Trump warns to close border with Mexico over ‘immigration’

Bloomberg

President Donald Trump said he’ll close the southern border next week unless Mexico “immediately” stops illegal migration into the US, which his Homeland Security secretary said threatens a “system-wide meltdown” at her agency.
“Closing the border will be a profit-making operation,” Trump told reporters at his Mar-a-Lago resort in Palm Beach, Florida. “There’s a very good likelihood that I’ll be closing the border next week.”
He said he plans to hold a news conference soon at a section of the border where the government is building a wall.
“Mexico could stop it,” Trump said. “It’s very easy for them to stop people from coming up, and they choose not to do it.”
Trump has periodically threatened to close the border, where he’s declared a national emergency because of the number of migrants crossing illegally. It’s unclear what he means, since closing the border entirely would halt millions of dollars worth of cross-border commerce. Trade with Mexico totalled $616 billion in 2017, according to the office of the US Trade Representative.
Mexican President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, speaking in Spanish, told reporters that “we are going to help, we want to have a good relationship with the United States government. We are not going to enter in controversy.”
He said that some of Trump’s complaints are related to politics and “the electoral process.” The country’s foreign minister, Marcelo Ebrard, was less conciliatory.
“Mexico does not act on the basis of threats,” he said in a tweet written in Spanish. “We’re a great neighbour. Just ask the million and a half Americans who chose our country as home.”
After touring a dike at Lake Okeechobee in Florida, Trump told reporters that Latin American countries including Mexico, Guatamala, and El Salvador have done nothing to help the US halt migration.