Immediately after Joe Biden’s inauguration in 2021, the southern border exploded. Families started crossing en masse, and the Border Patrol released them to non-profits, which bused them to cities around the country. As reporter Todd Bensman reveals in this new book, “Overrun,” the Mexican government had been plotting to push this wave of illegal immigration as soon as Biden was elected — knowing he would do nothing to stop it.
The Mexican government was not happy with President Trump’s Remain in Mexico policies.
Facing threats of debilitating trade tariffs from Trump, Mexico had been forced to take on the burdens of housing, feeding, and caring for hundreds of thousands of migrant family groups either expelled by Trump or unable to proceed over the border. Many could not be easily deported to Africa, Cuba, Haiti, or one hundred other countries.
Once Trump’s expulsion policies took full effect, as the Texas Tribune put it, Mexico was quickly “overwhelmed by the number of migrants in its border cities.” Women with very young children that Trump expelled soon became a headache for Mexico, which by law had to care for them somewhere, somehow. They filled Mexico’s 58 detention centers to capacity.
And when those centers filled up, squalid camps began to form in parks or in the central squares of northern Mexican cities like Nuevo Laredo, Piedras Negras, Juarez, Acuña, and especially so in Tamaulipas State across from South Texas in the cities of Reynosa and Matamoros, long the most heavily trammeled border-crossing areas into the United States.
So Mexico began closely eyeing the American election, looking for the soonest possible relief should Joe Biden win.
Immediately after the election, the Mexican congress secretively passed a new and unusual law that had been pre-written and a pathway for its quick approval cleared.
On November 6, 2020 — within 72 hours of Joe Biden’s election — the “Various Articles of the Migration Law and the Law on Refugees are Reformed, Complementary Protection and Political Asylum in the Matter of Migrant Children” was on President Andrés Manuel López Obrador’s desk for signing.
On November 11, President Obrador signed it with no formal announcement or press coverage.
By Todd Bensman
