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The Biden government is considering sending cash payments to Central Americans in an effort to prevent them from making the trek north, as the U.S. faces the worst immigration crisis in 20 years, Reuters reported Friday.
The potential cash transfer program will target residents of Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador, who are responsible for the vast majority of migrants crossing the border illegally.
“We are looking at all the productive options to address both the economic reasons why people may migrate and the protection and security reasons,” Jacobson said in an interview.
In March, nearly 170,000 migrants were picked up by U.S. border patrol agents on the southern border, a 70 percent increase over February and the highest monthly total since March 2001, the data show.
The numbers have been steadily increasing since the beginning of the year and are attributed to a number of factors. These include the pandemic, natural disasters in those regions and a more welcome attitude from President Biden, who has reversed a series of strict immigration policies introduced by his predecessor.
Local law enforcement agencies and border officials criticized Biden for not doing enough to stop or prepare for the boom, which left thousands of children missing without federal supervision at an estimated cost of $ 60 million a week.
The White House hopes the cash payments will address economic issues facing Central Americans so they do not have the need to migrate, the office said, citing a senior White House official who is anonymous.
Jacobson, who announced her resignation on Friday, could not explain to Reuters how the program would work, but said she could “promise” that the U.S. government would not hand out money or checks to people. ‘
The government is also devising a plan to send COVID-19 vaccines to Central American countries, which have had extremely slow vaccines. In Honduras and Guatemala, less than one percent of the population was vaccinated, and in El Salvador, only 2.5 percent were vaccinated. https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2021/world/covid-vaccinations-tracker.html
Jacobson said the government had not come to the decision to give preference to sending vaccines to Northern Triangle countries, but said Biden would consider how the vaccination could help the residents’ struggling economies.