Mexican President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador said it is not true migrants can go to the U.S. now that Joe Biden is in the White House. [File: Henry Romero/Reuters]

Mexico City, February 12 (RHC)-- Mexican President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador said that migrants who believe the “doors are open” to the United States, now that Joe Biden is president, are wrong.  Lopez Obrador urged migrants not to believe traffickers who tell them they could get legal status immediately.

“Now, for example, that there is a U.S. immigration policy to regularise the situation of migrants, Mexicans and our Central American brothers, people think that now the doors are open, that President Biden is going to immediately regularise all migrants,” Lopez Obrador said.

“It is not true that everyone can go now to the United States and they will be regularised, that has not been defined yet,” he said.  “Our brother migrants should have this information so that they won’t be deceived by human traffickers, who paint a rosy picture.”

During his news conference, Lopez Obrador also cited the recent massacre of 19 people, including at least 14 Guatemalan migrants, as justification for his policy of stopping Central American migrants at Mexico’s southern border with Guatemala.  He said the massacre showed that it was too dangerous to allow migrants to travel through drug cartel turf in northern Mexico.

“This was always our argument, that we need to protect migrants, watch out for them,” he said. “If they enter [Mexico] and spread out, we cannot keep an eye on them or protect them, and they wind up in the hands of organised crime, they are in danger.”