DR. SHERWOOD-RANDALL: Good morning. It is my distinct honor and pleasure to welcome each of you here today, in particular our distinguished foreign ministers and endorsing country representatives who are joining us for this fourth Ministerial of the Los Angeles Declaration on Migration and Protection.
Today marks an opportunity for us to celebrate over two years of progress that we have made together in addressing the migration challenge in our hemisphere under the Los Angeles Declaration, which is a framework that we have built together to share responsibility, partnership, and the pursuit of humane solutions that benefit the peoples of all of our countries.
I am grateful to each of you for your unwavering commitment to addressing the hemispheric challenges that we face and to promoting a safe, orderly, and humane approach to migration.
It is my privilege and pleasure to introduce Secretary of State Blinken for making opening remarks on behalf of the United States of America. Secretary Blinken.
SECRETARY BLINKEN: Liz, thank you so much. And good morning, everyone, and thank you for being here today. To all our partners in this endeavor, thank you.
As Liz said, back in June of 2022, during the ninth Summit of the Americas, President Biden convened nearly two dozen countries to launch the Los Angeles Declaration on Migration and Protection.
In doing so, we recognized together the need to strengthen regional cooperation to ensure safe, orderly, humane, and regular migration – and to help people lead peaceful, productive, and dignified lives in their countries of origin.
Just over the last two years, our countries have taken meaningful, concrete steps toward these shared commitments. Together, we’re making it easier for migrants, already in-country, to obtain legal status. For example, governments throughout the region are helping Venezuelans acquire lawful residency status. Colombia, Ecuador, and Peru are at the forefront – advancing measures to fully incorporate migrants into their receiving communities and economies.
We’re also promoting secure migration pathways – to dissuade individuals from taking perilous journeys to our borders in the first place.
Here, in the United States, we’ve led one of the largest expansions of lawful migration – including through new humanitarian and family-reunification parole processes, and raising our annual target for refugee resettlement to 125,000 – while also strengthening enforcement measures to discourage irregular migration. In the last year, we resettled more than 20,000 refugees from Latin America and the Caribbean – the highest-ever level.
The Safe Mobility Initiative equips individuals in Latin America with accurate information and an online process to apply for lawful entry into the United States, among other countries. And again, that means that people can determine whether they have a legal means to come to the United States from their own countries, not making the journey to the border. Since its establishment in June of ‘23, this program has overseen the arrival of tens of thousands of qualified refugees into the United States – and helped many others access integration resources in their countries of first refuge.
In the coming months, we will also push to further develop lawful and humane labor pathways that respect workers’ rights – across our hemisphere. This follows the United States’ decision in May to join the International Labour Organization’s Fair Recruitment Initiative, which aims to ensure practices that protect migrants against exploitation.
Together, we’re also disrupting human trafficking and smuggling.
Through visa restrictions, financial sanctions, we’re cracking down on criminal networks. And we’re applying similar measures against companies that charter flights and boats to facilitate dangerous, irregular migration routes. Just yesterday, the United States imposed visa restrictions on multiple travel agency executives engaged in this practice.
Finally, we’re working together to address the root causes of irregular migration, including the lack of economic opportunity, which we know is one of the biggest drivers of migration.
Under Vice President Harris’ Central America Forward initiative, we’ve generated over $5.2 billion in private sector investments in Honduras, Guatemala, El Salvador. These investments will expand economic possibility, creating good new jobs. They’re also targeting groups traditionally excluded or underrepresented in the formal economy – and with an emphasis on encouraging good governance as well as growth.
Building on this work, I can announce today that the United States will additionally invest more than $685 million across Latin America and the Caribbean.
With this announcement, the United States has now dedicated – in 2024 alone – over $1.2 billion to advance the objectives of the Los Angeles Declaration.
These new funds include nearly $369 million to aid refugees, vulnerable migrant populations, and host countries – as well as $228 million in emergency food assistance for Venezuelan migrants and displaced persons in Colombia, Ecuador, and Peru.
Our assistance also provides $10 million to the World Bank’s Global Concessional Finance Facility’s work in Latin America and the Caribbean. This programming promotes economic development that’s tailored to benefit both refugees and their host communities.
