Mexico braced for the worst when President Trump threatened steep tariffs on its exports. However as a deadline looms, Mexico’s leaders hope they’ve discovered a system for staving off tariffs by transferring decisively on a number of fronts to appease Mr. Trump.
Specializing in Mr. Trump’s complaints over migration and illicit medicine, President Claudia Sheinbaum is deploying 10,000 troops to discourage migrants from reaching the US, constructing on efforts to interrupt up migrant caravans and busing migrants to locations removed from the border.
Ms. Sheinbaum can also be handing over to the US dozens of high cartel operatives and accepting intelligence from C.I.A. drone flights to seize others. Breaking together with her predecessor, who falsely claimed that Mexico didn’t manufacture fentanyl, she is unleashing a crackdown leading to document seizures of the drug.
On the identical time, Mexico’s leaders are imposing their very own tariffs and restrictions on a variety of Chinese language imports, looking for to influence Mr. Trump that Mexico, and its low-cost industrial base, is usually a strategic companion to blunt China’s financial sway.
Mr. Trump continues to be vowing to impose 25 % tariffs on Tuesday. However Mexico’s monetary markets stay calm, reflecting expectations within the nation’s enterprise institution that Ms. Sheinbaum can discover a solution to strike a deal.
“The best way she’s been in a position to handle this disaster has been far superior than some other chief,” stated Diego Marroquín Bitar, a scholar who focuses on North American commerce on the Wilson Heart, a Washington analysis group.
Mr. Trump praised Ms. Sheinbaum as a “marvelous lady” after talking together with her in February.
Ms. Sheinbaum has combined her conciliatory public strikes to appease Mr. Trump, resembling deploying troops, with higher safety cooperation behind the scenes and a modest dose of pushback towards Mr. Trump on topics like renaming the Gulf of Mexico.
It’s not a simple balancing act for Ms. Sheinbaum, whilst her approval ranking has soared to 80 %. Skepticism of Mr. Trump’s xenophobic politics runs deep each in Mexican society and inside Morena, Ms. Sheinbaum’s political social gathering, which blends nationalist and leftist beliefs.
After many years of integration, Mexico depends on commerce with the US greater than some other main financial system. Tariffs, even when imposed briefly, may deal a blow, economists warn.
Mr. Trump can also be threatening separate 25 % tariffs on international metal and aluminum imports, which might additionally have an effect on Mexico. And the Trump administration is formulating extra “reciprocal” tariffs aimed toward offsetting commerce restrictions and matching the import duties charged by different nations.
The uncertainty over tariffs is already weighing on Mexico’s financial system as firms put plans on maintain. The central financial institution slashed its progress projection to 0.6 % for this yr from 1.2 %.
Nonetheless, Mr. Trump’s repeated threats and subsequent pullback on these threats have nurtured hopes that tensions may ease. He initially vowed to impose the tariffs on his first day in workplace, however then backtracked twice.
Mexican negotiators are in Washington to fulfill with Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick and Jamieson Greer, the U.S. commerce consultant, in a bid to achieve a last-minute deal.
Listed here are three areas the place Mexico is mobilizing to align with the Trump administration’s priorities.
Curbing Migration
Mexico’s pledge to ship 10,000 extra Nationwide Guard members to the U.S. border was cited as a win by Mr. Trump in early February, when he paused imposing tariffs for 30 days.
For months, Mexico had already been dismantling migrant caravans effectively earlier than they reached border cities and increasing a shadowy program that transported hundreds of migrants to locations deep in Mexico’s inside.
Mexico detained about 475,000 migrants within the final quarter of 2024, in line with authorities figures, greater than double the quantity detained within the first 9 months of the yr.
The border was already exceptionally quiet earlier than Mr. Trump took workplace in January, reflecting Mexico’s enforcement measures and the Biden administration’s asylum restrictions.
The Trump administration’s new efforts to choke off migration flows, together with Mexico’s troop deployment, are making it even tougher for migrants to enter the US.
Migrant crossings have dropped to as soon as unthinkable ranges. At one level in February, U.S. personnel on the Mexican border encountered solely 200 migrants in a single day, the bottom such determine in current historical past.
If the pattern holds on an annualized foundation, Border Patrol apprehensions may decline to ranges final seen almost 60 years in the past across the finish of the Johnson administration, in line with Adam Isacson, a migration skilled on the Washington Workplace on Latin America.
Mexico has sought to crack down on cartels producing illicit narcotics, particularly fentanyl, the artificial opioid that Mr. Trump has cited because the main explanation for overdose deaths in the US.
Marking a break from previous insurance policies, when cartels managed to provide fentanyl with negligible interference from the authorities, Mexican officers have been asserting new seizures of fentanyl tablets regularly in current weeks.
These strikes embrace the seize final week of six kilos of fentanyl at Mexico Metropolis’s new worldwide airport, in a package deal being despatched to New Jersey. That adopted the discovery of 18 kilograms of fentanyl hidden in a passenger bus within the northwestern border state of Sonora.
In December, shortly after Mr. Trump started threatening Mexico with tariffs, the authorities made a colossal seizure of 800 kilograms of fentanyl in Sinaloa state, Mexico’s largest seize of artificial opioids.
In February, Mexican authorities in Puerto Vallarta additionally arrested two Americans who confronted arrest warrants in the US for trafficking fentanyl. Each had been extradited to Oklahoma.
Mexico adopted up on Thursday by sending to the US almost 30 high cartel operatives needed by American authorities, one of many largest such handovers within the historical past of the drug warfare.
The strikes are aimed each at avoiding tariffs and army intervention by the US, which Mr. Trump has threatened to take towards drug cartels working in Mexico.
Andrés Manuel López Obrador, Ms. Sheinbaum’s mentor and predecessor as president, had restricted anti-narcotics cooperation with United States. Ms. Sheinbaum seems to be taking a unique strategy.
Higher enforcement may probably contribute to decreasing overdose deaths in the US, which have already been on the decline.
In what may very well be a promising signal for Mexican negotiators looking for a deal on tariffs, overdose deaths fell about 24 % within the 12-month interval ending September 2024, in contrast with the identical interval the earlier yr, the U.S. Facilities for Illness Management and Prevention stated.
Countering China
Commerce between China and Mexico had been surging, fueling issues that China may use its foothold in Mexico to realize higher entry to U.S. markets. A yr in the past, delivery from China to Mexico was one of many world’s quickest rising commerce routes.
However now Mexico is overhauling its ties with China, its second-largest buying and selling companion. Simply days after Mr. Trump first vowed to impose tariffs, the authorities raided an enormous advanced of shops in downtown Mexico Metropolis promoting counterfeit Chinese language items.
Then Mexico imposed a 35 % tariff on Chinese language attire imports, whereas additionally concentrating on Chinese language on-line retailers like Shein and Temu by implementing a 19 % tariff on items imported by courier firms originating from China.
Nonetheless, with numerous tariff threats on the horizon, Mexico may do extra to placate the Trump administration by transferring to curb the import of merchandise like semiconductors or cars, that are shortly making inroads in an necessary marketplace for U.S. automobile producers.
