Mexico condemns the Texas law and says it will not accept deportations from the state

Mexico will not accept deportations under any circumstances by Texas, the country’s Department of State said Tuesday in response to the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision to allow Texas to arrest migrants who enter the state without authorization.

The ministry condemned the state law, known as Senate Bill 4It would separate families, violate the human rights of migrants and create a “hostile environment” for the more than 10 million people of Mexican descent living in Texas.

Mexico’s top diplomat for North America, Roberto Velasco Álvarez, rejected the ruling on social media On Tuesday, he said immigration policy is something that should be negotiated between federal governments.

The Mexican government has severely criticized the measure since last year, rejecting the idea that local or national agencies, rather than federal authorities, would detain migrants and asylum seekers and return them to Mexican territory.

“Texas has taken a very combative stance,” said Rafael Fernández de Castro, director of the Center for US-Mexican Studies at the University of California, San Diego. “It just makes the problem worse because you’re forcibly closing one part of the border while others are still open.”

A senior Mexican Foreign Ministry official, who was not authorized to speak publicly, said the Supreme Court ruling would not affect existing migration agreements between the two countries.

While Mexico has served as the United States’ immigration enforcer, often discouraging migrants from gathering at the border, the country has also publicly pushed for two major policies to address the root causes that push people from their home countries — such as poverty and violence. , inequality and climate change – and expand regular migration routes.

Last week, President Andrés Manuel López Obrador of Mexico said his administration was proposing that the Biden administration give legal status to at least five million undocumented Mexicans living and working in the United States.

He has also called on the United States to suspend sanctions on Venezuela and lift the blockade on Cuba, saying such measures would reduce migration flows from those countries. And he has called proposals to build walls or close the border “electoral propaganda.”

“Do you think the Americans and Mexicans will approve of this?” Mr López Obrador said this last month. “Companies can’t handle it. Maybe for a day, but not for a week.”