Trump’s real immigration plan, outsourced to Mexico
by digby
I’m pretty sure this makes Trump happy. Although he’d much prefer that Americans could take such “tough” action, he no doubt realizes that he can get just as much credit as the yuge-handed man who strongarmed Mexico into doing his dirty work for him:
Mexican authorities are investigating reports that police opened fire on a group of migrants from El Salvador last week, killing a 19-year-old woman and wounding two men.
The confrontation in the Gulf Coast state of Veracruz on Friday comes as Mexico expands immigration enforcement at the behest of the United States, creating new checkpoints and deploying thousands of national guardsmen across the country. Human rights advocates have expressed concern that those actions could lead to violence against migrants.
Reports of the shooting have circulated in local media for days. On Tuesday, the attorney general of Veracruz held a news conference to relate the accounts of the survivors.
Attorney General Jorge Winckler Ortiz said 17 migrants bound for the United States were traveling in a white truck near a checkpoint in the town of Agua Dulce when they heard sirens.
The driver of the truck, who officials said was likely a smuggler, sped up. A police patrol car gave chase and eventually reached the truck, according to the account shared by Winckler Ortiz.
Then people wearing police uniforms “opened fire,” he said.
[Trump vows mass immigration arrests, removals of ‘millions of illegal aliens’ starting next week]
On Wednesday, Mexico’s secretary of public security said his ministry’s own investigation indicated that the migrants sped through a checkpoint and shot at Mexican officials.
“In this case, the first information indicates that not only did they not stop, but they fired and there were attacks against the personnel of the checkpoint,” Secretary Alfonso Durazo told reporters at a news conference.
He said the investigation is ongoing, but “we would not be surprised if we ended up identifying elements of organized crime or those participating in human trafficking.”
The accounts provided by Durazo and Winckler Ortiz were at odds. Durazo didn’t explain why police who fired in self-defense would have fled the scene after killing the migrant. And it would be unusual in Mexico for a truck full of migrants to attack security officials while passing a checkpoint.
Winckler Ortiz referred to people “wearing police uniforms” and driving “a patrol car.” He did not say they were necessarily police, but other officials in Veracruz said there was no reason to doubt that they were.
A municipal police unit arrived at the scene and found the 19-year-old dead in the passenger seat. Salvadoran authorities said the woman’s father and other close relatives were living in the United States.
This is what Trump has really wanted from Mexico. And if he has his druthers, he’d have the Central American countries manning their own borders and shooting anyone who tried to escape.
But this is a good first step. He is convinced that the United States has a right to control all the economic power in the world and must achieve that by bullying allies and threatening adversaries with massive military might. He’s willing to coddle psychopathic dictators if they flatter him because he thinks he can cajole them into “making deals” that favor the US. (He thinks he’s much smarter than they are.)
All across the globe we are starting to see the fruits of this “doctrine.” They are rotten to the core.
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