During a press briefing, Trump administration Chief of Staff John Kelly told reporters that Mexican authorities have done more than their fair share to keep drugs from flowing into the US.
“Places like Mexico, Central America suffer more from our drug demand, and do more in many ways to stop that drug flow than we do in our own country,” he said.
Kelly went on to speak about how much Mexican authorities have done to maintain tight control of their side of the border.
“We have great relationships with the Mexicans on the border. They’re in the counter-drug fight with the United States. In fact, in my view, [they] suffer more from the drug—our drug demand—which we don’t seem to address,” he said.
These statements stand in contrast to the adversarial tone that President Donald Trump has maintained towards Mexico since early in his presidential campaign. Despite the praise, Kelly mentioned that the U.S.’s southern border tends to be more troublesome than its border up north.
“[We] don’t have nearly the issues on the northern border with Canada. Great partnerships there,” he said. “But the problem with our southern border is the drug flow and the illegal immigration flow rides on a network that right now comes up through into the Western Hemisphere from abroad, up through Mexico—Central America and Mexico—and into the United States.”
And despite the good job Kelly says Mexico is doing, he advocated extending the existing wall between the U.S. and Mexico.
“We definitely need more wall or physical barrier. We have about 600 miles of that border now secured by some type of physical barrier,” he said.
Building a wall between the U.S. and Mexico and forcing Mexico to pay for it was one of President Trump’s most famous campaign promises.
However, by doing so, authorities may be making the border even less secure. A group of enterprising smugglers actually made a catapult attached to the Mexico-United States border wall. U.S. authorities saw the catapult and dispersed the people near it before it could launch its payload of 47 pounds of pot across the border.