By Julia Ainsley -
NBC News
Senior officials from the United States and Mexico meet on Friday in Washington DC to discuss how to curb irregular migration as pressure increases on the Joe Biden Administration to address this crisis ahead of November's presidential election.
However, neither side expects significant progress to emerge from the talks.
The meeting that the Secretary of State, Antony Blinken, will attend;
the Secretary of National Security, Alejandro Mayorkas;
White House National Security Advisor Elizabeth Sherwood-Randall;
and Mexican Foreign Affairs Secretary Alicia Bárcena is an extension of talks that began in Mexico on Dec. 27 when U.S. officials traveled to the neighboring country amid a historic increase in irregular crossings at the southern border.
Mexico then resumed deportations of Venezuelans, one of the groups of migrants with the most crossings to the United States, and began to intercept more people trying to reach Mexico through Guatemala.
These actions, as well as the migratory movements of the season, led to a dramatic drop in the number of migrants crossing the border at the beginning of 2024.
[Blinken and Mayorkas meet with AMLO to tackle the migration crisis while a huge caravan crosses Mexico]
But U.S. officials and other sources familiar with the talks said they do not expect results from Friday's meeting.
A senior Biden administration official, who spoke to reporters on Thursday, said: "We're not expecting any big announcements."
Another senior US official said there will be more talks throughout the year.
Both parties have set out clear objectives of what they hope to achieve with the negotiations from now on, two sources told NBC News in early January.
Among Mexico's priorities is getting the United States to commit to combating migration by "addressing the root causes," referring to political corruption, violence and poverty in the Western Hemisphere country.
Another US official assured that the Biden Administration is interested in doing so.
In early January, Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador publicly asked the United States to allocate $20 billion in aid to countries in Latin America and the Caribbean and to suspend sanctions on Venezuela, among other actions.
At the time, a US official reacted by saying that AMLO had an "ambitious agenda."
[Mexico and the US agree to joint measures to “depressurize” the border]
Both Mexican and US officials have insisted that their talks are not transactional.
For example, Mexico will not stop helping its neighboring country with the immigration issue if the United States does not commit to allocating the 20 billion in the region.
Two people familiar with the discussions said Mexico has its own interest in reducing irregular migration because the high flow of migrants north also affects it.
The United States relies heavily on Mexico's willingness to cooperate, however, as talks continue in Washington DC this week and throughout the year, Mexico has great leverage.