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Jan. 9 (UPI) — President Joe Biden, who landed in Mexico this weekend, will meet Monday with Mexican President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador and Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, who are expected to discuss topics including drugs, crime and migration.
Biden’s meeting with Obrador and Trudeau, unofficially nicknamed the “Three Amigos Summit,” comes a day after the president visited the U.S.-Mexico border for the first time since his inauguration to discuss the migration crisis with federal and local officials.
Biden and his wife, first lady Jill Biden, will depart for the National Place in Mexico City around 3:55 p.m. CST and are expected to arrive around 4:15 p.m. for a welcome ceremony hosted by Obrador and his wife, Beatriz Gutiérrez, according to a trip guidance provided by the White House.
After the ceremony, the White House said Biden will participate in a bilateral meeting with Obrador at the National Palace and are expected to discuss economic policies such as strengthening supply chains, as well as how to tackle the fentanyl drug crisis and “irregular migration.”
Biden and Obrador will then participate in a dinner with Trudeau at the National Palace, which will be closed to the press.
On Tuesday, Biden is expected to meet with Trudeau to discuss commitments to clean energy and support for Ukraine amid the war with Russia before a scheduled photo op with Obrador.
Later in the day, the three leaders will meet for the 10th North American Leaders Summit to “continue to deepen and expand our security cooperation and economic partnership and increase coordination on global and regional issues,” according to the White House.
“We have a big agenda that ranges from the climate crisis to economic development and other issues. But one important part of that agenda is strengthening our border between our nations,” Biden said during a speech Thursday on border security at the White House.
Biden has received bipartisan criticism for not doing enough to slow the border chaos. He responded last week by announcing new measures to beef up security while allowing up to 30,000 per month to apply for asylum before traveling to the border.
“We can’t stop people from making the journey, but we can require them to come here in an orderly way,” Biden said.
Some of those measures, like embracing Trump-era Title 42 that will allow them to immediately remove migrants because of COVID-19, drew anger among some of Biden’s own supporters.
Former President Donald Trump shared a post to his Truth Social platform on Monday in which he said the United States is “like a Third World Nation” because of the border crisis.
The Biden administration has been pressing Obrador to crack down on drug cartels that have trafficked the synthetic opioid fentanyl into the United States.
Last week, Mexico arrested Ovidio Guzmán, the son of the imprisoned cartel leader JoaquÃn “El Chapo” Guzmán, who has been accused of being part of a cartel trafficking fentanyl.
The U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration said last month that it seized the equivalent of 379 million potentially deadly doses of fentanyl in 2022, which is enough to kill all 331.9 million Americans.
Trade disputes and other tension have been brewing between the three nations since the Trump administration replaced the North American Free Trade Agreement with a new trade pact, and the three leaders are expected to focus much of their discussions on such issues.
Last summer, Obrador skipped the Summit of the Americas hosted in Los Angeles after the United States chose not to invite the leaders of Cuba, Nicaragua and Venezuela because of their human rights records — which angered other nations in the region.
Biden sought to ease some of the tensions at the start of the trip by arriving in Air Force One at Felipe Angeles International Airport in Zumpango de Ocampo, a newly constructed airport favored by Obrador.
