Mulvaney: Mexico tariffs a response to ‘extraordinary circumstances’ at the border
by Zachary Halaschak
WashingtonExaminer.com
June 02, 2019
Acting White House chief of staff Mick Mulvaney said that the president’s move to impose tariffs on Mexico stemmed from “extraordinary circumstances” at the border, where Central Americans who have traversed Mexico are flooding into the United States.
Speaking Sunday on NBC’s “Meet the Press,” Mulvaney said that the U.S. is facing a crisis of proportions never before seen, and so Trump imposed a 5% tariff on goods from Mexico.
“A couple days ago, a thousand people crossed in one group,” Mulvaney said, citing recent news that the Border Patrol had detained the largest single group of migrants ever.
“Let’s let that sink in for a second. It wasn’t 40 people crossing in 25 different places,” he said. “A group of 1,000 people stormed the border outside of Tijuana, Mexico, I believe, into El Paso, Texas. That’s never happened before.”
“The reason that we’re doing things that people don’t expect is that we’re facing things on the border that we’ve never experienced before,” Mulvaney said. “So yes, we’re using extraordinary tools because there is extraordinary circumstances that dictate those.”
Mulvaney said that Mexico can do more to stymie the flow of unauthorized migrants by better securing its own southern border with Central American countries. He said that most of the migrants coming into the U.S. aren’t Mexican and that Mexico should get to the genesis of the problem by preventing them from traversing its borders.
“That border along southern Mexico needs to be secured,” Mulvaney said. “It is much easier to secure that border than it is our border because it is so much shorter. It is a quarter of the length. They could do that.”
