said domestic politics meant finding compromises on energy and migration would be difficult.

"There's no obvious deal that satisfies all of their domestic interests," he said, "but I think it's in all their domestic interest to say they get along."

On Sunday, Biden was greeted at El Paso International Airport by Texas Governor Greg Abbott, who handed him a letter listing complaints about the record surge of migration on Texas' border with Mexico.

"Your open-border policies have emboldened the cartels, who grow wealthy by trafficking deadly fentanyl and even human beings,'' read part of the letter. "Texans are paying an especially high price for your failure, sometimes with their very lives, as local leaders from your own party will tell you if given the chance."

The letter also described Biden's visit as "two years and about $20 billion too late".

Earlier Sunday, the Republican governor accused Biden and his team of failing to communicate with local officials about the visit to El Paso.

"He did not call me, nor [did] his staff call, and let us know, either about his visit or to invite us, until last night. We got a random email to one of my staff members asking if I would be there to meet him on the tarmac," Abbott said on Fox News' Sunday Morning Futures.

But White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre told reporters on the plane to El Paso that Abbott had been invited and she understood that he would be at the airport when Biden landed.

In an interview on Monday on Fox News, Abbott described the president as "cordial" during their meeting. He said he also asked Biden to see for himself where people are crossing the border illegally.

"Obviously, he didn't do that,'' Abbott added.

Abbott said that he showed Biden five proposals to address the border crisis during border visit. He said that they don't "require any new passage of law; they only require the president to enforce issues that have already been enacted into law by the United States Congress that would stop the flow of illegal immigration between the points of entry''.

Abbott said that his deploying of the Texas National Guard has reduced border crossings and that he would contest Biden's wanting Texas to remove barriers where people cross the border.

"We want to litigate this issue and prove that Texas does have the authority to undertake the actions I'm undertaking, which are unprecedented for a state to secure not only our state but the entire country,'' he said.

Agencies contributed to this story.