Summit of the Americas Summit Attendees Plan to Commit to Take in More Migrants

The U.S. and Latin American countries will commit to receive more migrants.

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Venezuelan migrants received food at a bus station in Medellin in 2020. Colombia is offering protected status and work permits to nearly two million Venezuelans.Credit...Federico Rios for The New York Times

LOS ANGELES — The United States and Latin American countries on Friday plan to issue a joint declaration at the Americas summit, committing nations across the region to receive migrants and provide avenues for them to secure humanitarian protection and earn a living, according to U.S. officials who publicly spoke of the plans Thursday.

The American public and politicians have for decades focused on the large influx of migrants crossing the southern border into the United States, but ever-growing numbers of migrants have been pouring into countries across the Western Hemisphere.

“What we are seeing now is categorically distinct; from the southern tip of Chile to Canada, countries are affected by migration,” Clayton Alderman, director for regional migration and protection with the National Security Council, said in an interview after a panel in Los Angeles held alongside the official summit. He added that “everyone is feeling this in a way we have not before.”

Mr. Alderman and others described the planned directive as the “Los Angeles Declaration on Migration and Protection,” and it is expected to include Spain and Canada, in addition to the Latin American countries.

Even though Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador did not attend the summit, U.S. officials expressed confidence that Mexico — a key migrant transit country — would be a signatory.

It will contain four pillars: stabilization and assistance to countries hosting migrants; new legal pathways for foreign workers; a joint approach to border protection, including tackling smuggling networks; and a coordinated response to historic flows across the border.

Anne Knapke, a senior official with the U.S. Department of Agriculture, said that the declaration would expand labor programs to bring Central Americans to the United States as guest workers. Other countries, including Spain, are expected to make similar commitments.

About six million displaced Venezuelans have fled the economic and political turmoil of their home country in the last five years, to Colombia, Peru and Ecuador, among other countries. Central Americans facing gang violence and climate change have sought fresh starts in Mexico as well as the United States. Hundreds of thousands of Nicaraguans targeted by a crackdown on dissent have moved to Costa Rica, where about 10 percent of the population consists of refugees.

“It looks very different if you look at migration across the hemisphere rather than standing on the U.S.-Mexico border, which is what the United States has tried to do for the last 30 years,” said Dan Restrepo, a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress who served as adviser to President Barack Obama on Latin America.

“One of the important things at the Summit of the Americas this week is that it goes from looking at migration as something to control at the borders to something to manage throughout the hemisphere,” he said.

President Biden on Wednesday announced U.S. measures designed to help other nations. They include training medical professionals to improve health care in the Western Hemisphere, increasing food exports and attracting more private investment.

“These challenges affect all of us,” Mr. Biden said in his opening remarks. “All of our nations have a responsibility to step up and ease the pressure people are feeling today.”

Some 7,000 to 8,000 people each day are being encountered by U.S. Border Patrol agents after crossing the southern border into the United States. They include record numbers of Cubans, where economic hardship has caused food shortages. Haitians fleeing lawlessness and lack of opportunity in their home country have also been arriving by land and sea.

But other countries in Latin America have also been experiencing a new wave of migration, and seeking answers.

Colombia is offering protected status and work permits to nearly two million Venezuelans. Lucas Gomez, the presidential envoy on migration in Colombia, said that it is time to discuss policies designed to absorb migrants in host countries.

President Guillermo Lasso of Ecuador said at a summit migration event that there needs to be a “recognition of a reality” that people are on the move and that “inclusive policies” must be promoted to ensure they find safe haven and can thrive outside their homelands.

“As a poor country, we are opening our doors,” he said, referring to more than 500,000 Venezuelans living in Ecuador, a country of 18.1 million people.

Biden and Bolsonaro of Brazil meet for the first time.

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At the Summit of the Americas, President Biden and President Jair Bolsonaro of Brazil were expected to discuss climate change and the pandemic recovery.CreditCredit...Samuel Corum for The New York Times

President Biden met for the first time on Thursday with President Jair Bolsonaro of Brazil, the leader of the second-largest country in the Western Hemisphere, in a face-to-face discussion that was one of the most anticipated of the ninth Summit of the Americas.

The two leaders were gracious to each other in a photo op before the closed-door session.

