Mexico warns US it will refuse non-Mexican deportees
Mexico will not accept deportees from the United States unless they are Mexican nationals, Interior Secretary Miguel Angel Osorio Chong declared on Friday, a day after meetings with top US officials.
"As for other migrants, we cannot accept them," Osorio Chong said in an interview on Mexican radio station Radio Formula.
"We were very clear about this: We are not going to accept them. They (the US) cannot leave them here on our territory because we will reject them," the Mexican official said.
"There is no possibility that they'll be received by Mexico."
On Thursday, Osorio Chong and Foreign Minister Luis Videgaray met with US Homeland Security Secretary John Kelly and Secretary of State Rex Tillerson in Mexico City as the American officials sought to mend frayed ties.
The meeting came amid heightened tension over US President Donald Trump's plans to impose stricter immigration laws, including deportations of undocumented residents.
An estimated 11 million illegal immigrants live in the United States, many of them from Mexico.
As part of an immigration crackdown, Trump, who took office on January 20, ordered a wall built along the US southern border to stop undocumented migrants from entering the United States, a plan that outraged its neighbor.
On Tuesday, the US Department of Homeland Security issued new orders to step up the arrest and deportation of illegal immigrants. The government warned it could apply sanctions to a country if it refuses to cooperate.
In Thursday's meeting in the Mexican capital, Kelly and Tillerson sought to calm tensions, pledging there would be no mass deportations or use of military force to expel illegal immigrants.
But Osorio Chong appears not to have been persuaded.
"We cannot be a waiting room for those wanting to reach the United States," he insisted.
An estimated 200,000 undocumented migrants, most from Central America, try to cross from Mexico into the US each year.
The migrants often suffer abuse and violence, including death, from people smugglers and corrupt officials.
Trump has vowed to crack down on "bad dudes" illegally residing in the United States, and branded those from Mexico as rapists and criminals during his presidential campaign.