World
Mexico Managed to Stave Off Trump’s Tariffs. Now What?
Follow live updates on President Trump’s tariffs and the global fallout.
To broad relief across her country, President Claudia Sheinbaum of Mexico announced on Monday that she had forestalled a plan by the Trump administration to impose 25 percent tariffs on Mexican goods. Initially set to go into effect at the stroke of midnight, the tariffs have been delayed by a month, she said.
“We have this month to work, to convince each other that this is the best way forward,” Ms. Sheinbaum said at her regular morning news conference after speaking to President Trump. Suggesting that she might be able hold off the penalties altogether, she said she had told her American counterpart: “We are going to deliver results. Good results for your people, good results for the Mexican people.”
The announcement was seen as a victory for the Mexican government in dealing with Mr. Trump, who has set a new tone of aggression in the first weeks of his presidency. He has demanded that even some of the United States’ closest allies acquiesce to his demands or face consequences in the form of tariffs or perhaps even military force.
The deal, however, will force Mexico into a critical 30-day test during which it must not only continue its recent progress but also make still more headway on two of the country’s most enduring challenges: drug trafficking and migration.
Under the terms of the agreement, Mexico will post an additional 10,000 Mexican National Guardsmen on the border. In return, Ms. Sheinbaum said, the U.S. government will work to stop the flow of arms into Mexico.
In his own statement, Mr. Trump made no mention of a promise to help curb firearms trafficking, but he celebrated the deployment of Mexican troops.
While Mexico has spent the past year stepping up its immigration enforcement, which has already contributed to a drastic reduction in U.S. border crossings, the issue of drug trafficking is much more complicated. It will require Mexico to have “a very clear, very well-defined plan,” said Ildefonso Guajardo, a former economy minister who negotiated with the first Trump administration.
Mr. Trump and Thomas Homan, the administration’s border czar, have repeatedly laid blame for the fentanyl overdose crisis in the United States on Mexican cartels as well as on migrants they say move the drug across the border. Mr. Homan falsely told Fox News that Mexican cartels had “killed a quarter of a million Americans with fentanyl.”
Since 2019, Mexico has displaced China as the biggest supplier of fentanyl to the United States. Besides being extraordinarily potent, the drug is very easy to make — and even easier to smuggle across the border, hidden under clothes or in glove compartments. According to U.S. prosecutors, the Sinaloa Cartel spends only $800 on chemicals to produce a kilo that can net a profit of up to $640,000 in the United States.
Mexico has been the source of almost all of the fentanyl seized by U.S. law enforcement in recent years, and the amount crossing the border has increased tenfold in the past five years. But federal data shows it is brought in not by migrants but by American citizens recruited by cartel organizations. More than 80 percent of the people who have been sentenced for fentanyl trafficking at the southern border are U.S. citizens.
“All that makes it incredibly harder to go after and control the market,” said Jaime López-Aranda, a security analyst based in Mexico City.
Ms. Sheinbaum’s administration has already stepped up efforts to combat fentanyl since she took office in October, including the largest seizure of the drug — about 20 million doses — ever recorded in Mexico. Security forces regularly report advances on arrests and dismantled drug-production labs.
But experts question how much of a dent these efforts truly represent. “Mexico can keep carrying out symbolic actions like it has been doing lately,” Mr. López-Aranda said, “but there is little more it can do.”
Waging a full war on the cartels would likely backfire and set off more waves of violence across Mexico, analysts say. The country has experienced those consequences before.
Upon taking office in 2006, President Felipe Calderón declared a war on criminal groups. The idea was to eradicate them and loosen their grip on the country. But targeting cartel leaders and engaging in direct confrontations only led to these groups splintering into more violent, brutal cells, leading to one of Mexico’s bloodiest periods.
“What is even going to happen after we destroy all the labs?” said Mr. Guajardo. “These guys are just going to focus more on extortion, theft and killings. Mexico will be left to deal with the problem alone.”
Under the agreement announced on Monday, Mexico will also bolster security forces at the border. Unlike the United States, Mexico does not have a specific security force dedicated to patrolling the border, instead relying on a combination of the military and National Guard.