“Brazil is a wonderful place with magnificent people,” Mr. Biden said, noting that he had been lucky to visit the “magnificent country” three times in the past. He praised Brazil for making real sacrifices in an effort to protect the Amazon rainforest.

“I think the rest of the world should be able to help you preserve as much as you can,” Mr. Biden told Mr. Bolsonaro.

The meeting had the potential to be one of the most tense of the week.

Mr. Bolsonaro is a close ally of former President Donald J. Trump and a supporter of many of the policies that Mr. Biden has tried to combat. He has opened the Amazon to more logging and mining, made it easier to buy guns in Brazil, denigrated the idea of transgender rights and moved Brazil closer to President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia.

But what is most concerning to U.S. officials is Mr. Bolsonaro’s efforts to question the reliability of Brazil’s voting systems ahead of October’s presidential election, a contest in which polls show him trailing. Mr. Bolsonaro has even questioned the legitimacy of Mr. Biden’s electoral victory, mimicking Mr. Trump’s rhetoric, including as recently as this week.

“I will not discuss the sovereignty of another country. But Trump was doing really well,” he said in a local media interview on Tuesday when asked about allegations of voter fraud in the 2020 U.S. elections, which have been repeatedly debunked. “We don’t want that to happen in Brazil.”

Jake Sullivan, Mr. Biden’s national security adviser, told reporters ahead of the meeting between the two leaders that no topic was off limits. “I do anticipate that the president will discuss open, free, fair and transparent democratic elections,” he said.

Sitting next to Mr. Biden on Thursday and speaking in Portuguese, Mr. Bolsonaro addressed the concerns about his country’s democratic traditions.

“I came to office through democracy, and I’m quite certain when I leave office it will also be through democratic means,” he said, according to an unofficial translation of his comments.

Several members of Congress had publicly urged Mr. Biden to press Mr. Bolsonaro to increase efforts to find Dom Phillips, a British journalist, and Bruno Pereira, a Brazilian Indigenous expert, who went missing in the Amazon on Sunday after facing threats from illegal fishermen. The Brazilian government’s response has been widely criticized as slow and ineffective.

On Thursday, editors of many of the world’s largest news organizations, including The New York Times, sent a letter to Mr. Bolsonaro, asking him to “urgently step up and fully resource the effort to locate Dom and Bruno.”

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Biden calls for unity at the Summit of the Americas, but many countries want to see him deliver on promises.

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President Biden told C.E.O.s gathered at the Summit of the Americas that his administration would work to facilitate new areas of private sector investment in the region.CreditCredit...Samuel Corum for The New York Times

LOS ANGELES — President Biden’s promise on Thursday of leadership in confronting economic despair and mass migration in Latin America was met with skepticism from the leaders of countries in the region who said the United States was doing too little to meet the moment.

In a speech to open the working sessions of the ninth Summit of the Americas, Mr. Biden urged the leaders in attendance to join together behind concrete commitments and said his administration was ready “to demonstrate our enduring investment in our shared future.”

Mr. Biden said he would announce on Friday “specific concrete actions to secure our borders and resolve the shared challenges.”

“There is no reason why the Western Hemisphere can’t be the most forward-looking, most democratic, most prosperous, most peaceful, secure region in the world,” the president told the gathering.

But what Mr. Biden called “strong and constructive diplomacy” was viewed with less optimism by some of his counterparts from other countries. Several representatives of Latin American nations said that they appreciated the president’s ambitions but feared they fell short of the grim reality in the region.

Leaders from Colombia and Ecuador, who have recently announced separate programs to provide temporary legal status to up to three million Venezuelan migrants, said that they needed more American investment and better trade terms to help their economies absorb the newcomers.

Mr. Biden spoke after welcoming leaders from Latin America to the three-day regional summit, pressing ahead with the gathering despite being snubbed by the heads of Mexico, Honduras, Guatemala and El Salvador.

Mr. Biden had hoped to assemble the leaders of the hemisphere as a show of American strength in confronting corruption, poverty, health concerns, climate change and migration. Instead, his refusal to invite leaders from Cuba, Venezuela and Nicaragua prompted a boycott by several key nations.

