Mexican Officials Irked by US DHS Plans on Eve of Tillerson Visit
Tuesday, February 21, 2017 07:32 PM
By: Solange Reyner
President Donald Trump irked Mexican officials by revealing his mass deportation plan Tuesday, one day ahead of U.S. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson and Homeland Security Secretary John Kelly's visit to Mexico City, Politico reported.
"It does poison the general context in which the trip is taking place," Arturo Sarukhan, a former Mexican ambassador to the United States, told Politico. "It will create public opinion backlash and congressional backlash in Mexico."
Mexican officials contacted the State Department for more details on the plan, which looks to aggressively enforce the nation's immigration laws.
It allows federal immigration agents to deport people more quickly, implements a deport-first, ask questions later policy, and vastly increases resources to Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Customs and Border Protection. The memos also provide some details on Trump's plan to build a border wall along the U.S.-Mexico border and indicates the U.S is still looking for total ownership cost of the project.
Former president Ernesto Zedillo told the AP the Trump administration's actions "have closed off, at least for the foreseeable future, the possibility of any agreement being achieved through dialogue and negotiation that could satisfy the interests of both parties."
"The effort to accommodate President Trump's capricious wishes has proven worthless and should not be continued," Zedillo wrote in an editorial in The Washington Post. "It is not useful for Mexico or the United States."
http://www.newsmax.com/Newsfront/DHS.../21/id/774868/
