President Donald Trump confirmed on Sunday that he had pressed Mexico’s President to let US troops into the country to help fight drug cartels, an idea she summarily rejected.
Trump told reporters travelling with him aboard Air Force One from Palm Beach, Florida, to Washington that it was “true” he had made the push with President Claudia Sheinbaum. The proposal, first reported by The Wall Street Journal last week, came at the end of a lengthy phone call between the two leaders on April 16, The Journal said.
Sheinbaum has also confirmed that Trump made the suggestion, and that she rejected it. Mexico and the US can “collaborate,” she recalled telling him, but “with you in your territory and us in ours.”
Trump said he proposed the idea because the cartels “are horrible people that have been killing people left and right and have been — they’ve made a fortune on selling drugs and destroying our people”. He said, “If Mexico wanted help with the cartels, we would be honoured to go in and do it. I told her that. I would be honoured to go in and do it. The cartels are trying to destroy our country. They’re evil.”
He said, “The President of Mexico is a lovely woman, but she is so afraid of the cartels that she can’t even think straight.” Trump has had a better working relationship with Sheinbaum than with Canada’s leaders. But the relationships with both neighbouring countries have been strained over trade and immigration.
Rwanda migrants
Rwanda is in talks with the Trump administration to take in migrants deported from the US, the central African nation’s foreign minister said late on Sunday.
It was unclear if a deal would involve migrants who had already been deported or those who will be in the future, but any deal would potentially make Rwanda the first African country to enter into such an agreement with the US.
Rwanda’s foreign minister, Olivier J.P. Nduhungirehe, said on Sunday that his government was in talks about receiving third-country deportees from the US.
“It is true that we are in discussions with the US,” Nduhungirehe said in an interview with Rwanda TV, the state broadcaster. “These talks are still ongoing, and it would be premature to conclude how they will unfold,” he added.
