Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump has confirmed that he
will travel to Mexico on Wednesday to meet with President Enrique Peña
Nieto in Mexico City.
Moments before taking the stage for a rally in Everett, Washington, just
north of Seattle, Trump tweeted that he had "accepted the invitation of
President Enrique Peña Nieto, of Mexico, and look very much forward to
meeting him tomorrow".
The meeting will happen hours before Trump is scheduled to deliver a
major address on immigration in Phoenix, Arizona, in which he will aim
to clarify his increasingly murky stance on the issue.
It was confirmed by the official Twitter account for the Mexican
presidency, which tweeted:
Translated, the tweet says that Trump "has accepted the invitation and
will meet privately tomorrow with the president".
Peña Nieto – who has previously compared Trump to Hitler and
Mussolini – said via Twitter that he had invited both presidential
candidates to Mexico "to discuss bilateral relations", adding: "I believe
in dialogue to promote the interests of Mexico in the world and to protect
Mexicans wherever they are."
The Trump campaign did not respond to repeated requests for comment.
However, Josh Green, a reporter for Bloomberg News, said Trump would
be accompanied on the trip by former New York mayor Rudy Giuliani
and Alabama senator Jeff Sessions.
Trump, who launched his campaign in 2015
with the announcement that immigrants
from Mexico were "bringing rapists" , had
been scheduled to appear at fundraisers in
California on Wednesday morning, before
delivering his immigration address in
Phoenix at 6pm local time (9pm ET).
The trip to Mexico City to meet with Peña Nieto – who has previously
invited Trump to debate him in Mexico – will likely occur somewhere in
the middle of the day.
The proposal was first broached with the US embassy in Mexico City
earlier this week, a fast-tracking of an international visit by an American
presidential candidate that is typically planned over the course of weeks.
In recent days, Trump has been increasingly vague on his position about
the legal status of the 11 million illegal immigrants currently in the US.
During the Republican primary, Trump appealed to the conservative base
by calling for a "deportation force" to remove all undocumented aliens
from the country.
However, on a recent trip to Iowa, Trump said the policy issue was driven
by the media. "In recent days, the media – as it usually does – has missed
the whole point on immigration. All the media wants to talk about is the
11 million or more people here illegally," he said at a fundraiser for
Republican senator Joni Ernst.
In front of a crowd in Everett on Tuesday evening, Trump made no
mention of his upcoming diplomatic mission, focusing instead on
campaign favorites, including a rambling story in rhyming couplets about
an ungrateful and poisonous snake, intended as an allegory about Muslim
refugees to the US.
Also notably absent from the speech was perhaps Trump's most essential
motif: the wall he proposes to build along the US-Mexico border.
Trump's approval ratings among Latino voters are historically bad, and
his relationship with Peña Nieto's government is even worse. Trump has
long pledged to force Mexico to pay for the 2,000-mile (3,220km) border
wall, a suggestion the Mexican president responded to coldly.
"No way," Peña Nieto told CNN earlier this year.
Peña Nieto has fallen on hard political times in recent months. The latest
polls put his approval rating at just 23%, according to Mexico News
Daily, as the president has been hit by personal scandals, as well as
allegations of human rights abuses by police officers. Protests by
teachers opposed to his educational reforms have led to widespread
unrest and several deaths.
It is hard to see how inviting Trump to meet him would help Peña Nieto
domestically, as Trump is, unsurprisingly, considerably less popular in
Mexico than the president. In March, city legislators passed a non-legally
binding bill to ban Trump from Mexico's capital.
Peña Nieto's predecessor, former president Vincente Fox, has been
considerably more vocal in speaking out against the Republican nominee,
calling Trump's ideas "racist" and saying "I declare: I'm not going to
pay for that fucking wall."
A spokesperson for Democratic candidate
Hillary Clinton said the focus should
remain on Trump's immigration speech in
Arizona. Jennifer Palmieri,
communications director for Hillary for
America, said: "From the first days of his
campaign, Donald Trump has painted
Mexicans as 'rapists' and criminals and has promised to deport 16
million people, including children and US citizens. He has said we should
force Mexico to pay for his giant border wall. He has said we should ban
remittances to families in Mexico if Mexico doesn't pay up.
"What ultimately matters is what Donald Trump says to voters in
Arizona, not Mexico, and whether he remains committed to the splitting
up of families and deportation of millions."
Launching his presidential bid last year, Trump claimed "the US has
become a dumping ground for everyone else's problems", pointing the
finger at Mexico.
"They're sending us not the right people," he said. "They're sending
people that have lots of problems and they're bringing their problems.
"They're bringing drugs, they're bringing crime, they're rapists, and
some I assume are good people but I speak to border guards and they tell
us what we are getting."
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