Experts questioned how effective a deployment of 10,000 additional troops would be at delivering Mexico’s promised results when it came to fentanyl.
“Ten thousand members perhaps sounds like a lot, but it’s all in the details,” said Cecilia Farfán-Méndez, a drug policy researcher at the Institute on Global Conflict and Cooperation at U.C. San Diego. “If you’re only going to have them at the border, that doesn’t address the entire fentanyl production chain.”
Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, a senior fellow at the American Immigration Council, noted that this is the third time in six years that Mexico has committed to sending a large deployment of National Guard to the U.S. border.
While Mexico’s forces will “try to achieve results at all costs,” a more effective strategy would be to have officials from both countries share more intelligence and information to stop the flow of drugs, said Jonathan Maza, a Mexican-based security analyst.
The lack of cooperation was something that American officials complained about during the administration of Ms. Sheinbaum’s predecessor, Andrés Manuel López Obrador.
Given the importance to Mexico of avoiding tariffs, Mr. Maza said the National Guard may achieve results in the short and medium term. But, he warned, criminal groups are likely to adapt.
On curbing migration and illegal crossings at the border, Mexico may have a more straightforward path to success, having adopted several effective measures in the last year.
National Guard troops are deployed to immigration checkpoints from north to south, and migration officials have also instituted a policy of “decompression” in which migrants are bused from concentrated areas in the north farther south to keep pressure off the border. The Mexican authorities have used busing on occasion for years, but its expansion in 2024 highlighted the country’s toughening policies on migration.
Breaking up migrant caravans headed for the United States is another step Mexican officials have taken in recent years. When several emerged in the weeks leading up to Mr. Trump taking office, they were all disbanded.
Mexico’s tougher stance, paired with President Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s executive order last summer to essentially prevent undocumented migrants from receiving asylum at the border, contributed to a dramatic reduction in illegal immigration at the border in 2024. In December, U.S. Border Patrol officials recorded only 47,326 illegal crossings — a sharp drop from the record 249,740 documented a year earlier.
The Mexican authorities have also introduced bureaucratic hurdles for migrants and asylum seekers.
“Mexico’s strategy has exhausted and worn down migrants,” said Mauro Pérez Bravo, the former head of the National Migration Institute’s citizen council, which evaluates the country’s migration policies. “What it did was to emotionally and physically drain people to keep them from getting to the United States.”
In exchange for deploying troops to the border and stemming the flow of fentanyl and migrants into the United States, Ms. Sheinbaum said she secured Mr. Trump’s agreement to do more to prevent American-manufactured firearms from entering Mexico.
“These high-powered weapons that arrive illegally arm the criminal groups and give them firepower,” she said.
This is not the first time that Mexico has made that argument.
In 2021, the country sued several gun makers and one distributor, blaming them for the devastating, decades-long bloodshed from which Mexico has struggled to recover. The U.S. Supreme Court will decide this year whether Mexico may sue gun manufacturers in the United States. A recent analysis showed that nearly 9,000 gun dealers operate across cities in Arizona, California, New Mexico and Texas.
But in his own remarks, Mr. Trump did not make any mention of Ms. Sheinbaum’s request. It is unclear how his administration could actually fulfill such a commitment and what, if anything, Mexico would do should it fail to do so.
James Wagner, Paulina Villegas and Simon Romero contributed reporting.
WASHINGTON (AP) — Mark Schiefelbein has been based in Washington, D.C., with AP for about three years, and before that spent a decade in Beijing at AP’s China bureau.
Here’s what he had to say about this extraordinary photo.
Why this photo?
This was an event that had never happened before in the 250-year history of the United States and may never happen again: a night of mixed martial-arts cage match brawls on the South Lawn of the White House, with bloodied competitors battling it out in front of the president, vice president, and other leaders of the country. AP had other photographers ringside at the event focusing more on the fights themselves. So I felt my role was to capture the context of the evening — the location, the people in attendance, the environment.
