“The scope of the challenge is huge and I think it’s important to understand the smugglers and criminal organizations will always be more agile than government,” Jacobson said. “We don’t think messaging alone is going to change this—that’s why we’re doing so many other things—but we do think that increasing and improving and targeting our message is clearly part of what we need to do.”
Administration officials have vowed to address root causes of migration including poverty, political corruption and the after-effects of natural disasters in the Northern Triangle region of Central America, from where most migrants leave. Biden last month assigned Vice President Kamala Harris to oversee the effort.
Jacobson traveled in late March to Mexico for talks with high-ranking officials on cracking down on migrant flows as well as ways to spur economic growth in the area. Ricardo Zúñiga, the State Department’s special envoy to the Northern Triangle, traveled this week to El Salvador and Guatemala.
El Salvador’s President Nayib Bukele refused to meet with Zúñiga, according to the Associated Press, a sign of the difficulties the Biden administration could face working with governments in the region. And a U.S. prosecutor said at a court hearing last month that Honduras’ president was involved in a drug trafficking plot in which the president’s brother was convicted.
The Biden administration has nonetheless taken steps to begin increasing U.S. assistance to the region. Biden officials say Trump’s decision to limit aid helped contribute to the migration spike.
Zúñiga announced a $2 million contribution to an international commission targeting corruption in El Salvador. The U.S. Agency for International Development announced Tuesday it would send disaster response teams to all three Norther Triangle countries to help the recovery from a pair of hurricanes that devastated the area late last year.
Biden’s initial budget request to Congress includes $861 million to address root causes of migration from Central America. The funding is part of a $4 billion, four-year plan in Biden’s legislative proposal on immigration. That bill faces long odds of passage in Congress.
This article was provided by Bloomberg News.