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Mexico’s Response to Trump’s Tariffs: Troops, Cartels and China
Mexico braced for the worst when President Trump threatened steep tariffs on its exports. But as a deadline looms, Mexico’s leaders hope they have found a formula for staving off tariffs by moving decisively on several fronts to appease Mr. Trump.
Focusing on Mr. Trump’s complaints over migration and illicit drugs, President Claudia Sheinbaum is deploying 10,000 troops to deter migrants from reaching the United States, building on efforts to break up migrant caravans and busing migrants to places far from the border.
Ms. Sheinbaum is also handing over to the United States dozens of top cartel operatives and accepting intelligence from C.I.A. drone flights to capture others. Breaking with her predecessor, who falsely claimed that Mexico did not manufacture fentanyl, she is unleashing a crackdown resulting in record seizures of the drug.
At the same time, Mexico’s leaders are imposing their own tariffs and restrictions on a wide range of Chinese imports, seeking to persuade Mr. Trump that Mexico, and its low-cost industrial base, can be a strategic partner to blunt China’s economic sway.
Mr. Trump is still vowing to impose 25 percent tariffs on Tuesday. But Mexico’s financial markets remain calm, reflecting expectations in the country’s business establishment that Ms. Sheinbaum can find a way to strike a deal.
“The way she’s been able to manage this crisis has been far superior than any other leader,” said Diego Marroquín Bitar, a scholar who specializes in North American trade at the Wilson Center, a Washington research group.
Mr. Trump praised Ms. Sheinbaum as a “marvelous woman” after speaking with her in February.
Ms. Sheinbaum has mixed her conciliatory public moves to appease Mr. Trump, such as deploying troops, with greater security cooperation behind the scenes and a modest dose of pushback against Mr. Trump on subjects like renaming the Gulf of Mexico.
It’s not an easy balancing act for Ms. Sheinbaum, even as her approval rating has soared to 80 percent. Skepticism of Mr. Trump’s xenophobic politics runs deep both in Mexican society and within Morena, Ms. Sheinbaum’s political party, which blends nationalist and leftist ideals.
After decades of integration, Mexico relies on trade with the United States more than any other major economy. Tariffs, even if imposed briefly, could deal a blow, economists warn.
Mr. Trump is also threatening separate 25 percent tariffs on global steel and aluminum imports, which would also affect Mexico. And the Trump administration is formulating additional “reciprocal” tariffs aimed at offsetting trade restrictions and matching the import duties charged by other countries.
The uncertainty over tariffs is already weighing on Mexico’s economy as companies put plans on hold. The central bank slashed its growth projection to 0.6 percent for this year from 1.2 percent.
Still, Mr. Trump’s repeated threats and subsequent pullback on those threats has nurtured hopes that tensions could ease. He initially vowed to impose the tariffs on his first day in office, but then backtracked twice.
Mexican negotiators are in Washington to meet with Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick and Jamieson Greer, the U.S. trade representative, in a bid to reach a last-minute deal.
Here are three areas where Mexico is mobilizing to align with the Trump administration’s priorities.
Curbing Migration
Mexico’s pledge to send 10,000 additional National 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 well before they reached border cities and expanding a shadowy program that transported thousands of migrants to places deep in Mexico’s interior.
Mexico detained about 475,000 migrants in the last quarter of 2024, according to government figures, more than double the amount detained in the first nine months of the year.
The border was already exceptionally quiet before Mr. Trump took office 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, along with Mexico’s troop deployment, are making it even harder for migrants to enter the United States.
Migrant crossings have dropped to once unthinkable levels. At one point in February, U.S. personnel on the Mexican border encountered only 200 migrants in a single day, the lowest such figure in recent history.
If the trend holds on an annualized basis, Border Patrol apprehensions could decline to levels last seen nearly 60 years ago around the end of the Johnson administration, according to Adam Isacson, a migration expert at the Washington Office on Latin America.
Mexico has sought to crack down on cartels producing illicit narcotics, especially fentanyl, the synthetic opioid that Mr. Trump has cited as the leading cause of overdose deaths in the United States.
Marking a break from past policies, when cartels managed to produce fentanyl with negligible interference from the authorities, Mexican officials have been announcing new seizures of fentanyl pills on a regular basis in recent weeks.
These moves include the capture last week of six kilos of fentanyl at Mexico City’s new international airport, in a package being sent to New Jersey. That followed the discovery of 18 kilograms of fentanyl hidden in a passenger bus in the northwestern border state of Sonora.
In December, shortly after Mr. Trump began threatening Mexico with tariffs, the authorities made a colossal seizure of 800 kilograms of fentanyl in Sinaloa state, Mexico’s largest capture of synthetic opioids.