Prime Minister Johnny Briceño of Belize chastised Mr. Biden in a speech on Thursday afternoon, calling it “inexcusable” that the United States had blocked Cuba and Venezuela from attending the summit.

“At this most critical juncture, when the future of our hemisphere is at stake, we stand divided,” he said. “And that is why the Summit of the Americas should have been inclusive.”

As the meeting convened on Thursday with those who agreed to attend, the diplomatic failure loomed large, raising questions about the role of the United States in helping a region wracked by political instability, natural disasters and the aftermath of the pandemic.

“To state the obvious, our region is large and diverse,” Mr. Biden told the leaders on Wednesday evening. “We don’t always agree on everything, but because we’re democracies, we work through our disagreements with mutual respect and dialogue.”

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President Biden called for regional collaboration during the opening ceremony of the summit, which convened in Los Angeles despite a boycott of the gathering by several key leaders.CreditCredit...Samuel Corum for The New York Times

President Donald J. Trump deepened the mistrust in Latin America during his four years in office. Mr. Biden was elected in part on the promise of a new kind of leadership toward the countries and the people of Latin America. But while his words are vastly different than those of Mr. Trump, he has struggled to make good on his immigration and border agenda.

Some of Mr. Trump’s most high-profile efforts to block migrants from entering the United States remain in place. Mr. Biden’s administration is still turning people away at the border using the Title 42 health regulations that his predecessor put in place during the pandemic. And despite trying to end it, Mr. Biden continues to implement a policy that forces some asylum applicants to wait in unsafe camps in Mexico.

The complete overhaul of the nation’s immigration laws, which Mr. Biden promised, remains stuck in Congress, with no prospect of progress.

Biden and Trudeau meet to emphasize the importance of strengthening democracy in the Americas.

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President Biden and Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau met on the sidelines of the summit Thursday.Credit...Samuel Corum for The New York Times

LOS ANGELES — Most of the talk at the Summit of the Americas has been about confronting the issues of economic distress and migration in Latin America. But President Biden took a few minutes on Thursday to sit down with the leader of the northernmost country in the Americas: Canada.

“We have no better friend in the whole world,” Mr. Biden told Prime Minister Justin Trudeau before a closed-door discussion on the sidelines of the summit. “And you’re a good personal friend as well.”

The president has said he is hosting the summit in Los Angeles to underscore the commitment by the United States and other countries to embrace democracy in the region, reject corruption and pursue economic prosperity.

Before starting the meeting with Mr. Trudeau, Mr. Biden called the region “the most democratic hemisphere in the world,” and said there is “no reason why it can’t become more democratic and prosperous.”

White House officials said the two leaders discussed the development of critical minerals in both countries and agreed to work together on making supply chains more robust even as they partner on confronting climate change. Officials said Mr. Biden also discussed with Mr. Trudeau the ongoing war in Ukraine, and said the two men reiterated their commitment to holding Russia accountable for the invasion.

In brief remarks to reporters, Mr. Trudeau echoed Mr. Biden’s remarks about democracy. Speaking occasionally in French, he said both countries are trying to “make the case that democracy is not just fairer, but it’s also better for citizens for putting food on the table and putting futures in front of them.”

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Mexico, Central American leaders rejected repeated efforts by the U.S. to convince them to attend summit.

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American officials spent weeks negotiating with the Mexican government, trying to entice President Andrés Manuel López Obrador to the summit.Credit...Luis Antonio Rojas for The New York Times

LOS ANGELES — In the lead up to the Summit of the Americas, the Biden administration scrambled to avoid the embarrassment of a boycott by key leaders — only to find its overtures rejected.

American officials spent weeks negotiating with the Mexican government, trying to find a way to entice President Andrés Manuel López Obrador to the meeting in Los Angeles. Vice President Kamala Harris called the leader of Honduras to persuade her to come. Top aides were dispatched to try to convince the leaders of El Salvador and Guatemala.

Nothing worked. The heads of state in all four countries have refused to attend the meeting, a blow to Mr. Biden at a moment when he sought to project unity and common purpose across the Western Hemisphere.

The Salvadoran president, Nayib Bukele, would not even get on the phone with Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken, according to four people familiar with the outreach who were not authorized to speak publicly.

