Trump's top deputies hope to shore up ties with a suspicious Mexico

Tillerson and Kelly will sit down with Pena Nieto on Thursday as well as with Mexico's ministers of foreign affairs, interior, finance, national defense and navy. In addition to the wall, they are expected to discuss trade, counterterrorism, immigration and other key bilateral concerns.

The talks take place under a fresh cloud, however, since the Trump administration this week released aggressive new guidelines on immigration enforcement, signed by Kelly, that could lead to deportation of millions of undocumented Mexicans from the United States.

The administration policy calls for using local and state authorities to enforce federal immigration laws, deporting people who committed only minor crimes, jailing more people while they await deportation hearings, and trying to send illegal border crossers back to Mexico even if they aren't Mexican.

Credit: Good

Credit: Good

The meetings are the first since Mexican Foreign Minister Luis Videgaray came to Washington in late January and met in private with Jared Kushner, Trump's son-in-law and a key adviser to the president on foreign affairs.

Videgaray later said the U.S.-Mexico relationship is at a crossroads.

"This is a moment of definition: The decisions we make in the coming months will determine how Mexico and the United States coexist for the next decades," Videgaray said last week at the margins of the G-20 economic summit in Bonn, Germany.

The overnight trip to Mexico City marks the third fence-mending foray this month by Trump's top deputies as they seek to shore up relations with longtime allies alarmed by Trump's often confusing signals on foreign policy and by tumult in the White House.

Last week, Vice President Mike Pence, Secretary of Defense James Mattis, as well as Tillerson and Kelly, fanned out in Europe to reassure allies that the administration remains committed to the NATO military alliance and to maintaining sanctions on a resurgent Russia, issues where Trump had raised doubts.

Mattis previously had visited Japan and South Korea to reassure them that the White House does not plan to pull back from its security commitments in northeast Asia, as candidate Trump had suggested.

U.S. ties with Mexico normally are little noticed far from the border, but Trump's harsh anti-Mexico rhetoric and policies have changed all that.

During the campaign last year, he blamed Mexico for sending rapists and criminals across the border, and excoriated Mexico for what he said were unfair trade practices.

One of his first actions at the White House was to order construction of the border wall and insist that Mexico will pay the bill despite the country's angry refusals. Trump has cited a $12 billion price tag while a Homeland Security estimate pegged the total at $21 billion.

Trump has threatened to slap a punitive tax on imports, including cars, that are made in Mexico and sold in the U.S. He also has vowed to scrap or renegotiate the North American Free Trade Agreement, a 1994 deal that eliminated almost all tariffs among the U.S., Mexico and Canada.

NAFTA is credited with vastly expanding trade _ about $1.4 billion in goods now cross the U.S.-Mexico border every day _ but at the cost of some U.S. jobs because the agreement made it easier for U.S. companies to move factories to Mexico.

In response, some Mexicans have called for national boycotts of U.S. brands and goods, using hashtags including #AdiosStarbucks, #AdiosWalmart, #AdiosCocacola and #AdiosProductosGringos, while lawmakers introduced a bill to stop buying American corn. Protesters formed human chains last weekend along parts of the border where Trump has vowed to build a wall.

Some Mexican officials also have countered with threats to end cooperation on joint efforts that target drug trafficking, illegal immigration and organized crime.

In recent years, Mexico has prevented thousands of Central Americans from flooding U.S. border crossings and has allowed extradition of drug lords, including Joaquin "El Chapo" Guzman, to the United States.

Mexico also is pouring an estimated $50 million into its 50 diplomatic consulates in the United States to support its citizens who are under threat of deportation. Delaying removals could wind up clogging U.S. immigration courts and jails.

There seems to be little space for common ground.

Even if Tillerson and Kelly are able to calm Mexican tempers, Trump seems unlikely to back down from his demands for Mexico to pay for a border wall, a cornerstone of his campaign.

For Pena Nieto, there is little political capital to work with the White House given widespread umbrage in Mexico at the new American president.

"We know that damage has been done to the bilateral relationship in the last few months," Sen. Benjamin L. Cardin of Maryland, the ranking Democrat on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, said after an official trip to Mexico City last weekend.

But Cardin voiced optimism for the future of U.S.-Mexico relations while taking a swipe at Trump's tweets.

"I'm confident the strength of our partnership and friendship with Mexico is dynamic enough to withstand 140-character broadsides or unrealistic demands," he said.

Trump's handling of relations with Mexico so far has largely relied on his inner circle, including Kushner, and not on the Latin America veterans at the State Department and National Security Council.

Craig Deare, who had been named National Security Council director for Western Hemisphere affairs and was one of the most senior Trump appointees to occupy a post involving Mexico and Latin America, was fired late last week after he criticized how the administration was handling foreign policy.

Deare had complained to scholars during a private session at the Wilson Center think tank in Washington that foreign policy was too tightly controlled by Kushner and Trump's chief strategist, Stephen K. Bannon, according to one of the people who attended the meeting and spoke on condition of anonymity because the discussion was private.

Deare said the president's top aides fostered dysfunction in the White House and blocked access to Trump to the detriment of actual policy making, the person said.

There are far-reaching consequences of ruining the U.S. relationship with Mexico.

In addition to suspending or scaling back bilateral cooperation, Mexico and the rest of Latin America could turn away from an unfriendly Washington toward an eager-to-please China. That could cost the United States economically and in terms of strategic power, after decades in which Washington diligently sought to rebuild ties with the region.

In Mexico, Trump's antagonism, along with discontent with the ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party, is fanning flames of renewed nationalism and stoking the prospects of leftist candidate Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador in the next presidential election.

"We are now deeply concerned to see this (U.S.-Mexico) foundation shaken," six former U.S. ambassadors to Mexico, under both Republican and Democratic administrations, wrote in a letter published this month on the Wilson Center website.

"Public attitudes in both countries are being soured by exaggerated public accusations," they wrote. "Mexicans believe that their national 'dignity' has been insulted. Champions of closer cooperation with the United States are on the defensive. Nationalist voices are gaining traction. This is not in the United States' long-term interest."