The president continued this Easter Sunday with his long tradition of lambasting Mexico for supposedly not doing enough to counter undocumented immigration into the United States. He has coupled that time and time again with railing against immigrants to the U.S., singling undocumented immigrants out and pushing for a wall in between us and Mexico to keep them out.
As the latest installment in this saga of the president’s belligerence, he angrily melted down on Twitter Sunday morning, in the face of reports about a group of around 1,000 people, mostly from Honduras, who were making their way through Mexico to the United States border.
He wrote:
‘Mexico is doing very little, if not NOTHING, at stopping people from flowing into Mexico through their Southern Border, and then into the U.S. They laugh at our dumb immigration laws. They must stop the big drug and people flows, or I will stop their cash cow, NAFTA. NEED WALL!’
Indeed; as it’s clear here in the president’s statement, the cooperation that he wants to see take place between the United States and our southern neighbor has to do with the border wall he’s long sought to put up. He’s long sought to have Mexico pay for the structure, although the country has never made any indication that they’re interested in doing so.
Even still, the president remains committed to the idea of seeing the wall go up. He threatened to veto the recently passed government spending bill because it didn’t have as much funding for border security as he wanted; he ended up signing it and then touting apparent fence construction as the beginning of his wall.
One of the ways that he’s tried to rope Democrats into supporting his wall is through coupling it with a provision for “Dreamers” — those undocumented immigrants protected by the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, or DACA program — to have a path to citizenship and continued protections. Democrats mostly unsurprisingly didn’t bite, and in a fit of rage, as a part of his Easter Sunday meltdown, the president tweeted:
‘NO MORE DACA DEAL!’
In response to the president’s latest ranting, Mexico’s foreign minister took to Twitter with a message of his own.
Luis Videgaray wrote:
‘Every day Mexico and the US work together on migration throughout the region. Facts clearly reflect this. An inaccurate news report should not serve to question this strong cooperation. Upholding human dignity and rights is not at odds with the rule of law. Happy Easter.’
Videgaray referencing an “inaccurate news report” comes after the president was apparently set off this Easter Sunday morning against Mexico by a Fox & Friends story about the aforementioned group of migrants making their way to the U.S. border.
Trump continued on with the inaccuracies while speaking to reporters ahead of going into church services for Easter Sunday, at which time he strongly implied — as he has in the past — that the Mexican government is “sending” dangerous people to the United States.
That claim is no more true this time around than it was the first time he said it on the national stage. It’s one of thousands of lies and misrepresentations that Trump has marked his time in office with.
Check out some of Twitter’s response to Mexico’s foreign minster below.
Featured Image via MANDEL NGAN/AFP/Getty Images
