‘We were paying them tremendous amounts of money. And we’re not paying them anymore,’ says president
The United States will no longer provide foreign aid to El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras, the State Department announced Saturday.
Secretary of State Mike Pompeo has ordered the State Department to cut off all aid to the three nations – collectively known as the Northern Triangle – for their failure to address the waves of caravans traveling to the U.S. southern border.
“At the Secretary’s instruction, we are carrying out the President’s direction and ending FY 2017 and FY 2018 foreign assistance programs for the Northern Triangle. We will be engaging Congress as part of this process,” a State Department spokesperson said in a statement.
President Trump warned reporters Friday that he may shut down the southern border over Mexico’s failure to stop “massive caravans” coming from the Northern Triangle.
“We have right now two big caravans coming up from Guatemala, massive caravans, walking right through Mexico,” Trump said. “So Mexico is tough, they can stop them. And if they don’t stop them, we’re closing the border.”
“We were paying them tremendous amounts of money. And we’re not paying them anymore. Because they haven’t done a thing for us. They set up these caravans,” he added.
Mexico warned the U.S. that the “mother of all caravans” comprised of nearly 20,000 people has formed and is making its way to the border.
“We have information that a new caravan is forming in Honduras, that they’re calling ‘the mother of all caravans,’ and they are thinking it could have more than 20,000 people,” Mexico’s Interior Secretary Olga Sanchez Cordero said Wednesday.
Officials reportedly did not say how much money would be withheld by the order.
“Between last year and this year, about $1.3 billion was allocated to the region with the vast majority of it going to those three countries, according to a study from the Congressional Research Service,” CNN reported.
(...) Latino voters living along the border in Texas make it completely clear that they want the wall, and in fact, they want it taller and longer than its current construction.
Infowars