This support will also help institutionalize our partnership by setting up and maintaining a Technical Secretariat, with support from the Pan American Development Foundation and the Organization of American States. This office will oversee coordination between our countries. And it will monitor progress – so that we can hold ourselves accountable to the goals that we establish together.
Our inaugural chair, Colombia, will work closely with the Secretariat – to guide our priorities for the L.A. Declaration’s implementation in 2025.
This morning, as we reflect on these last two years, the impact of our collective efforts is clear – but so, too, are the complex and ongoing challenges that we face in this era of unprecedented global migration.
I’m confident that together we can move toward a hemisphere where migration is a choice, made freely, pursued lawfully, and where people – all people – can live with security, dignity, and opportunity.
I thank you all again for your presence today but most of all for the work we’re doing every day to advance this shared agenda. Thank you. (Applause.) Thank you.
DR. SHERWOOD-RANDALL: Thank you, Secretary Blinken, for your leadership and for the leadership of your team in advancing the shared commitments that we made. And I am struck in listening to what you’ve recounted by how far we have come since your leaders around this table stood on the podium in Los Angeles with President Biden and made this bold promise that we would build a system in our hemisphere in which we shared the burden and responsibility that we have taken on together and which is showing results today. And as you’ve now said, we also have the opportunity to institutionalize this with the establishment of the new secretariat to ensure that the leadership endures and that our agenda is sustained throughout the region going forward.
So with that, I want to introduce the foreign minister of Colombia, Luis Gilberto Murillo. We are so grateful for Colombia’s leadership and partnership, particularly in welcoming and integrating more than 2 million Venezuelan migrants and serving as a model for the region and indeed for the whole world. We are thrilled that Colombia is taking on this new role as the first country chair of the Los Angeles Declaration and will host next year’s ministerial to ensure that this work carries forward and that it is regionally based and regionally owned. So thank you, Ambassador, Minister. Welcome.
FOREIGN MINISTER MURILLO: Thank you very much, Dr. Sherwood Randall. We are really pleased with the honor to chair for the next year Los Angeles Declaration and also very pleased that we are going to have the secretariat, which is very important to moving to institutionalization of this process. We have very important progress in responding to the joint challenge of migration, particularly in terms of the Western Hemisphere under the L.A. Declaration, but still we have a lot of challenges.
Colombia, as Secretary Blinken was saying, have welcomed almost 3 million Venezuelans. Of those, 2.5 million have been already regularized. And we are pleased to announce that we are working on regularization of 500,000 more that are already in Colombia, but they need to be legal in our country with the necessary possibility to move into integrating to Colombian society if that’s the case. In addition to that, Colombia have evolved from being a country that welcome migrants to a country that is a transit country.
But in terms of welcoming migrants, we have – in a full capacity we are – we have invested almost one point of our GDP in responding to the needs of migrants. Almost 1 million and 600,000 migrant all already receiving health services. We have almost 600,000 kids in our schools. And we do that because that’s our commitment to respond to the challenge of the hemisphere. Colombia in that demonstrate the principle that we committed under L.A. Declaration. However, we need to expand ways of responding to the migrants that are already transit to Colombia.
We have a trilateral mechanism with the United States and Panama to respond to the challenge of the Darién Gap, where we have almost every year around 500,000 people crossing. It is obviously reducing them – we are reducing that number. And we are working with our partners in Panama to obviously have more migration control in those areas. In addition to that, we are working on providing some Safe Mobility Offices that we agreed with the United States to facilitate their process of migrants that are willing to come to the United States through legal pathways. That office has also have been very effective so far.
But we need more – obviously more work to do, join with other countries. On a bilateral basis, we are working with our Mexican partners also to respond to some of the challenges in terms of joining an effort to provide more support to Colombia in term of responding to the new challenge of having migrants that are transiting to our country. Almost 92 nationalities have been dictated to go to Colombia, and we have the challenge of responding to those extracontinental migrant that are going through our country.
In finalizing, let me say that Colombia continue committed to the goals of the L.A. Declaration, and we are very excited and motivated that we are going to work with all of you – the 25 countries in term of really having a migration process that is safe, that is doing it in a orderly way, and also provide the possibility of people to have human mobility in a human way.
Thank you very much. (Applause.)
DR. SHERWOOD-RANDALL: Thank you, Minister Murillo.