MEXICO | Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum rejects Trump's Annexation suggestion

MEXICO - teleSUR - December 11, 2024 - On Monday, President Claudia Sheinbaum rejected President-elect Donald Trump’s suggestion that Mexico and Canada should join the United States because of the subsidies they had received.

“Mexico is a free, sovereign and independent country. We all know that and we always defend it,” Sheinbaum said during her morning press conference at the National Palace.

On Sunday, Trump said that Americans are “subsidizing Canada to the tune of over US$100 billion a year. We’re subsidizing Mexico for almost US$300 billion. We shouldn’t be—why are we subsidizing these countries? If we’re going to subsidize them, let them become a state.”

Sheinbaum dismissed these statements, noting that the “subsidies” Trump mentioned could be related to the increasing Mexican exports to the United States. “The only way to compete with other regions of the world is to maintain and strengthen the trade agreement, the U.S.-Mexico-Canada Agreement, because we should not see each other as competition, but as complementarities,” she said.

#Mexico 🇲🇽 | President Claudia Sheinbaum assured that her Government will represent Mexico with dignity, referring to the call she held with the president-elect of the United States, #DonaldTrump, in which, among other topics, the issue of #migration was addressed pic.twitter.com/v9ndPsWLUr

— teleSUR English (@telesurenglish) December 6, 2024

On Monday, the Mexican president also referred to the immigration issue, assuring that “not much more budget is required” to deal with Trump’s mass deportations and other restrictive immigration policies.

Sheinbaum said that the National Institute of Migration (INM) and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs (SRE) have enough resources to deal with deportations and the migratory flow when the Republican politician takes office on January 20.

Currently, there is concern about Trump’s promises of mass deportations from the U.S., where Mexicans are about half of the 11 million undocumented people and their remittances represent almost 4 percent of Mexico’s gross domestic product (GDP), which this year would receive a record of US$65 billion.

On Tuesday, Sheinbaum will lead a meeting of the National Security Council with all the country’s governors, with whom she hopes to put together an immigration plan in light of the mass deportations. Although daily migrant apprehensions at the U.S.-Mexico border have fallen by 75 percent since December 2023, irregular migration through Mexico rose by 193 percent year-on-year in the first half of the year to more than 712,000 people, according to the Migration Policy Unit.

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