Mexico To Trump: We Won’t Take Back Non-Citizens Who Entered US Via Mexico – OpEd
By Jim Kouri
Mexico’s Interior Minister Miguel Angel Osorio Chong has made it clear that Mexico will not accept unauthorized immigrants deported from the United States – unless the deportees are citizens of Mexico, according to a homeland security report on Monday.
According to the Homeland Security News Wire, a major part of President Donald Trump’s immigration enforcement plan is the deportation back to Mexico of any person or persons crossing the U.S.-Mexico border without permission or authorization, regardless of the deportee’s nationality.
The already hostile news media have stirred up resentment by claiming the current administration is trying to force the Mexican government to build facilities for housing the hundreds of thousands who will be deported.
In a meeting held in Mexico City last Thursday, Secretary of State Rex Tillerson and the Department of Homeland Security’s retired Marine general, Secretary John Kelly, discussed the Trump immigration enforcement plan with Mexican officials, but Osorio Chong, said the next day that President Enrique Pena Nieto’s government informed the two U.S. cabinet members that Mexico will definitely refuse to accept, house and process those detainees who are not Mexican nationals.
“They can’t leave them here on the border because we have to reject them. There is no chance they would be received by Mexico,” Osorio Chong said, according to the HSNW report.
“They asked us that while their legal process is happening there if they could be here,” Osorio Chong told the Mexican people. “And we told them that there’s no way we can have them here during that process,” he stated.
A memorandum published on the DHS web site last week suggested that immigrants who are in the United States illegally should be deported “to the contiguous country” they had entered from, which in most cases would be Mexico.
The members of the U.S. Border Patrol and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) report that the majority of the immigrants crossing the United States/Mexico border during President Barack Obama’s two terms have been Central Americans, not Mexicans.
In fact, Obama, Mexico and officials from other Central American countries are well aware that U.S. government planes transported immigrants directly into the U.S., making it easier for illegal aliens to avoid problems in Mexico. Reports have indicated the Mexican border police routinely beats, robs and kills immigrants crossing their southern border.
Osorio Chong also threatened to cancel accepting U.S. funding as per the Mérida Initiative, which funds the fight against narco-traffickers and other organized crime. Mexico is willing to give up the U.S. funding which is more than $2 billion-per-year for fighting the drug cartels.
The Mérida Initiative was launched by President George W. Bush in 2008, and after about nine-years has been winding down.
“If that resource could be an issue for pressure or if they want to pressure the government, honestly, we have no problem, none, if they withdraw it,” Osorio Chong said.