The absences have cast doubt on the relevance of a summit that was meant to demonstrate cooperation among neighbors, but has instead loudly broadcast rifts in a region that is increasingly willing to defy American leadership.

“It shows the deep divisions in the continent,” said Martha Bárcena, the former Mexican ambassador to the United States. The leaders who decided against attending, Ms. Bárcena said, are “challenging U.S. influence, because U.S. influence has been diminishing in the continent.”

The Biden administration has said that much can be achieved without presidents at the table, as foreign ministers sent in their stead are just as capable of signing agreements.

“The U.S. remains the most powerful force in driving hemispheric actions to address core challenges facing the people of the Americas,” Karine Jean-Pierre, the White House press secretary, said on Monday.

Still, while the region’s no-shows are boycotting for different reasons, they all seem to be airing their displeasure with the way the administration wields power.

Mr. López Obrador has telegraphed for weeks that he would not attend unless the administration invited Cuba, Venezuela and Nicaragua. The leftist Honduran president, Xiomara Castro, joined his bandwagon and said she, too, would bow out unless the meeting included those countries.

Leaving them out of the summit, Mr. López Obrador said, “means continuing with the politics of old, of interventionism, of a lack of respect for the nations and their people.”

The leaders of Guatemala and El Salvador appeared more concerned about their own rapport with the United States than the guest list.

Upon taking office, the Biden administration went on the offensive on corruption in both countries, sanctioning high-ranking officials and calling out perceived efforts to weaken democratic institutions by the two Central American governments.

Guatemala’s president, Alejandro Giammattei, said he wasn’t going to the summit a day after Mr. Blinken said that his government’s choice of attorney general was involved in “significant corruption.”

“I sent word that I’m not going,” Mr. Giammattei said, adding: “As long as I am president, this country will be respected and its sovereignty will be respected.”

Mr. Bukele has not made his reasoning public, but people familiar with the Salvadoran president’s thinking say he didn’t see the point of handshakes and photo-ops when the dialogue between the two countries was so fundamentally broken.

Protesters take on climate change, immigration at summit in L.A.

A group protested Wednesday in front of the L.A. Convention Center, where leaders are gathered for the ninth Summit of the Americas.

At one point, a woman ran toward a motorcade on its way to the convention center, prompting a police officer to wrestle her to the ground. A young girl held up signs that read, “Cuba, Venezuela, Nicaragua are here!” The sign was a reference to the three nations that were not invited to the summit.

Climate change was also a topic of protests, with banners decrying the use of fossil fuels. And during President Biden’s evening speech Wednesday night to kick off the summit, a woman in the audience began heckling him and was taken away.

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Crossings at the southwestern U.S. border have hit record levels.

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A caravan of migrants from Central and South America made its way along a highway in Mexico City on Tuesday.Credit...Alejandro Cegarra for The New York Times

WASHINGTON — Since President Biden took office, migration at the southwestern border of the United States has spiked to record levels, with more than 2.7 million encounters through the end of April.

In the 2021 fiscal year, there were 1.7 million encounters, and in the first six months of the 2022 fiscal year, there have been nearly 1.3 million. Previously, 1986 and 2000 broke records with more than 1.6 million crossings both years.

In recent months, about 84 percent of the people who have been crossing the southwestern border without documentation come from countries that were either not invited to the Summit of the Americas: Cuba, Nicaragua and Venezuela; or those that did not send heads of state in protest to Mr. Biden’s exclusive invite list: El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras and Mexico. Those four countries opted to send their foreign ministers to the summit instead.

The absences have raised questions about whether there can be productive conversations about the spike in migration at the southwestern border.

That border of the United States has been largely closed to asylum seekers since the beginning of the pandemic because of a public health rule put in place to prevent the spread of the coronavirus. But people have been coming anyway, prompted by hardship at home and Mr. Biden’s pledge for a more welcoming America during the 2020 campaign.

While people from Central American countries have continued to come to the United States to seek asylum, recently there have been more migrants from Brazil, Colombia, Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua, Peru and Venezuela crossing the southwestern border in search of refuge. People have also come to the United States after arriving in Mexico from Romania, Russia, Turkey, Ukraine and countries in Africa.

