Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum is pushing back on Donald Trump’s claim she promised to effectively close her country’s northern border with the United States after the incoming American leader alleged that she’d pledged to stop all migration through the country.
On Wednesday, Trump took to his Truth Social platform to claim that Sheinbaum had made such a promise during a phone call earlier in the day. He wrote that she had “agreed to stop Migration through Mexico, and into the United States, effectively closing our Southern Border.”
But Sheinbaum quickly clapped back in a post of her own on X (formerly Twitter), writing that while the pair had shared an “excellent conversation” she’d told him that the migrant caravans Trump frequently points to as evidence of chaos on the US-Mexico border are not reaching the US because the migrants are “being taken car of” — receiving aid and services — in her own country.
“We reiterate that Mexico’s position is not to close borders but to maintain bridges between governments and people,” she said.
Trump appeared to have understood her comments to mean that Sheinbaum had somehow ordered a halt to all northward movement by anyone intending on migrating to the United States, but in her posts to X she explained that she’d taken care to “explain” to her incoming American counterpart the “comprehensive strategy that Mexico has followed to address the migration phenomenon, respecting human rights.”
The president-elect has a long history of making broad pronouncements about Mexico’s management of its side of the border the two countries share and has often complained that America’s southern neighbor has not done enough to stop people from traversing the country with the ultimate aim of claiming asylum in the United States.
Now, months from taking the oath of office for a second time, he has threatened to impose a significant import tax on all products brought in from Mexico and Canada unless both governments do more to stop what he has claimed to be an “invasion” of asylum seekers who cross into the US.
Last month, the US Customs and Border Protection agency said unauthorized border crossings fell 60 percent between October 2023 and the same time this year. Along the US-Canada border — the longest largely-unguarded land border in the world, the agency has stepped enforcement efforts that cut migrant encounters by half from June 2024 to September 2024.
