Biden administration officials head to Mexico for meetings on opioid crisis, migration

Washington — Top officials with the Biden administration are traveling to Mexico on a two-day swing for meetings with Mexican and Canadian officials on the opioid crisis and migration, the White House said early Monday. 

Elizabeth Sherwood-Randall, President Biden’s homeland security adviser, is leading the delegation, and she is joined by senior officials from the Departments of State, Justice and Homeland Security, and the White House Office of National Drug Control.

The group will be in Mexico City on Monday and Tuesday for bilateral and trilateral meetings with officials from Mexico and Canada to discuss efforts to combat the opioid crisis and “cooperation to address our regional migration challenge,” a White House official said.

Discussions focused on the opioid crisis come after Mr. Biden, Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador, and Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau gathered in January for the North American Leaders’ Summit and ordered the creation of a Trilateral Fentanyl Committee, focused on addressing the threat to North American communities posed by illegal fentanyl. The group last met in April and will gather again this week.

During meetings focused on migration, Biden administration officials will “continue to sustain and strengthen the successful initiatives we have put in place to address the humanitarian situation caused by the migration flows at our shared border and in the region,” the White House official said.

While May saw a peak in daily illegal border crossings before the end of the Title 42 pandemic-related policy that allowed U.S. officials to expel migrants on public health grounds, the number of migrants crossing the U.S.-Mexico border illegally dropped in June to the lowest level since the start of Mr. Biden’s presidency, according to unpublished government data obtained by CBS News earlier this month.

The decline follows the implementation of stricter asylum rules, under which migrants are disqualified from asylum if they enter the U.S. illegally without first requesting refugee status in another country.