Thousands of migrants, including many Haitians, are waiting in Mexican border towns, hoping that U.S. immigration policy will change and they will be able to safely cross into the country.

Even as the Biden administration has publicly said that the southwestern border is closed and has warned migrants not to make the dangerous trek north, it has allowed more than 700,000 people into the country to face removal proceedings. Some were humanitarian exceptions to the public health rule, while others were let in because the United States did not have enough detention space to hold them or they could not be sent back on expulsion flights to certain countries, including Cuba and Nicaragua, because of a lack of diplomatic relations.

The Summit of the Americas is the latest platform where the United States will make a case for a regional approach to migration that includes other countries hosting more refugees fleeing poverty, systemic violence and humanitarian crises and taking steps to secure borders so that it is harder for migrants to reach Mexico’s northern border.

Already, Colombia has offered temporary status to Venezuelans. And the Biden administration leaned on Mexico last year to start requiring visas from Venezuelans in an effort to slow their migration toward the United States.

Despite snubs, Harris works on rounding up investment for Latin America.

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Vice President Kamala Harris with President Alejandro Giammattei of Guatemala last year. Mr. Giammattei is among the leaders who chose not to attend the summit.Credit...Erin Schaff/The New York Times

LOS ANGELES — Vice President Kamala Harris, assigned by President Biden to work with Latin American leaders to confront the root causes of migration, engaged in a flurry of activity before the start of the summit.

On Tuesday morning, Ms. Harris unveiled the central piece of her effort: a commitment of nearly $2 billion from a variety of companies that have pledged to invest in Latin America in the coming years, bringing jobs and the promise of economic prosperity.

History is not kind to such efforts in the region. Previous pledges of economic revitalization have failed to do much to counter the poverty and corruption that plague many of the countries in Central and South America.

But Ms. Harris has said she believes the pledges by the companies — including Gap, Visa and several others — will provide opportunities for migrants and make it less likely that they will seek to cross into the United States illegally.

“Governments alone cannot address this issue,” Ms. Harris said on Wednesday at a gathering of chief executives at the InterContinental hotel in Los Angeles. “We must partner with the private sector if we are to have lasting impact and if we are to maximize our capacity.”

“To attract meaningful investment,” she added, “part of our agenda and strategy must include a priority that is to combat corruption, promote the rule of law, reduce violence and empower women.”

On Thursday, Ms. Harris announced a new partnership to address the climate crisis with Caribbean nations. A news release from the White House said that the partnership, to be known as PACC 2030, “establishes a framework to elevate U.S. cooperation with Caribbean countries to support climate adaptation and strengthen energy security, while building the resilience of critical infrastructure and local economies to the climate crisis.”

The White House called the effort a “comprehensive, adaptive and goal-oriented approach” to working with Caribbean nations to confront climate challenges.

For Ms. Harris, the stakes for the summit are high. She was widely criticized for her initial handling of migration issues during the first few months of the administration, when a surge of families and unaccompanied children crossed into the United States, overwhelming Border Patrol stations.

The vice president and her team have repeatedly insisted that Mr. Biden did not ask her to handle the situation at the U.S.-Mexico border because that is the job of officials who run the Department of Homeland Security. Instead, she has said she is working to develop relationships with Latin American leaders who can address the long-term problems that cause migrants to flee their own countries.

That is why the boycott of the summit by President Andrés Manuel López Obrador of Mexico and several Central American leaders is so striking, coming after Ms. Harris made trips to the region and highlighted her relationships with the top officials in those countries.

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Amid an autocratic slide in Latin America, observers ponder future summits.

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The first Summit of the Americas was convened in Miami in 1994 with 34 nations in attendance.Credit...J. Scott Applewhite/Associated Press

LOS ANGELES — When the first Summit of the Americas kicked off in 1994 after the fall of the Soviet Union, Latin America was united in common cause: Democracy was the future.

The divisions among the United States and Latin American nations during this week’s summit could not be more stark, with several of Washington’s key allies openly challenging its leadership and even boycotting the event amid an autocratic slide across the region. Many countries in the region are turning to China as an ally in trade and politics, as a way to attract investments without the preconditions on human rights and democracy that Washington usually demands.

