Trump keeps tariff threat over Mexico

STERLING, Va. — President Donald Trump on Sunday dangled the prospect of renewing his tariff threat against Mexico if the U.S. ally doesn’t cooperate on border issues, while some of his Democratic challengers for the White House said the lastminute deal to avert trade penalties was overblown.

In a series of tweets, Trump defended the agreement heading off the 5 percent tax on all Mexican goods that he had threatened to impose Monday, but he warned Mexico that, “if for some unknown reason” cooperation fails, “we can always go back to our previous, very profitable, position of Tariffs.”

Still, he said he didn’t believe that would be necessary.

The tweets came amid questions about just how much of the deal — announced with great fanfare Friday — was really new. It included a commitment from Mexico, for instance, to deploy its new National Guard to the country’s southern border with Guatemala. Mexico, however, had already intended to do that before Trump’s latest threat and had made that clear to U.S. officials.

“We want to continue to work with the U.S. very closely on the different challenges that we have together. And one urgent one at this moment is immigration,” said Mexico’s ambassador in Washington, Martha Barcena.

She told CBS’ “Face the Nation” that the countries’ “joint declaration of principles … gives us the base for the road map that we have to follow in the incoming months on immigration and cooperation on asylum issues and development in Central America.”

The U.S. also hailed Mexico’s agreement to embrace the expansion of a program implemented earlier this year under which some asylum-seekers are returned to Mexico as they wait out their cases.

But U.S. officials had already been working to expand the program, which has already led to the return of about 10,000 to Mexico, without Mexico’s public embrace.

“The president has completely overblown what he reports to have achieved. These are agreements that Mexico had already made, in some cases months ago,” said Democratic presidential candidate Beto O’Rourke, speaking on ABC’s “This Week.” “They might have accelerated the time table, but by and large the president achieved nothing except to jeopardize the most important trading relationship that the United States of America has.”

But acting Homeland Security Secretary Kevin McAleenan, speaking on “Fox News Sunday” insisted “all of it is new,” including the agreement to dispatch around 6,000 National Guard troops — a move Mexico has described as an “acceleration.”

“This is the first time we’ve heard anything like this kind of number of law enforcement being deployed in Mexico to address migration, not just at the southern border but also on the transportation routes to the northern border and in coordinated patrols in key areas along our southwest border,” he said, adding that “people can disagree with the tactics” but that “Mexico came to the table with real proposals” that will be effective, if implemented.