Tillerson, Kelly tackle thorny issues in Mexico

The U.S. Secretary of State was joined by Homeland Security Secretary John Kelly in the visit to Mexico, which was aimed at soothing concern and anger about the new U.S. administration’s policies toward Mexico.

“We can not humiliate a country to the bargaining table”, said Carlos Gutierrez, former secretary of Commerce under George W. Bush.

“You know as well as I that we are not going to change Donald Trump’s way of thinking, we are not going to convince him, and he is going to continue being president for a long time”.

Mr Videgaray said it was a “complex time” for US-Mexico relations, which have gone downhill quickly since Mr Trump was elected president last November.

By Friday, American officials are required to finish calculating all the money and grants that the United States provides to Mexico, a task that Mr. Trump first demanded in the executive order he signed last month directing the construction of a border wall.

The new priorities are broad enough to apply to nearly any illegal immigrant, including anyone who has been charged with a crime, misrepresented themselves, poses a risk to public safety, or “have abused any program related to receipt of public benefits”. Some Mexican officials and analysts have hinted at countermeasures, suggesting that Mexico could suspend its co-operation on joint efforts to reduce transit migration and drug trafficking. “Trump criticized U.S. -Mexico relations while Tillerson was in Mexico, saying at a meeting with business leaders, “$70 billion in trade deficits and that doesn’t include the drugs that are flowing across the border”.

“The Mexican government and people do not have to accept measures that one government wants to impose unilaterally on another”, Videgaray said late Wednesday. Mexican officials are also likely to seek answers about whether a forthcoming report ordered by Trump’s administration that will list all current US aid to Mexico is meant to threaten Mexico into compliance over immigration or the wall.

Mexico’s foreign minister has expressed “worry and irritation” about U.S. policies to two of President Donald Trump’s top envoys sent to cool tempers after weeks of tension between the countries. Under previous policy, migrants from other countries who entered the U.S. illegally through Mexico were deported back to their homelands.

Several immigration law experts said they had simply never heard or seen cases where this statute had been deployed. Former Mexican president Vicente Fox disagreed.

The Trump administration’s new memos on immigration, released Tuesday, were met with an blunt rejection Wednesday by Mexico’s Foreign Minister Luis Videgaray.

Central American migrants rest next to the train tracks at Arriaga in the southern Mexican state of Chiapas while waiting for the freight train “La Bestia”, or the Beast, to travel to north to the U.S. border, January 10, 2012. “Both presidents are keen to set a positive tone, a constructive tone moving forward”, the official added.

Trump, rarely one to understate, did so however when asked how he thought the Tillerson-Kelly mission would go in their attempt to quell the immigration furore created by Trump’s pledge to deport the 1.1 million undocumented immigrants presently in his country, 52% of which are Mexican.

For more reading, see the subscription Wall Street Journal story explaining why billionaire South Florida real estate developer and Trump friend Jorge Pérez criticized Trump’s immigration policies and stance toward Mexico.