A wave of unrest has gripped Northern Mexico ahead of a visit to Mexico City by President Joe Biden and Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau. The state visit by Biden includes a stop at the U.S.-Mexico border.
In a pre-dawn raid Thursday, Mexican authorities arrested Ovidio Guzmán, the son of notorious Mexican drug lord Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán. The operation sparked a series of intense firefights between law enforcement and cartel members trying to free Ovidio throughout Sinaloa’s capital city Culiacán — home to one million.
The fighting forced the city’s international airport to close Thursday morning. Eventually, Ovidio was successfully flown to Mexico City on a military aircraft.
It isn’t clear if Ovidio will be extradited to the United States, where his father is serving a life sentence at a supermax prison in Colorado.
At least 29 people died in the attempts to free Ovidio.
Ovidio is a high-ranking member of the Sinaloa Cartel in his own right. Before Thursday, the U.S. State Department offered up to $5 million for information leading to his arrest.
Officials say the plan to apprehend him was in the works for months. However, Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador may have pushed to capture Ovidio to show Biden his resolve to control his country’s security situation.
Observers say it’s likely to lessen the pressure from the Biden administration to stem the tide of narcotics, especially fentanyl, coming into the United States.
Beyond trafficking in large amounts of marijuana and cocaine, Ovidio and his brother, Joaquín Guzmán-López, manage 11 “methamphetamine labs in the state of Sinaloa,” according to the State Department.
ABC News has more on what lead to this moment and Biden’s itinerary:
Biden said he will visit El Paso, Texas, “to assess border enforcement operations, meet with the local officials and community leaders and the folks at the border sending me what they need that they don’t have.”
Since he became president, Republicans have hammered Biden on his handling of immigration and the crisis at the southern border, making it a top campaign issue in last year’s midterm elections.
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The Biden administration also announced Thursday it planned to send more migrants back to Mexico, even as it fights in court to end the “Title 42” pandemic-era restrictions the federal government is currently enforcing. Working with the Mexican government, the administration expects to send as many as 30,000 unauthorized Cuban, Haitian, Nicaraguan and Venezuelan migrants to Mexico each month.
While not an official expansion of Title 42 – given that there have never been nationality-based exceptions to the protocols – Mexico’s acceptance of Cubans, Haitians and Nicaraguans will effectively allow for more Title 42 expulsions while the order remains in place. Diplomatic tensions have caused difficulties in organizing removal flights to those countries. Mexico’s agreement to accept them will allow for more removals under Title 42 or by other means.
With Republicans embroiled in a historic battle for the speaker’s gavel, Biden’s trip has received less attention from the GOP than it would’ve otherwise.
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Mexico is hardly an ally. Corruption in that nation is legendary. Due to Democrats’ open border nonsense, most of these criminals will be in the U.S. if thay haven’t gotten in already.
Mexico is an ally of the swamp, and just as corrupt as the Washington DC swamp creatures, but are definitely no friends to the citizens!
America is hardly a country to criticize any countries about corruption? Maybe at one we could do that, in all honesty, do you think we still can hold that moral high ground?
I’m amazed that they’ll allow Biden to travel to Mexico with the cartel looking to free Guzmans son. Half of the police and military are on the cartel’s payroll and it will be hard to protect Biden. If Biden never came back to the U.S. it wouldn’t break my heart, however I wouldn’t want to see him get hurt and putting him in the middle of a war is not sensible.
Howard – I’ll wager that he won’t be allowed any closer to the actual border than kamalala was when she was in El Paso a while ago. IIRC she spent more time in New Mexico than she did at the airport. There ain’t no way he will get close to the real hot spots.
OTOH it would be a real feather in the cap of the cartels if they managed to somehow take him out. I certainly wouldn’t want to see that by any means.
Photo ops, nothing more. It’s infuriating that the Biden Admin think that all Americans have the intellect of all Philadelphians. Gosh.
Two peas in a pod, Mexico and Washington, D.C. no problem there.
If the mexicans are to clean up the drug gangs, they’ll need US military assistance. That could start in the USA and move south the way things are going….
OK Mexico free the cartels for Joe