Mexican officials are hoping to get the United States to loosen restrictions along the border, and vaccines will be key in that effort.

Those restrictions will be a key topic of conversation during Department of Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas’ visit to Mexico this week. On Tuesday morning, Mexico’s Foreign Secretary Marcelo Ebrard discussed the possible paths to reopening.

“Mexico is going to make an extraordinary vaccination effort,” Ebrard said of what he planned to tell Mayorkas. “So that our cities are at similar standards as those in the United States in the proportion of those vaccinated.”

That effort will be significantly aided by the 1.35 million doses of the Johnson & Johnson vaccine that the United States just sent to Mexico for that purpose.

Ebrard said there are a couple paths to loosening restrictions: it could either proceed on a city-by-city basis, or as vaccination rates in the entire Mexican border population approach certain thresholds.