In February, Mexican authorities in Puerto Vallarta also arrested two American citizens who faced arrest warrants in the United States for trafficking fentanyl. Both were extradited to Oklahoma.
Mexico followed up on Thursday by sending to the United States nearly 30 top cartel operatives wanted by American authorities, one of the largest such handovers in the history of the drug war.
The moves are aimed both at avoiding tariffs and military intervention by the United States, which Mr. Trump has threatened to take against drug cartels operating in Mexico.
Andrés Manuel López Obrador, Ms. Sheinbaum’s mentor and predecessor as president, had limited anti-narcotics cooperation with United States. Ms. Sheinbaum appears to be taking a different approach.
Mexican officials, for instance, have been welcoming intelligence from the C.I.A., which has stepped up secret drone flights over Mexico to hunt for fentanyl labs. Mexico’s defense minister said in late February that U.S. drones had been used to track down top Sinaloa Cartel figures.
Greater enforcement could potentially contribute to reducing overdose deaths in the United States, which have already been on the decline.
In what could be a promising sign for Mexican negotiators seeking a deal on tariffs, overdose deaths fell about 24 percent in the 12-month period ending September 2024, compared to the same period the previous year, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control said.
Countering China
Trade between China and Mexico had been surging, fueling concerns that China could use its foothold in Mexico to gain greater access to U.S. markets. A year ago, shipping from China to Mexico was one of the world’s fastest growing trade routes.
But now Mexico is overhauling its ties with China, its second-largest trading partner. Just days after Mr. Trump first vowed to impose tariffs, the authorities raided a vast complex of stores in downtown Mexico City selling counterfeit Chinese goods.
Then Mexico imposed a 35 percent tariff on Chinese apparel imports, while also targeting Chinese online retailers like Shein and Temu by implementing a 19 percent tariff on goods imported through courier companies originating from China.
Still, with various tariff threats on the horizon, Mexico could do more to placate the Trump administration by moving to curb the import of products like semiconductors or automobiles, which are quickly making inroads in an important market for U.S. car manufacturers.
new video loaded: What We Learned About Jeffrey Epstein’s Death
By Steve Eder, Christina Shaman, James Surdam, Alex Gallitano and Paul Abowd
June 16, 2026
WASHINGTON (AP) — Republicans on Capitol Hill said Monday they need more information about the agreement between the United States and Iran announced by President Donald Trump, and some are expressing skepticism as they ask the White House for details.
The agreement announced Sunday to end the war in Iran, set for a ceremonial signing Friday in Geneva, is centered around reopening the Strait of Hormuz and lifting the United States’ naval blockade in the region, along with financial incentives for Iran if it meets certain benchmarks. But Senate Republicans and Democrats who returned to Washington on Monday said there were still many unanswered questions about the deal and they need thorough briefings before it is finalized.
“I just don’t know enough about it,” Senate Majority Leader John Thune, R-S.D., told reporters in the Capitol. “Even the people who follow this stuff closely up here don’t know that much about it.”
Congressional leaders and intelligence committees generally receive higher-level intelligence briefings before rank-and-file members, and they are notified of major developments before they are announced. But Thune said he had not been personally briefed on the deal.
“I think that my understanding of what it entails — and, again, not having seen anything — it would require, I think the issues are going to be compliance, and how are you going to enforce that,” Thune said.
Thune’s concerns were echoed by several other GOP senators.
“If it’s a secret deal then how can I take it seriously?” asked Republican Sen. Thom Tillis of North Carolina.
Vice President JD Vance told ABC News on Monday that the White House would release the text this week, “and what everybody will see is that Iran doesn’t get a dime of money unless they perform their obligations.”
Senators have questions about details
Trump has not yet explained how his agreement will address Iran’s nuclear program, including who will be in charge of verifying that Iran is in compliance and who will destroy or remove highly enriched uranium believed to be buried under nuclear sites that were badly damaged by U.S. strikes last summer.
A memorandum of understanding also includes the possibility of releasing Iran’s frozen funds, sanctions relief and a $300 billion fund to help rebuild Iran if Tehran meets certain benchmarks, senior U.S. officials told reporters Monday. But the document has not been released.
Thune said he wants to know more about the conditions on the financial incentives for Iran. He said the deal would be a “good one” if the incentives are conditioned upon Iran winding down its nuclear program and getting rid of the enriched uranium, “preventing them from having a nuclear capability in the future.”
Sen. John Kennedy, R-La., said he is hopeful but “until you see the final document, it’s hard to make an assessment.”
“I go into it very skeptical of the government of Iran,” Kennedy said. “They learn to lie before they learn to talk. So any agreement we make with them has to have guardrails. It has to have a way to judge through independent inspection if they’re doing what they say they’re doing.”
