White House officials are warning that US President Donald Trump is serious about closing the border with Mexico to tackle the “crisis” there.
“It certainly isn’t a bluff. You can take the president seriously," White House counselor Kellyanne Conway told Fox News on Sunday.
She further defended the decision to cut aid to the three Central American countries of El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras over the US immigration problem, asserting that "We need to send a message."
The White House counselor added that Congress "can fix this," referring the influx of immigrants and refugee seekers through the southern border.
"Congress can fix the problem of immigration that they’ve failed to fix. This president is looking at the metrics," Conway said, adding that the country has "never seen a surge" in immigration "like this."
Acting White House chief of staff Mick Mulvaney also appeared on ABC to defend the “crisis” narrative.
“When [Obama-era DHS chief] Jeh Johnson said it’s a crisis, I hope people now believe us. A lot of folks in the media… Democrats didn’t believe us a month ago, two months ago, when we said what was happening at the border was a crisis: a humanitarian crisis, a security crisis,” Mulvaney said.
The US president warned multiple times last week that he would close the border with the country’s southern neighbor.
“Mexico is going to have to do something, otherwise I’m closing the border. I’ll just close the border. And with a deficit like we have with Mexico and have had for many years, closing the border would be a profit-making operation. When you close the border also you will stop a lot of the drugs from coming in,” Trump told reporters in Florida on Friday.
Trump has previously been warned about trying to build a wall on the border.
During a visit to Morocco Sunday, Pope Francis noted that those who close borders “will become prisoners of the walls that they build.”
“That’s a universal law in the social order and in the personal one. If you raise a wall between people, you end up a prisoner of that wall that you raised.”