During the first summit in Miami, several Latin American countries were at the forefront on insisting nations commit to democracy, a product of the dictatorships they had fought at home. But that enthusiasm has waned, leaving the region more divided than ever and searching for common ground other than geographic proximity.

The shifting regional landscape has left many wondering about the summit’s worth.

Eric Farnsworth, a former official in the Clinton administration who helped organize the first summit in Miami, said it needed to change from an event held every three years to an “as-needed or as-desirable” basis.

“Our mistake coming out of the first summit in Miami was assuming that countries would remain democratic and increasingly seek to pursue a common agenda,” said Mr. Farnsworth, now the vice president at the Council of the Americas, an organization promoting free trade. “Just because they happen to reside in the Western Hemisphere is no longer enough. Attendance should be based on democratic values and mutual interest.”

Mr. Farnsworth added that Washington’s own democratic backslide under the Trump administration, including a leaked audio call after his 2020 election loss in which the former president pressured election officials in Georgia to “find” him votes, has “tarnished the U.S. brand.”

The summit has been marred by the absence of several heads of state, including Mexico and Honduras, over demands that the autocratic governments of Cuba, Nicaragua and Venezuela be invited. The Biden administration wavered on who would be invited only to resolutely snub the three countries just days before the summit and failed to issue an agenda early, leaving participants confused about the event’s objective. Past summits have had clear themes.

Jorge Castañeda, Mexico’s former foreign minister, said that the Biden administration should have pivoted as the divisions mounted and either postponed or turned the event into a debate, forcing countries to lay out their political positions and defend them.

“This is more like the funeral of the Americas,” Mr. Castañeda said jokingly, adding of the Biden administration: “They missed an opportunity though. They could have forced countries to come out and explain: Do they support democracy and human rights? If not, why?”

Los Angeles County, where the summit is being held, is home to the nation’s largest Latino community.

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At the summit’s opening ceremony, Gov. Gavin Newsom of California described Los Angeles as one of the most diverse cities in the world.Credit...Lucy Nicholson/Reuters

LOS ANGELES — The nation’s second largest city has transformed into a major geopolitical stage this week as President Biden and other world leaders convene for the ninth Summit of the Americas.

The summit takes place roughly every three years and brings together representatives from countries in the Western Hemisphere to tackle issues such as immigration, trade and poverty.

The United States has not hosted the event since the first one in 1994, which President Bill Clinton oversaw in Miami. The most recent summit occurred in Lima, Peru, in 2018.

Los Angeles has “deep and robust ties throughout our hemisphere,” according to the Biden administration, and its population speaks more than 224 languages, hails from 140 countries and “shows our hemisphere and the world the best of American society,” the administration said.

Los Angeles County, which has nearly 10 million residents, is home to the largest Latino community in the nation.

Speaking on Wednesday evening at the summit’s opening ceremony, Gov. Gavin Newsom of California told the audience that 27 percent of Californians were foreign-born and that half of the state’s children had at least one parent who was foreign-born.

“You are in one of the most diverse cities — L.A. — in the most diverse region in the most diverse state — California — in the world’s most diverse democracy,” he said. “I couldn’t imagine a better place for all of you to be.”

California is also a major player in policy related to climate change, immigration and Covid-19, topics that leaders are expected to discuss this week. The official theme of this year’s summit, which will largely be held at the Los Angeles Convention Center, is “Building a Sustainable, Resilient and Equitable Future.”

“California is a place where ambitions and dreams become reality, and so we all gather in L.A. this week for the Summit of the Americas with big ambitions,” Vice President Kamala Harris said at the opening ceremony, after calling herself “a proud daughter of California.”

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South American countries ask for more migration aid, as Biden seeks a regional response.

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President Biden and first lady Jill Biden welcomed President Iván Duque of Colombia to the summit Wednesday night.Credit...Frederic J. Brown/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

LOS ANGELES — The United States is trying to marshal a regional response to migration at the Summit of the Americas in Los Angeles this week to help stem the nearly unprecedented influx of people to its southern border.

But the countries most affected by the Venezuelan refugees crisis have said the United States needs to provide far more economic assistance if it wants to prevent South Americans from heading to the United States.

Leaders of Colombia and Ecuador, who have recently announced separate programs to provide temporary legal status to up to three million Venezuelan migrants, said at the summit that they need more American investment and better trade terms to help their economies absorb the newcomers after the pandemic.

