The Australian’s Adam Creighton says the Biden administration cannot deny the correlation between increased Mexican “border encounters” and the “rule changes” made to reverse the Trump border policy.

“Well look it’s not improved at all – there was a flurry of executive orders on the first few days of the Biden presidency … indeed a lot of those orders were reversing various Trump rules and there’s been this extraordinary surge in numbers," he said.

"So in March alone there were 172,000 border encounters which is up from about 50,000 just a few months earlier.

“It’s very hard for the Biden administration to say that it’s got nothing to do with the rule changes.”