Mexico wants a deal with Trump to avoid receiving non-Mexican deportees

By Abel Alvarado, CNN

(CNN) — Mexico hopes to strike a deal with President-elect Donald Trump to limit the number of third-country deportees it could receive from the US, Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum said on Thursday.

A similar deal to send deportees directly to their country of origin is already in place with the current Biden administration.

“We hope to have an agreement with the Trump administration,” Sheinbaum said Thursday during her daily press conference adding that Mexico is “in solidarity with everyone, but [Mexico’s] main function is to receive Mexicans.”

Faced with the prospect of mass deportations across the US-Mexico border, Sheinbaum said her administration is setting up meetings with Mexican border states governors — Baja California, Sonora, Chihuahua, Coahuila, Nuevo León, and Tamaulipas — so “we can agree on how to receive our compatriots.”

“We hope [mass deportations] don’t happen, but if they do, we will be ready to receive them,” she said.

In a statement sent to CNN, Karoline Leavitt, spokeswoman to Trump transition team, said Trump “was given a mandate by the American people to stop the invasion of illegal immigrants, secure the border, and deport dangerous criminals and terrorists that make our communities less safe. He will deliver.”

Sheinbaum’s comments come after a November 27 call with Trump about the two countries’ shared border and the fentanyl crisis, a conversation she described as “excellent” in a post on X.

Trump, too, said the call was “wonderful” in a post on Truth Social, and went further, claiming that Sheinbaum had “agreed to stop migration through Mexico, and into the United States, effectively closing our Southern Border.” Sheinbaum has denied proposing to seal the border.

“Everyone has their own way of communicating, but I can assure you, I give you the certainty that we would never — and we would be incapable of it — propose that we would close the border,” Sheinbaum said. “It has never been our approach and of course we don’t agree with that.”

That was the first time they had spoken since Trump promised massive tariff hikes on goods from Mexico on the first day of his administration, in retaliation for illegal immigration and “crime and drugs” moving across the border. Sheinbaum has warned of possible counter-tariffs in response.

Mexico has also highlighted its actions to address the fentanyl trade and border crisis in recent days. On Wednesday, the Mexican government announced what it said was the largest fentanyl bust in the country’s history, with over a ton of the synthetic opioid seized in two raids in the cartel-ridden northern state of Sinaloa. Just hours later, the government released data showing that an average of around 5,200 migrants have been detained each day in Mexico since Sheinbaum took office on October 1.

The US southern border has become a global crossroads, where Mexican and non-Mexican migrants congregate with hopes of crossing into the US, often after making long and arduous journeys across the world. Since 2022, US Customs and Border Protection have recorded a yearly average of over half a million encounters with migrants from Central American nations, such as El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, and Nicaragua. Thousands of encounters have also involved migrants from Venezuela, Cuba and increasingly China, among others.

Elsewhere in Latin America, the Panamanian Foreign Ministry said Thursday that the country would not accept migrants of other nationalities who may be deported by the future Trump administration from the United States.

“In light of international law, we have no obligation to accept deportees of nationalities other than Panamanian. We wish to maintain relations with the United States always within the framework of mutual respect,” the ministry said in a statement.

“This Foreign Ministry clearly understands that our main mission is to protect the interests of the Republic of Panama,” it added.

Karoline Leavitt, a spokeswoman for Trump’s team, told CNN that the president-elect received a mandate from the American people to stop what she called “the invasion of illegal immigrants, secure the border and deport dangerous criminals and terrorists” who make their communities less safe. “He will comply,” she said.

This story has been updated with additional details.

Reporting contributed by Veronica Calderon, Elizabeth González and Mauricio Torres

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