“The United States is worried about migration, but we hope that this migration can be stopped through investment that generates employment in each country,” the Colombian vice president and foreign minister, Marta Lucía Ramírez, told The New York Times in Los Angeles on Wednesday.

She said the United States must use its leadership at development banks such as the Inter-American Development Bank and the World Bank to provide more loans to Colombian businesses.

President Iván Duque of Colombia said separately on Tuesday that less than 30 percent of the money that the international community pledged last year to help his government integrate Venezuelan migrants has been delivered.

“We need to match pledges with disbursements,” he said.

Similarly, Ecuador’s president, Guillermo Lasso, said in a speech in Los Angeles on Tuesday that his country needs a free-trade agreement with the United States to help his government create jobs for the nearly 600,000 Venezuelan migrants in the country.

These requests for trade and multibillion dollar investment are unlikely to bear fruit, said Benjamin Gedan, the head of the Latin America program at the Wilson Center, a Washington research group.

The Biden administration has avoided any discussion of trade deals in Los Angeles for fear of provoking political backlash ahead of midterms. And the Inter-American Development Bank, the largest lender in the region, is not expected to announce any major new migration-related financing at the summit, reflecting, in part, the Biden administration’s tense relations with the Trump-appointed president of the bank, Mauricio Claver-Carone.

“Biden is right about the scale of this crisis, but U.S. support doesn’t match the challenge,” Mr. Gedan said.

The U.S. is accelerating the expulsions of Haitian migrants.

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Haitian men at a shelter for migrants in Reynosa, Mexico. Haitians represented about six percent of the migrants crossing the border with Mexico, but occupied 60 percent of expulsion flights.Credit...Kirsten Luce for The New York Times

WASHINGTON — The Biden administration expelled nearly 4,000 Haitians on 36 deportation flights in May — a significant increase over the previous three months — after renegotiating agreements with the island nation, which has been crippled by gang violence and an expanding humanitarian crisis.

Over the past year, a growing number of Haitians have been making the journey through the jungles of South America to dangerous stretches of northern Mexico, then crossing into the United States. Recently, many have also been trying to reach Florida by boat. They have been part of a record wave of migration at the border with Mexico.

While the number of Haitians crossing into the United States has increased recently, it is far from the biggest migration challenge facing the country. It just happens to be one of the easiest for the administration to manage.

An emergency public health rule has allowed border officials to quickly expel migrants during the coronavirus pandemic, but the Biden administration is limited in terms of where it can send flights. For the most part, Mexico will accept migrants turned back from the United States only if they are from El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Mexico and, in limited cases, Cuba and Nicaragua.

Others must be flown back to their countries, but U.S. border officials have to allow most Cubans, Nicaraguans and Venezuelans — who make up a significant portion of those recently crossing the border — to stay and eventually face removal proceedings. A lack of diplomatic relations with those countries prevents the United States from sending flights there.

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Summit participants will dine at the Getty Villa in Pacific Palisades.

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The Getty Villa in Pacific Palisades, the site of Thursday night’s dinner.Credit...Monica Almeida/The New York Times

LOS ANGELES — President Biden may not have gotten the guest list he wanted. But Latin American leaders who showed up for the president’s summit are reportedly going to be treated to a swanky dinner Thursday night, L.A.-style.

Mr. Biden is scheduled to host the leaders at the scenic Getty Villa, one of the museums established by oil tycoon J. Paul Getty at the eastern end of the Malibu coast, in the Pacific Palisades neighborhood.

Reportedly inspired by Villa of the Papyri at Herculaneum in Italy, the museum sits in the hills above Los Angeles, providing spectacular views. The 48,000-square-foot building is arranged around an open-air courtyard and was renovated in 2006.

The White House did not provide details about the location — or the dinner menu. The official schedule for the president said only that: “the president and the first lady will welcome heads of state and government and their spouses for a dinner as part of the Ninth Summit of the Americas.”

Glamorous dinners are traditionally a part of the choreography of global summits. As president, Barack Obama was served ice cream in the image of Mt. Fuji at a gala dinner in Japan and spiced, seared ahi tuna with wasabi cream in Malaysia.

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