WOLA: Advocacy for Human Rights in the Americas
23 Jun 2022 | Podcast

Migration and the Summit of the Americas

Latin America’s historic current levels of migration were a central concern at the Summit of the Americas in Los Angeles in early June 2022. The Summit produced a declaration endorsing the idea of shared responsibility for attending to migrant flows, but there’s a lot of uncertainty about concrete commitments.

Maureen Meyer, WOLA’s vice president for programs, and Lesly Tejada, WOLA’s program assistant for Mexico and Migrant Rights, were in Los Angeles for the summit, and share their views of what happened there.

Meyer and Stephanie Brewer, who directs WOLA’s Mexico and Migrant Rights program, were in Tapachula, a city along Mexico’s border with Guatemala, in late February and early March. In early June, they published a report about what they saw, called “Struggling to Survive,” together with Tejada. The report describes a plainly untenable situation for tens of thousands of migrants stranded in the city.

Podcast host Adam Isacson has also paid two recent visits to the U.S.-Mexico border since March, one of them with Tejada. There is a lot to discuss about the state of migration, border policy, and regional relations, and we get into some detail on what we’ve been seeing.

Some links:

Download the podcast .mp3 file here. Listen to WOLA’s Latin America Today podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, iHeartRadio, or wherever you subscribe to podcasts. The main feed is here.