This takes air traffic control to a complete latest level.
Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador is asking President Biden to land Air Force One at a latest airport farther from central Mexico when he visits him next month – describing it as a favor to quell domestic criticism of the project.
The bizarre request creates a potentially awkward start to the visit and would require Biden’s motorcade to add time to commuting when the president arrives on January 9 for talks with López Obrador and Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau.
“I take this chance to say [Biden] that it’s out of friendship, out of diplomacy, that we’re asking him to land his plane at Felipe Ángeles International Airport”, the 69-year-old Mexican president, known by the initials AMLO, he said on Wednesday at a press conference.
AMLO said Trudeau had already agreed to land at a more distant airport that opened in March, and said he was taking his request for Biden to the U.S. Embassy, According to Excélsior newspaper in Mexico.
![Biden will travel to the North American Leaders' Summit in Mexico City on January 9 and 10.](https://nypost.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2022/11/mexican-president-biden-9.jpg?w=1024)
The White House didn’t immediately respond to The Post’s request for comment.
The brand new airport is about 30 miles north of Mexico’s National Palace, where the North American leadership summit will probably be held, and traffic could mean the drive could take greater than an hour.
The more convenient Mexico City International Airport, which has served the capital since 1931, is about five miles from the Mexican version of the White House.
Biden will visit Mexico on his first international trip to the Western Hemisphere since taking office last 12 months amid a record wave of illegal immigration across the border between the 2 countries.
AMLO last 12 months blamed Biden for uplifting the border rush, saying: “Expectations have been created that with President Biden’s government there will probably be higher treatment of migrants. And this has caused migrants from Central America, in addition to from our country, when wanting to cross the border, to think that it is less complicated this manner.
The Mexican leader also said: “They see [Biden] as a migrating president and so many feel they may make it to america. We want to work together to regulate the flow.”
Biden presided over nearly 2.4 million illegal crossing arrests within the 2022 fiscal 12 months that ended Sept. 30. 1.7 million in fiscal 12 months 2021, lower than 500,000 in 2020 and nearly 1 million in 2019.
Biden last 12 months canceled the development of former President Donald Trump’s border wall on the US-Mexico border and ended Trump’s “Stay in Mexico” policy, requiring asylum seekers to wait south of the border for his or her persecution claims to be processed. He also called on Congress to establish a path to American citizenship for the vast majority of illegal immigrants currently in America.
The Biden administration has steadily relaxed enforcement of the CDC’s Title 42 COVID-19 policy, which allows U.S. border officials to quickly expel most individuals who cross the border illegally within the name of public health. The Supreme Court is facing a Title 42 court battle and is anticipated to rule in the summertime, but within the meantime, Biden officials are allowing more migrants to stay after entering illegally.
![President Biden and Mexican President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, photographed in the Oval Office in July 2022, had a difficult relationship.](https://nypost.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2022/12/andres-manuel-lopez-obrador-joe-biden-1.jpg?w=1024)
Official figures indicate that under Trump, about 80% of illegal immigrants were deported under Title 42, but this figure it fell to just 29% in November because most migrants were allowed to wait for asylum judgments while remaining within the US.
The Mexican president, a leftist often compared to Vermont’s Socialist Senator Bernie Sanders, snubbed Biden in June when he left the Summit of the Americas in Los Angeles – thwarting Biden’s plans to show warmer relations with Mexico City than under Trump, who once threatened to in the reduction of. from trafficking in “caravans” of migrants passing through the country.
The AMLO boycott deprived the conference of the leader of probably the most populous Spanish-speaking country and emboldened other leaders to skip the event. The snub was sparked by Biden’s decision not to invite the authoritarian leftist leaders of Cuba, Nicaragua and Venezuela.
![There has been a sharp increase in the number of border crossings in recent months.](https://nypost.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2022/12/supreme-court-761.jpg?w=1024)
AMLO also ruffled the feathers of Democrats last month in support of latest Twitter owner Elon Musk’s decision to reinstate Trump’s account, which was deleted last 12 months after the Capitol riots.
“I already voted for Trump to use Twitter. The Statue of Liberty cannot remain an empty symbol” López Obrador tweeted.
Trump and AMLO developed a surprisingly warm relationship after working together to ratify the US-Mexico-Canada USMCA trade pact, which replaced the Nineteen Nineties NAFTA trade deal and included several reforms, including aiding in-house automotive manufacturing.
Biden had previously visited Mexico as vice chairman in February 2016, when he brought his son Hunter with him aboard Air Force Two after hosting his Mexican associates on the vice chairman’s official Washington residence.
Hunter Biden is under federal investigation for potential crimes, including tax fraud and unrecorded foreign lobbying related to quite a few influence peddling operations while his father was vice chairman and held power in countries reminiscent of Mexico, China and Ukraine. House Republicans, who will take back power next week, vow to define Joe Biden’s role in his family’s overseas advisory work.
Joe Biden in 2015 posed for a gaggle photo together with his son and Mexican billionaires Carlos Slim and Miguel Alemán Velasco in Washington, DC. In 2016, Hunter Biden emailed Alemán’s son, apparently from Air Force Two en route to Mexico, complaining that he had not received reciprocal business favors after “I brought all and sundry you ever asked me to F’ing white.” Home and vice-president’s house and inauguration.