In mid-March, President Joe Biden warned migrants against making the journey to America, in a statement that came amid his administration’s efforts to tackle a growing surge of refugees on the US-Mexico border.
Some Guatemalan residents are still eager to leave their country for the US in a sign of “desperation”, even despite the US government’s migrant-related warnings not to make the perilous journey, CBS News reports.
According to the US news outlet, Guatemalans are being lured into going to the US by smugglers who are advertising the trip to America for a certain price tag, which may reportedly amount to tens of thousands of dollars.
Some such migrants, CBS News said, hope to find better work in the US and are willing to flee Guatemala, pounded by two powerful hurricanes late last year.
The developments unfold after the Biden administration placed around 28,000 radio ads in Latin America as part of a stepped-up campaign to discourage people from travelling to the US. The message is “Don’t put your children’s lives at risk over false hopes”.
About-Face in Biden’s Migration Policy?
The ads come amid reports that President Joe Biden is considering restarting the construction of former POTUS Donald Trump’s southern border wall that the US president himself put the brakes on in January, in a bid to tackle an increasing surge of migrants near the American-Mexican border.
The reports followed Biden thanking newly naturalised citizens for choosing his country as their final destination as he welcomed his “friends” and “fellow Americans” to the US.
US Customs and Border Protection agents and Central American migrants on International Bridge 1 Las Americas
The message was an apparent about-face to last month’s tone, when Biden warned refugees not to come to America, a statement that he made amid his team’s efforts to contain the border crisis.
The warning was preceded by Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas predicting that before the end of this year, the US may apprehend more migrants on its southern border than it has over the past 20 years.
Biden’s move to freeze construction of the border wall was earlier slammed by Trump, who argued that when he was POTUS, the country’s southern border was “in great shape – stronger, safer, and more secure than ever before”.
The ex-POTUS asserted that the US-Mexico border was “working magnificently”, claiming the US is now being destroyed on the southern border, which is “a terrible thing to see”.
In the hours after Biden was inaugurated on 20 January, he began the process of rolling back many of Trump’s policies, issuing executive orders that included halting construction of the border wall on the US-Mexico border and ending prolonged detention and family separations of refugees in America.
Sourse: sputniknews.com
