Tim Kaine says Donald Trump “caved” and “choked” by failing to discuss his demands that Mexico pay for a border wall during his meeting with Mexican President Enrique Peña Nieto.
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The Republican presidential candidate, however, was still unclear about what exactly he would do with the millions of people who are in the USA illegally.
“I think it was kind of a diplomatic embarrassment”, Kaine said of Trump’s unexpected meeting with Mexican President Enrique Pena Nieto.
Left unanswered by Trump: What would happen to those who have not committed crimes beyond their immigration offenses?
“Anyone who has entered the United States illegally is subject to deportation”, Trump said in the highly anticipated speech in Phoenix in Arizona.
Asserting that he will reform legal immigration to serve the best interests of America and its workers, Trump said the “time has come for a new immigration commission to develop a new set of reforms to our legal immigration system in order to achieve the goals to keep immigration levels, measured by population share, within historical norms”. Our message to the world will be this: you can not obtain legal status, or become a citizen of the United States, by illegally entering our country.
Instead, Trump spoke of a mass deportation.
The United States is Mexico’s main trading partner, the first destination for Mexican exports and a main contributor to foreign direct investment within the Latin American country, with bilateral trade reaching over 530 billion US dollars in 2015.
Former Mexican President Vicente Fox said Trump was trying to boost his sagging campaign. “There will be no amnesty”, Trump told the crowd. The candidate is deeply unpopular in Mexico due in large part to his deriding the country as a source of rapists and criminals as he kicked off his campaign.
Trump used the beginning of his speech to blame undocumented immigrants for pretty much every problem in America; claiming that “countless” lives had been taken by undocumented immigrants, that they cost the government $113 billion per year and that the number of undocumented immigrants in the country “could be 3 million”. But Pena Nieto tweeted that he had told Trump that Mexico wouldn’t pay for the wall.
Trump’s 10-point immigration plan called for securing the US-Mexico border with a “beautiful” and “impenetrable” wall, while deporting immigrants who are in the US illegally and have a criminal record. Silent at that moment, Pena Nieto later tweeted, “I made it clear that Mexico will not pay for the wall”.
With the meeting held behind closed doors, it was impossible to know who was telling the truth.
Donald Trump says that that, if he’s elected president, he’ll work on “promoting American pride and patriotism in America’s schools”.
Yet, standing on American soil, he addressed directly a question he sidestepped when asked in Mexico. Trump himself had insisted at the news conference in Mexico City that the two men did not discuss the financing of the wall. “They don’t know it yet, but they’re going to pay for the wall”.
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“A whole range of topics were discussed in the meeting and the subject of the wall was discussed, but getting into the details and negotiations about paying for the wall, it really wasn’t that kind of a meeting”, he said during an interview on CNN Wednesday night. “From there, the conversation addressed other issues, and developed in a respectful manner”, Pena Nieto wrote.
