“I will close the border if Mexico doesn’t get with it,” Trump said to reporters who had gathered at Mar-a-Lago, his winter retreat in Florida. “If Mexico doesn’t stop it.”
Trump has threatened to close off the border several times before and has not followed through. But his comments Friday signaled a new escalation as his administration confirmed that it would review ways to reshuffle Border Patrol agents, shut down traffic lanes and close ports of entry at the southwest border. He began the day with a morning tweet saying that he would close the border “next week,” and then told reporters that he was prepared to close off trade and commercial ports of entry.
A full or partial sealing of the border would effectively close off the United States from one of its largest trading partners, but it could leave American citizens who cross back and forth with a sluggish or potentially nonexistent system of returning to the United States.
“If they don’t stop it, we will keep the border closed,” Trump said. “I’m not playing games.”
The president has been emboldened since the release of a report by the special counsel, Robert Mueller, found that his campaign had not cooperated with the Russian government. And a partisan upholding of his national emergency declaration over a wall along the southwestern border has prompted Trump to ratchet up harsh words against immigration as he seeks to galvanize supporters ahead of the 2020 presidential election.
As he engaged in multiple photo opportunities throughout the day, Trump’s actions and comments indicated that his mind was not on the scenes at hand but on immigration.
“How are we doing at the border?” he asked a military official on a tour of Lake Okeechobee, the site of a restoration project in the central part of the state. During a meeting at Mar-a-Lago to announce that Linda McMahon, who has led the Small Business Administration, had resigned, he again turned to immigration.
“We have the most laughed-at immigration laws of anywhere in the world,” Trump said to reporters as he and McMahon sat in the ornate front room of the club. “They’re the Democrats’ laws, and I got stuck with them.”
Trump told reporters that he would consider shutting down ports along the border, a decision that could imperil the transit of goods between the United States and Mexico. According to government figures, Mexico is the United States’ third-largest trading partner, with $557.6 billion worth of products flowing across the border in both directions.
A move by Trump to shut down or dramatically curb trade with Mexico would pose significant risks to the U.S. economy. It would also represent a stunning reversal in trade relations between the two countries, which last August put their differences aside to renegotiate their portion of the North American Free Trade Agreement. The new deal, known as the United States-Mexico-Canada-Agreement, still needs to be approved by Congress.
The president lamented Mexico making a “fortune” off the United States, and said Mexico’s immigration laws were the “strongest immigration laws of anywhere in the world.” (Mexico is much weaker than the United States at enforcing its border laws.) Trump also again invoked migrant caravans — including one containing hundreds of people heading to the United States — as a reason Mexico needed to act.
“Mexico is tough,” Trump said. “If they don’t stop them, we’re closing the border.”
Americans would feel the effects in other ways. Border control agencies are already reviewing ways to slow down immigration processing at the border. A senior Homeland Security official confirmed Friday that shutting down ports of entry along the southwest border is “on the table” to handle the surge in migrants seeking asylum.
Kirstjen Nielsen, the homeland security secretary, said in a statement that she had asked volunteers to add more support at the border, and suggested that American citizens may encounter difficulty getting through as a result.
“Make no mistake: Americans may feel effects from this emergency,” Nielsen said. “As personnel are reallocated to join the crisis-response effort, there may be commercial delays, higher vehicle wait times at the border and longer pedestrian lines.”
She added that “despite these impacts, we cannot shirk our responsibility to the American people to do everything possible to secure our country while also upholding our humanitarian values.”
Stephen H. Legomsky, a law professor at Washington University in St. Louis, said there were a few options available to Trump if he wanted to move to stop the flow of people at the border, including slowing down processing at ports of entry. The administration has already limited the number of migrants who can apply for asylum each day.
“He could pretend that this was necessary in the interest of national security,” Legomsky said, “and it could be that the courts would be hesitant to second guess a national security claim by a president.”
Legomsky said putting up trade roadblocks and slowing down the processing of people would have harmful effects, both on American citizens who could find themselves “marooned” in Mexico, and on families, including groups of women and children, who are fleeing violence and poverty.
“There’s a huge humanitarian concern,” Legomsky said. “So many of the people are these Central American mothers and children fleeing from high levels of violence. They would be effectively stuck in the border areas which are also extremely dangerous.”
On Thursday, the president said that he did not share concern over the plight of people in danger. In front of supporters at a rally in Grand Rapids, Michigan, he used harsh language to describe the thousands of people who have tried to flee violence and poverty, calling the problem an “invasion” and referring to asylum-seekers as a “big fat con job.”
In a news conference in El Paso, Texas, on Wednesday, Kevin McAleenan, the commissioner of the Customs and Border Protection, said that an influx of migrants had reached a “breaking point.”
In February, there were 76,000 crossings at the border, which marked an 11-year high and signaled that the Trump administration’s harsher policies have not stopped the flow of people trying to enter the country.
The threat to close the border is one that Trump has made previously but not carried out. He suggested doing so during the government shutdown this past winter, and repeated it earlier this week in accusing Central American governments of squandering American aid.
But he has not yet attached a deadline by which he would take such a drastic measure, and did not respond to reporters who asked Friday whether he would set one.
The Homeland Security official said the Trump administration has not yet decided to shut down a major port, but that the department has been forced to divert agents from ports of entries and interior checkpoints to handle large groups of migrants trying to illegally come into the United States, including families.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.