Trump just spoke to reporters about the border and said some things you’ll definitely want to hear.
From what I can glean from this, Trump is now backing off of his threat to close the border.
He claims that in the last few days Mexico has begun to comply with the US and is now sending people back to their own countries who are trying to cross their southern border to come here.
"We're going to give [Mexico] a 1-year warning. And if the drugs don't stop (or largely stop), we're going to put tariffs on Mexico," Trump said, calling it an incentive for Mexico to address drug trafficking and migration.
"If that doesn't stop the drugs — we close the border" pic.twitter.com/c57qg84aDi
— POLITICO (@politico) April 4, 2019
But Trump doesn’t take closing the border off the table completely. AND he is adding tariffs on car imports to the mix of punishments for Mexico.
Trump is now giving Mexico a one-year warning, arguing that if they don’t continue to stop central American migrants from coming to our border and they don’t put a stop to drugs coming over our southern border, he will put tariffs on car imports from Mexico. If that doesn’t work he says shut down the border.
The problem with the tariffs is that they will hurt consumers here in the US, not just the manufacturers Mexico. But we’ve said all this before and apparently Trump doesn’t really care about hurting consumers.
So it sounds like to me that Trump is not going to shut down the border right now because he says Mexico is now doing their part to stop the flow of migrants.