WEST PALM BEACH, Fla. — It would take “something dramatic” in the coming days to persuade President Trump not to close the U.S.-Mexico border, acting White House chief of staff Mick Mulvaney said Sunday, and White House counselor Kellyanne Conway said the President’s threat “certainly isn’t a bluff.”
The two senior staffers, appearing separately on Sunday morning talk shows, also reiterated the Trump Administration’s intention to cut off hundreds of millions of dollars in assistance to Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador.
Those countries are the primary source of tens of thousands of migrants who have been presenting themselves at U.S. ports of entry and asking for political asylum.
“Democrats didn’t believe us a month ago, two months ago when we said what was happening at the border was a crisis, a humanitarian crisis, a security crisis,” Mr. Mulvaney said on ABC News’ This Week.
He called on the Mexican government to solidify its southern border and said Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador need to do more to prevent their citizens from entering Mexico.
If they cannot do that, he said, “it makes very little sense for us to continue to send them aid.”
Ms. Conway, appearing on Fox News Sunday, pushed back against the notion that cutting aid to those countries would make matters worse.
“The conditions are already awful,” she said. “The executive branch has done so much to try to mitigate these awful circumstances, and we need to send a message back to these countries, too.”
Closing the border would have consequences not only for families seeking asylum but also for trade and commerce between the United States and Mexico.
Mexico is the third-largest trading partner of the United States, with more than $611 billion in cross-border trade last year, according to the Commerce Department.
If the border closure applied to goods and vehicles as well as people, the economic consequences would be immediate and severe, with automakers and U.S. farmers among the first to feel the pain, according to trade specialists.
To deal with “an unprecedented humanitarian and border security crisis all along our Southwest border,” the agency said it had redeployed 750 border agents.
Sen. Richard Durbin (D., Ill.), appearing on NBC’s Meet the Press, said the government needs to prioritize the humanitarian crisis unfolding along the U.S.-Mexico border.
“The first thing we need to do is meet the humanitarian needs at the border instead of building fences two or three years in the future by taking money from Department of Defense, focus on facilities to serve these families so that there aren’t children who are hurt and dying as a result of this situation.”
Mr. Trump took to Twitter over the weekend to implore Mexico 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!”
Under U.S. law, people who reach the U.S. border are entitled to request asylum.
In recent weeks, Border Patrol facilities along the southwestern border have been strained to a breaking point by the largest influx of migrants in years.
The numbers are growing, in part, because travelers are hoping to make the journey north before summertime.
The number of arrivals has spiked and is now at about 100,000 people a month.
This has overwhelmed the system. The immigration courts have backlogs of hundreds of thousands of cases.
There is profound partisan disagreement over how to handle it.
Closing the southern border is not unprecedented.
Presidents Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan both shut the border over drug-related issues, while President Lyndon B. Johnson closed it briefly after the assassination of John F. Kennedy in 1963.
Mr. Trump could turn to the section of immigration law that grants a president broad authority to prevent certain people from entering the country on national security grounds, legal experts said.
That authority was upheld by the Supreme Court in a decision last year on his travel ban.
First Published April 1, 2019, 3:56 a.m.
