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News > Latin America

Mexico Could Abandon Doing US 'Dirty Work' over Trump Policies

  • People participate in a protest march calling for human rights and dignity for immigrants, in Los Angeles, Feb. 18, 2017.

    People participate in a protest march calling for human rights and dignity for immigrants, in Los Angeles, Feb. 18, 2017. | Photo: Reuters

Published 19 February 2017
Opinion

A Mexican minister said his government would stop its U.S.-backed border controls at the southern border if Trump follows through on his border tax promise.

U.S. President Donald Trump’s plan to impose heavy border taxes on Mexico could see the suspension of a security program with Washington at Mexico’s southern border, which stops immigrants and refugees fleeing conflicts in Central America from coming into Mexico as they try to seek asylum in the United States.

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“There is so much at stake for the interest of the U.S. as a country,” Mexico’s Economy Minister Ildefonso Guajardo told the Canadian newspaper Globe and Mail in an interview Saturday.

Mexico has been accused of doing the U.S.’s “dirty work” when it comes to the war on drugs and immigration enforcement in return for cash. The minister warned that Trump’s rhetoric against his country and its people could see the Mexican government less willing to “keep on cooperating in things that are at the heart of (U.S.) national-security issues.”

“You cannot ask me to (accept poor) conditions in terms of trade and then request my help to manage migration issues from other nations or … the prosecution of criminal activities and narcotics,” he added.

For the past three years Mexico has virtually locked its southern border as part of Programa Frontera Sur initiated by President Barack Obama in order to stop the flow of refugees from Central America.

Washington gave Mexico US$86 million in equipment and training in 2014 in order to set up border controls along its 3,000-mile southern border and crack down on immigrant flows from countries like El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras. Mexico detained 330,000 Central Americans in the last two years.

In recent years, Mexico has also become a hotspot for refugees fleeing conflicts in Africa and the Middle East who are wishing to go to the the United States. Last year at least 7,500 people from Africa came into Mexico according to government figures.

As part of the security cooperation between the U.S. and Mexico, U.S. agents are stationed in detention centers across Mexico in order to vet refugees from Muslim-majority countries who are applying for asylum in the United States.

However, it is not clear whether threats to suspend the program would be materialized in the case of a Trump border tax, which his administration suggested would pay for his wall with Mexico.

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One of the main promises of Trump’s presidential campaign was building a wall along the border with Mexico in order to stop the flow of what Trump calls criminals, drug dealers and rapists from entering the United States.

But in fact over the past few years more Mexicans have been leaving the U.S. than coming in, according to official statements.

Humberto Roque Villanueva, deputy secretary of population, migration and religious affairs at the Mexican Secretariat of the Interior, told Mexico's La Jornada that while his government has been accused of doing “the dirty work” of the U.S. through security cooperation, the country would not abandon border controls at the southern border over Trump’s hostile policies for “legal, human and crime-prevention reasons.”

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