Former President Donald Trump said Monday that he’d slap new tariffs on goods from Mexico in retaliation for illegal border crossings if he returns to office.
Speaking at a campaign event in Raleigh, North Carolina, Trump said one of the first things he’d do if he wins the White House would be to call Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum and threaten her over his fearmongering characterization of arriving immigrants.
“I am going to inform her on day one or sooner that if they do not stop this onslaught of criminals and drugs coming into our country, I am going to immediately impose a 25% tariff on everything they send into the United States of America,” Trump said.
“If that does not work, I will make it 50,” he continued. “If that does not work, I will make it 75. I will make it 100.”
Trump has made illegal immigration a central focus of his presidential campaign for the past year amid a surge of crossings along the U.S. border with Mexico. But there have been far fewer border encounters in recent months, according to federal data, likely as a result of changes President Joe Biden enacted earlier this year to stifle asylum claims and speed deportations.
Biden announced the changes in June after Trump urged Republicans to abandon a bipartisan border security bill in Congress.
Border encounters during the most recent three months were lower than the average number of encounters per month in 2019, while Trump was president, before they dropped sharply due to the coronavirus pandemic.
Trump has also made tariffs a centerpiece of his policy agenda for a second term and has already proposed a 20% tariff on all imported goods, claiming foreign countries would bear the cost.
In fact, economists widely agree that tariffs would sock U.S. consumers as companies raise their prices to offset the cost of the tariffs.
Trump’s actual tariff plans have been something of a moving target, however. His original 10% across-the-board tariff idea later became tariffs of 10% to 20% on imported goods. He’s also suggested a higher 60% tariff on Chinese goods.
In recent weeks, Trump has proposed 200% tariffs on cars imported from Mexico and a week later said it could be much higher.
“All I’m doing is saying, ‘I’ll put 200 or 500, I don’t care.’ I’ll put a number where they can’t sell one car,” he said on Fox News.
In between those comments, Trump went even higher.
“I will impose whatever tariffs are required — 100%, 200%, 1000%,” Trump said in an appearance at the Detroit Economic Club.
It’s not clear if Trump’s proposed 25% tariff on Mexican goods would be in addition to the other tariffs he’s envisioning.
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Trump’s claim that foreign nationals would bear the cost of higher tariffs is reminiscent of his repeated and false claims in 2016 that Mexico would pay for his proposed border wall. When Trump was in the White House, Enrique Peña Nieto, Mexico’s president at the time, simply refused to go along with the wall funding demands.
During his rally on Monday, Trump recalled how he wound up raiding military funds in order to pay for wall construction after Congress also balked at his demands for funding. He did not remind voters of his failed promise to make Mexico pay.
“Because we had a Congress that was not behaving, I said, ‘I don’t care. This is an invasion of our country. I am taking it out of the military,’” Trump said. “I took it out of the military.”