Senate could have a vote
Under the Iran nuclear agreement review act passed by Congress during the Obama era, any deal the U.S. reaches concerning Iran’s nuclear material must be submitted within a certain amount of time to Congress for review. But it is up to Congress whether that happens — it is not required.
President Barack Obama’s 2015 nuclear agreement with Iran, known as the JCPOA, was submitted for what’s called a vote of disapproval in the Senate. The outcome did not roll back the agreement, but put the senators on record with their support or opposition.
Sen. Lindsey Graham, a close ally of Trump and a longtime hawk on Iran, has appeared skeptical over the emerging agreement. He said he is “pulling for a deal” but Congress will need to review and vote on it, and he wants to see the memorandum that the two countries have agreed on.
“The way Iran describes it, it’s awful. The way we describe it, it makes sense to me,” Graham, R-S.C., said. “Let’s look at it and see what it actually is.”
Graham has said he wants Vance, whom he called “the architect of the deal,” to present it to lawmakers.
Vance responded to Graham on Monday, saying in the interview with ABC that he would “caution Lindsey Graham and anybody else not to believe the hard-liner propaganda in Iran, but to believe what’s actually in the agreement.”
Even though Iran’s new supreme leader, Mojtaba Khamenei, is the son of the last supreme leader, and Iran’s paramilitary Revolutionary Guard still has significant authority in Iran, Vance told CNN in a separate interview that “fundamentally, it is a much different group of people.” He insisted that the conflict had unlocked much more direct communication with high-level Iranian officials and that the relationship was “fundamentally transformed.”
Next steps in Congress unclear
Most Senate Republicans said they want to review the deal, but it was still unclear whether they would have a vote, or if Congress could pass it.
Republican Sen. Eric Schmitt of Missouri said he doesn’t think an up-or-down vote is necessary.
“You have the camp that wants us to lose and then you have a camp that wants a forever war,” Schmitt said. “President Trump’s not in either one of those camps, and neither am I.”
Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, said he expects the Senate will get the final say. But he praised Trump for making “the single most consequential decision of his presidency” by attacking Iran.
“I think he made America safer,” Cruz said. “The president as commander in chief acted decisively to stop that ayatollah from getting nuclear weapons.”
Sen. James Lankford, an Oklahoma Republican who serves on the Intelligence Committee, said he expects there are still many more steps to the process before any package would come to Congress for review.
“Seems like early reports are showing that this is kind of the first step,” he said. “Once we have a final agreement, we need to take it up and pass it. … If you want a long-term agreement it’s got to be law.”
Democrats ask what has changed
Democrats questioned how the deal will improve upon the U.S. position before the war — and how it differs from Obama’s 2015 nuclear deal.
“For all his critique of JCPOA, we had international observers, we actually had an alliance there that included the Europeans, and Russia and China were all signatories,” Virginia Sen. Mark Warner, the top Democrat on the Intelligence Committee, told CBS’ “Face the Nation” on Sunday.
Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., said there are more questions than answers, including what happens to the Iranian nuclear program and sanctions on Iranian oil.
Trump has spent “tens of billions of dollars” and service members and Iranians have died, “and he still cannot explain how one family in Massachusetts is better off,” Warren said.
Democratic Sen. Tim Kaine of Virginia said an end to what has been a costly and unpopular war would be a good resolution, but he wants to hear more details.
“An off ramp is good because it was a war that should have never been started,” he said.
___
Associated Press writers Michelle Price in Washington and Bill Barrow in Alpharetta, Georgia, contributed to this report.
From: To:
Subject: RE: Subject possibly flying into Teterboro
Date: Fri, 05 Jul 2019 17:10:55 +0000
Importance: Normal
Attachments: 19 Cr._490_Epstein_Arrest Warrant_(002).pdf
“
Hi all,
We received a hit notification that our sub will be landing at Teterboro at 1720 tomorrow, 7/6/2019. I’ve attached a copy of the arrest warrant. Identifiers are below.
Sub: Jeffrey Epstein
DOB: 1/20/1953
Tail #: N212JE
Thank you for your assistance with this. Please let me know if there is anything else you’d need. We’d like to plan to meet at Teterboro around 3:30pm to be there early in case of an earlier landing.
Thanks again,
SA
FBI New York
VCAC/Human Trafficking
C:
From:
[mailto:
Sent: Monday, July 01, 2019 11:28 AM
To:
Cc:
Subject: RE: Subject possibly flying into Teterboro
Good morning all,
Please let me know as soon as you’re aware of his pending arrival/departure from Teterboro. In dealing with private/charter aircraft notifications, our systems don’t always identify a specific subject correctly.
My pleasure,
From:
Sent: Monday, July 1, 2019 11:18 AM
To:
Cc:
Subject: Re: Subject possibly flying into Teterboro
EFTA00038049
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