WASHINGTON - President Joe Biden on Monday sought help in averting a new crisis at the border from President Andrés Manuel Lpez Obrador of Mexico, seeking diplomatic cooperation from one of the key supporters of the harsh tactics imposed by Biden's predecessor to choke off immigration.
Lpez Obrador won the admiration of President Donald Trump for cooperating on his hard-line immigration agenda, even praising Trump during a call with Biden, then the president-elect, in December.
Facing an uptick of illegal migrant crossings at some parts of the southwestern border, Biden is now hoping Lpez Obrador will become a partner in preventing another cycle of out-of-control migration from Central America, but do so without resorting to the full range of policies Trump embraced.
Despite campaigning against Trump's policies, Biden wants one of the same things from the Mexican president that his predecessor did: help in keeping Central American migrants from immediately surging north toward the United States through Mexico.
While Biden has presented himself as breaking sharply with Trump administration immigration policies, he has kept some for now while abandoning others.
The president has recently begun welcoming a limited number of asylum-seekers back to the United States who were exposed to violence and kidnappings in dangerous areas of Mexico under a Trump-era program. But the Biden administration has kept in place a separate Trump policy that empowers agents to rapidly expel new arrivals at the border to Mexican authorities as Biden hopes to avoid a crisis that challenged his predecessors.
Both policies were accepted by Lpez Obrador with little resistance when they were first imposed by Trump.
Lpez Obrador recently called for a new guest worker program for Mexicans and Central Americans in the United States, although Biden's press secretary said Monday the move would require legislation from Congress.
But while Trump initially threatened Mexico with tariffs and a shutdown of the border to win cooperation with his immigration agenda, Biden heaped praise on Lpez Obrador on Monday. Biden has also signaled that he is eager to open the U.S.-Mexico border to full trade when the pandemic allows it to happen.
"The United States and Mexico are stronger when we stand together," Biden said at the beginning of a virtual meeting with the Mexican president, while acknowledging that the countries have not been "perfect" neighbors. He said that during the Obama administration, "we looked at Mexico as an equal - you are equal."
Before the meeting, Alejandro N. Mayorkas, the homeland security secretary, denounced what he called the "depths of cruelty" of the Trump administration's immigration philosophy, telling reporters that the separation of families at the border was "the most powerful and heartbreaking example" of Trump's assault on the immigration system.
But even as Biden seeks to unwind those policies, Mayorkas acknowledged that the United States continued to rely, for now, on a measure at the heart of Trump's approach: a public health rule that requires border agents to quickly deport border crossers to Mexico without a chance to request asylum.
"They need to wait. It takes time to rebuild the system from scratch," Mayorkas said of potential asylum-seekers.
Biden has made immigration one of his top legislative and diplomatic priorities, moving quickly to raise Trump-era limits on refugees who can be allowed into the United States and calling on Congress to pass a far-reaching bill that would give a path to citizenship to 11 million unauthorized immigrants already living in the country.