The White House has Roberta Jacobson, President Biden’s leading official on border issues, who has been trying to move to the US with a large increase in migrants, at the end of the month after 100 days in progress.
Jacobson, a highly regarded former U.S. ambassador to Mexico and career diplomat, said in an interview that she had always intended to serve as the coordinator of the National Security Council for the U.S. Southern Border and believed that she was the Biden- government can leave. has built teams to work on the immigration issue, including causes in many countries’ homelands.
Vice President Kamala Harris was recently appointed by Biden to oversee diplomacy with the countries – El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras – and the US Agency for International Development is setting up a hitherto unannounced special task force for Central America, according to people familiar with the matter.
“It was never my intention to return to government,” Jacobson told The Times on Friday. She retired on May 5, 2018, in part due to disagreements with then-President Trump. “But sometimes you get the call you can’t refuse.”
She agreed to become Biden’s frontier tsar shortly after he was inaugurated. “It would always take 100 days,” she said. Her official departure is at the end of April.
Jake Sullivan, Biden’s national security adviser, said Jacobson would retire after helping to introduce a safer, more secure and fairer approach to our southern border. ‘
One specialist in the region who is close to the administration has confirmed that the appointment of the border tsar will always be temporary, but says that the announcement is now sending a bad message. ‘
It comes as a large number of underage minors reach the southern U.S. border and give political ammunition to Republicans and other critics who blame Biden for what they call a crisis, leading to intense investigation and finger pointing.
Last year, a steady increase in numbers at the border began, but it increased during the first few months of Biden. The government tried to find a difficult balance between promises to undo “the moral and national disgrace of the previous government”, as Biden put it, and promised that “the border was closed”, as Jacobson himself in said the Spanish from the White House. .
Last month, U.S. officials encountered nearly 19,000 minor minors at the southern border, the largest monthly number ever recorded, according to Homeland Security officials, well above the previous high of more than 11,000 in May 2019.
A combination of court rulings, humanitarian concerns and legal changes in Mexico led the Biden government in January to quickly remove migrant children without parents or legal guardians, as was the case under a Trump-era pandemic policy. This has probably helped fuel the continuing increase in the number of underage minors at the border – as well as migrating families who are “separating themselves” and sending children on their own, officials say.
As the U.S. immigration system is largely aimed at single adults – who still make up the vast majority of encounters at the border – the government, like others before, has struggled to respond to the increase in underage minors. The United States has more than 20,000 minor children in their possession, the vast majority of whom have family in the United States.
Because Jacobson’s departure came so shortly after Harris’ appointment, there were speculations that a suspected rivalry led to Jacobson’s decision to leave. She and other administrative officials denied it. Some experts said that the fact that Jacobson in the border role allowed Harris to concentrate on Central America and gave her political cover to avoid being too closely related to the border issue.
Rep. Norma Torres (D-Pomona) – the first member of Congress born in Central America – calls Jacobson’s resignation a ‘loss for our country’, but says she is committed to working with Harris and the government. to work to meet the challenges we face. the border. “
Andrew Selee, president of the non-partisan think tank of the Migration Policy Institute, confirmed that Jacobson’s role “should definitely only be a 100-day job.
“Managing all the moving parts in the interagency process on immigration and the relationships with key partners in the region is a challenging challenge that remains an important test for the Biden government,” he added. “They are both trying to address an immediate increase in border migration and are finding long-term solutions to ongoing regional issues that have fueled the recurring migration flows.”
In an interview with The Times early last month, Jacobson spoke about her plans for the border and the need for the government to learn from past mistakes, including the tighter control of the $ 4 billion four-year package Biden proposed for the three has. Central American countries, called the Northern Triangle.
Instead of pouring the most money into the national treasury, she said in that interview that larger sums go to non-governmental organizations and programs for single mothers, youth education, and similar groups, “so that you ultimately strengthen societies and not these governments. enrich. “