How I made this photo
A small group of other photographers and I, the White House press pool, had been allowed to photograph part of the evening from a position in the stands directly opposite the White House. I was carrying four cameras with a variety of lenses from 12 mm to 300 mm. This let me capture everything from ultra-wide views of the “claw” structure built for the fights, to close-ups of leaders and celebrities in attendance. I had been following Diego Lopes with my longest lens as he moved around the ring celebrating his win over Steve Garcia. When I saw him start to climb onto the cage, I immediately realized there might be a possibility of a picture like this and zoomed out to capture more of the scene.
An octagon on the White House lawn for Trump’s 80th birthday and the nation’s 250th, in photos
Why this photo works
The White House is surely one of the most recognizable buildings in the world. The columns of the South Portico, the fighter standing with arms and legs spread wide in celebration, and the octagon padding of the UFC ring tell an entire story as your eyes move from top to bottom of the frame. With Lopes standing with his back to the camera, facing the White House, it becomes less a photo of him and more about the evening, the event, and the spectacle. It was fortunate that it was after nightfall, so things that might have been distracting, like the Marine Band and spectators seated behind the ring, are mostly in the dark. Only the key elements – the White House, Lopes, and the ring are lit up.
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For more extraordinary AP photography, click here.
World
British Prime Minister Keir Starmer faces potential leadership challenge from newly-elected Andy Burnham
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Andy Burnham has officially won his special election and regained a seat in Parliament, setting him up to challenge the deeply unpopular Keir Starmer as the leader of the Labour party and as prime minister.
Burnham, currently the mayor of Greater Manchester in northwest England, won a seat in Makerfield and came away with 55% of the vote in a field of more than a dozen candidates, according to The Associated Press. The runner-up was Rob Kenyon of Reform UK, a right-wing populist party, who received more than 9,000 fewer votes than Burnham.
Burnham last served as a member of Parliament in 2017 but strongly implied in his victory speech that he is returning with the intention to lead the United Kingdom.
“Everyone knows that politics isn’t working. Everyone can feel that the country isn’t where it should be. Tonight could, just could, be the turning point,” he said, according to the AP. “This result will bring about a country that works fairly for everywhere and for everybody.”
TRUMP ALLY NIGEL FARAGE DEALS MAJOR BLOW TO STARMER IN LOCAL UK ELECTIONS AS RESIGNATION CALLS MOUNT
Britain’s Labour party candidate Andy Burnham speaks to supporters after the Makerfield by-election in Ashton in Makerfield, England, on Friday, June 19, 2026. (Jon Super/AP)
This special election, called by-elections in Britain, was unusually significant because the area’s Labour MP, Josh Simons, intentionally resigned to allow Burnham to win the seat and pursue leadership.
The potentially outsized impact of this election was juxtaposed with the strange scene that unfolded when all the candidates gathered on Friday morning to hear the results. Burnham stood in between an independent candidate dressed in a fox costume and another candidate known as “Count Binface”.
As his name suggests, “Count Binface,” whose real name is Jonathan David Harvey, was wearing a trash can on his head and regularly runs in U.K. elections to advocate for increased voter turnout.
Starmer congratulated Burnham in a social media post on X, saying voters “chose Labour’s campaign of hope and optimism over division and hate.”
When asked about Burnham’s intentions to oust him as leader, Starmer said he will fight to remain prime minister, a position he has held for nearly two years.
“I’ve said repeatedly I’m not going to walk away from that,” Starmer told reporters.
Labour party candidate Andy Burnham, center, stands with other candidates on the podium at the Edge Wigan, awaiting the Makerfield by-election result announcement in Wigan, England, on Friday, June 19, 2026. (Jon Super/AP)
AS EPSTEIN-LINKED APPOINTMENT SPARKS BACKLASH, UK PM STARMER FACES PARTY REVOLT AMID RESIGNATION CALLS
Starmer led the Labour party to a landslide victory in July 2024 and ever since, his popularity has been eroding thanks to a persistently high cost of living, an anemic economy and a scandal over his willingness to accept gifts from wealthy donors.
Last September, Starmer was slammed for appointing Peter Mandelson as the British ambassador to the United States, when it was known as early as 2019 that Mandelson had a friendship with convicted child sex offender Jeffrey Epstein. Following an enormous public backlash, Mandelson was quickly dismissed from his post.
