Trump cuts foreign aid to three caravan nations
Donald Trump moved yesterday to cut direct aid to El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras, whose citizens are fleeing north and overwhelming US resources at the southern border.
The State Department notified congress that it would look to suspend 2017 and 2018 payments to the trio of nations, which have been home to some of the migrant caravans that have marched through Mexico to the US border.
The US President has turned the caravans into the symbol of the dangers of illegal immigration — a central theme of his mid-term campaigning last November. With special counsel Robert Mueller’s Russia probe behind him, Mr Trump has revived his warnings of the caravans.
Mr Trump returned to a previous threat he never carried out: closing the border with Mexico. He brought up that possibility on Saturday and revisited it in tweets yesterday, blaming Democrats and Mexico for problems at the border and beyond despite warnings that a closed border could create economic havoc on both sides.
“It would be so easy to fix our weak and very stupid Democrat inspired immigration laws,” he tweeted. “In less than one hour, and then a vote, the problem would be solved.
“But the Dems don’t care about the crime, they don’t want any victory for Trump and the Republicans, even if good for USA!”
As far as Mexico’s role, he tweeted: “Mexico must use its very strong immigration laws to stop the many thousands of people trying to get into the USA. Our detention areas are maxed out & we will take no more illegals. Next step is to close the Border! This will also help us with stopping the Drug flow from Mexico!”
When reporters asked Mr Trump on Saturday what closing the border could entail, he said “it could mean all trade” with Mexico and added, “We will close it for a long time”.
Mr Trump has been promising for more than two years to build a long, impenetrable wall along the border to stop illegal immigration, though congress has been reluctant to provide the money he needs. The US and Mexico trade about $US1.7 billion ($2.4bn) in goods daily, according to the US Chamber of Commerce, which said closing the border would be “an unmitigated economic debacle” that would threaten five million American jobs.
Bob Menendez, the ranking Democrat on the Senate foreign relations committee, spoke out against cutting off aid to Central America, declaring that “foreign assistance is not charity; it advances our strategic interests and funds initiatives that protect American citizens”.
The Trump administration has threatened before to scale back or cut off US assistance to Central America. Congress has not approved most of those proposed cuts.
Short of a widespread border shutdown, Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen said the US might close designated ports of entry to re-deploy staff to help process parents and children.
Border officials are also planning to more than quadruple the number of asylum-seekers sent back over the border to wait out their immigration cases, said an administration official.
The official said about 60 migrants a day are returned and officials are hoping to send as many as 300 a day.
Mexican President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador said his country was doing its part to fight migrant smuggling. “We want to have a good relationship with the government of the United States,” Mr Lopez Obrador said.
The “mother of all caravans” expected to depart from Central America has begun by looking more like the baby of all caravans, after a group of about 40 migrants left yesterday for the US from the capital of El Salvador.
It was not clear whether they planned to meet with other migrants from Guatemala and Honduras, but the Honduran government denied there was another caravan forming in its country. Honduran Foreign Minister Maria Dolores Aguero suggested that such assertions could spur aspiring migrants to come together in larger groups.
Mexican Interior Secretary Olga Sanchez Cordero said last week that a caravan of migrants from Central America could be forming with more than 20,000 people, and she pledged to form a “containment” line around Mexico’s narrow Tehuantepec Isthmus to stop migrants from continuing their northern journey.
https://www.theaustralian.com.au/world/trump-cuts-foreign-aid-to-three-caravan-nations/news-story/3c472eae12f4bd2d5bf377fc8c7fd07d