Mexico president joins political foes to blast Trump border plan

Mexican President Enrique Pena Nieto on Thursday sharply rebuked Donald Trump over his plan to send National Guard troops to the border, joining with opponents to tell the US leader not to vent his domestic political "frustration" on Mexico.

Trump has been unable to get the US Congress or Mexico to fully fund his planned border wall, and Trump said Thursday he will probably keep National Guard troops along the Mexican border until it is built.

In an unusually combative address, a stern-looking Pena Nieto urged Trump to stop sowing discord between the two nations and demanded a more respectful tone in bilateral relations.

"If your recent declarations are due to frustration over issues to do with internal policy, your laws, or your Congress, direct yourself to them, not to Mexicans," Pena Nieto said.

For months Mexico has been locked in tortuous negotiations with the United States and Canada to rework the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), but hopes have risen recently that some kind of preliminary deal could be within reach.

"President Trump: if you want to reach agreements with Mexico, we stand ready," Pena Nieto said, before adding: "We will not allow negative rhetoric to define our actions."

Pena Nieto and Trump have had a strained relationship ever since the New Yorker launched his campaign in 2015 with the claim that some Mexican migrants are criminals and rapists.

The White House says mobilizing the National Guard was part of Trump's strategy to stop illegal immigrants from entering the country, whom he blames for serious crime.

Pena Nieto has faced criticism for failing to take a tough line against Trump in the past. Trump's comments have thrust the countries' relationship into the centre of Mexico's presidential campaign, where Pena Nieto's party is trailing.

All the country's presidential candidates on Thursday criticised Trump's plan to militarize the border.

The front-runner in the race, Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, said Trump's scheme was political "propaganda" based on misinformation that aimed to stir up "xenophobia" and "racism."

"This great threat on the southern border of the United States that he says is there, does not exist," said the leftist Lopez Obrador, who has a double-digit lead in most polls.

"This anti-Mexican policy has worked politically because unfortunately there are conservative sectors in the United States with little information and he knows how to awaken an anti-Mexican sentiment," he added during a campaign event in the northern border city of Nuevo Laredo.

Ricardo Anaya, the second-place contender who heads a right-left coalition, echoed a Senate motion on Wednesday calling on the government to end cooperation with the United States on migration and security if Trump did not back down.

"You cannot negotiate or cooperate with threats," he said.

Jose Antonio Meade, candidate of Pena Nieto's Institutional Revolutionary Party, also attacked the border plan, and independent Margarita Zavala called it a "historic error" and a "hostile act" in a letter addressed to Trump.

Barring Meade, all of the candidates are trenchant critics of the president, but Pena Nieto namechecked all four of them and the Senate motion in his scolding of Trump.

"As president of all Mexicans, I agree with (their) remarks," he said. "No one stands above the dignity of Mexico." 

Trump's wall 

Trump said on Thursday he would probably station a few thousand National Guard troops at the 3,200-kilometre (2,000-mile) long Mexican border until the wall he wants to build there to keep out illegal immigrants is done.

No funding for the entirety of Trump's proposed wall is currently in place. Both the Mexican government and the U.S. Congress so far have refused to fully pay for it. Trump vowed as a candidate that he would get Mexico to pay for his wall.

Hounded by headlines about alleged affairs with various women and a continuing probe of possible collusion between his presidential campaign and Russia, Trump has recently escalated the anti-immigrant rhetoric that helped him get elected.

In a storm of Tweets this week, he has warned that illegal immigrants are threatening US security and jobs, a theme that has resonated in the past with conservative Republican voters.

Trump last month signed a federal spending bill from Congress that contained $1.6 billion to pay for six months of work on his wall. He had asked for $25 billion for it.

En route back to Washington from an event in West Virginia where he talked about the 2017 Republican tax overhaul, Trump was asked by reporters on AirForce One how many National Guard troops he wanted at the border. He said: "Anywhere from 2,000 to 4,000."

He said the administration was looking at the costs. "It depends on what we do," he said. "We’re looking from 2,000 to 4,000 and probably keep them, or ... a large portion of them, until such time as we get the wall."

The deployment was likely to aggravate tensions with Mexico, a key U.S. ally that has already expressed concern.

On Wednesday, the administration said it was coordinating with the governors of the four US states that border on Mexico on deploying the Guard, a reserve wing of the US armed forces that is partly under the supervision of state governors.