With Starmer as leader, Labour is increasingly losing liberal-minded voters to the Green Party, while also facing stronger challenges by Reform UK, a Nigel Farage-led party that advocates against mass migration and in favor of tighter border controls. Farage, an ally of U.S. President Donald Trump, said he was disappointed by Burnham’s victory.
Burnham is expected to head to London to be sworn in as soon as Monday. Under the British parliamentary system, the governing party can hold leadership elections in the middle of the term. The winner of such a contest can become prime minister without there having to be a national election.
British Prime Minister Keir Starmer awaits Switzerland’s Federal President Guy Parmelin on the sidelines of the G7 summit, in Evian-les-Bains, France, on Tuesday, June 16, 2026 (Isabel Infantes/Pool Reuters via AP)
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Under Labour rules, a lawmaker can challenge the leader if they win the backing of a fifth of their party’s members in the House of Commons. Burnham has enough lawmakers on board to trigger a leadership contest, according to a report from The New Statesman.
According to the AP, Culture Secretary Lisa Nandy said Burnham and Starmer will “have a conversation about what comes next” in the next few days.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
French President Emmanuel Macron and Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez have issued a blistering rebuke against deportation camps outside the European Union, setting their countries on a collision course with a growing political majority.
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During a summit on Friday, 19 leaders across the bloc signed a joint declaration calling to make “full use” of a new European law that enables the construction of so-called return hubs to host migrants whose asylum applications have been denied.
The coalition, led by Denmark and Italy, two fierce advocates of outsourcing, wants to “move forward with solutions based in third countries as soon as possible”.
But for Macron and Sánchez, this path runs counter to European values and risks squandering financial resources and undercutting relations with neighbouring Africa.
“I am not sure that this is our Europe. I don’t know if these are the fundamental principles on which our Europe was built,” Macron said at the end of the summit on Friday.
“And I don’t think it’s effective, either. The proof is that I have not seen anyone make it work so far,” he went on, underscoring his strong dissatisfaction. (Italy has set up migration centres on Albanian soil but has fallen short of expected targets.)
“I have a lot of respect for anyone who wants to do it. I disagree, both pragmatically and in principle. I think it has nothing to do with European politics.”
Macron said his country was in favour of tougher laws to curb irregular arrivals but drew a red line on the physical transfer of migrants to faraway countries where they have never set foot. That possibility, long considered taboo, is allowed under a revamped Return Regulation described as the “strictest-ever” migration law.
“There is a question, in fact, around these famous return hubs in third countries. France does not support this policy. We are in favour of a more effective return policy. But first of all, I have never seen a return hub in a third country operate,” Macron went on.
“I invite you to consider what it is (in practice): this means that people who do not want to return to their country of origin or who cannot get back to their country of origin will be pushed into a third country, which will accept them in return for money.”
Macron mocked the jargonistic term “innovative solutions” that proponents of migration offshoring often use in their public communication and challenged the notion that host countries would respect human rights in exchange for financial incentives.
“I am a big supporter of innovation in my country,” he said, saying he would later attend the Vivatech festival in Paris. “But I am always very careful when talking about innovation in values and human rights. Allow me to have that reservation.”
Meanwhile, Sánchez, a vocal critic of the measures, said the deportation camps would be an “absolutely inefficient” and “worthless” response to irregular migration.
“It’s a mirage, if you will, that it will simply waste economic resources, and Europe doesn’t have many,” the Spaniard said after the summit in Brussels.
“Secondly, it sends a wrong message to those countries of origin and transit with which we should be collaborating, cooperating and showing empathy towards.”
Macron echoed Sánchez’s reputational concerns and insisted he would not allow EU funds to be used in any capacity to build the deportation camps, which are “neither effective nor do they correspond with our principles”.
“Sometimes, we hear one or the other (country) advocate policies with the African continent, so good luck defending our credibility on these continents by explaining that we will use the money for investments to build return hubs on their continents,” he said.
“What world do we live in?”
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