Biden's Secretary of State heads to Mexico to beg President Obrador to curb migrant caravans

On Wednesday, Secretary of State Antony Blinken flew down to Mexico City to meet with President Andres Lopez Manuel Obrador and discuss the ongoing crisis at the border between the two nations.

Blinken's visit comes as a migrant caravan led by Luis Garcia Villagran continues to march towards the United States. The Center for Human Dignification director, who has a history of assisting asylum seekers in their northbound journeys, claimed that the group could balloon in size from its current 3,000 to nearly 15,000.

According to CNN, Blinken will be joined on his trip down south by Department of Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas and White House homeland security adviser Liz Sherwood-Randall.

In the lead up to the meeting, DHS officials have been busy working on potential steps that Mexico could implement to curb illegal immigration into the US, such as driving migrants south instead of north, monitoring railways to ensure they are not used to transport humans across the border, and using incentives to dissuade potential migrants from making the journey in the first place.

President Biden has faced increased pressure to act, with Republicans in Congress urging him to allocate more money to solving the crisis at the southern border, tying it in with requested funding for Ukraine and Israel.

As CNN reports, Biden and Obrador agreed during a call last week that action was "urgently needed," with both leaders sharing a desire to reopen critical ports of entry that had previously been closed due to the fact that staff had to be sent to other areas of the border to deal with irregular crossings.

The aforementioned caravan departed from Tapachula, a city in southern Mexico, on Christmas Eve, with those the front of the caravan holding a cross and a banner that read "Exodus from poverty" in Spanish.

If the caravan reaches its predicted size, it will be the largest to reach the US in a year.