"WASHINGTON (AP) - Due to pressure from the transition team of President-elect Andrés Manuel López Obrador, the government of Enrique Peña Nieto rejected 20 million dollars allocated in the Mérida Initiative by the Donald Trump administration for the repatriation of undocumented immigrants. in Mexico.
 
"The Mexican government did not accept the 20 million dollars, they are there at the bottom of the Mérida Initiative, but they were not accepted to carry out repatriations," a government official from Peña Nieto told Apro in response to the dispatch published by this weekly. on its website, noting that Washington's proposal to finance the cost of deportations in Mexico would be signed.
 
A member of the transition team of the president-elect, reported to Apro that, for a few weeks, Marcelo Ebrard Casaubón (future secretary of Foreign Affairs), told the chancellery in charge of Luis Videgaray Caso, that he would not accept any money from the government of Trump to defray the expenses of the deportation of undocumented immigrants.
 
"We knew of the negotiations and the intention of the government of President Trump to provide funds for the deportation of people from Mexico to their countries of origin, therefore, the government of Peña Nieto was asked not to accept a single penny" , stressed the informative source of López Obrador's transition team.

Over the refusal of the still Mexican government, the State Department, in charge of the financing and revision of the Mérida Initiative, recently notified the US Federal Congress about the allocation of the 20 million dollars.

 
The process of informing the Capitol about the destination of funds for the international affairs budget by the Department of State is mandatory, which does not imply, as the Mexican government clarifies, that the 20 million dollars are accepted.

 
President Trump tried to convince the Peña Nieto government that Mexico would become a sort of immigration filter for Washington since he arrived at the White House and applied the Zero Tolerance policy to undocumented immigration, by approving the separation of children from their parents when arriving as undocumented immigrants to the southern border of the United States and criminalizing those of legal age.

 
In secret, Luis Videgaray and Alfonso Navarrete Prida, secretary of the Interior, negotiated, like the Trump government, the agreement to convert Mexico into a Third Secure Country (TPS).
With the typification of the TPS, Trump intended that all non-Mexican foreign immigrants seeking asylum for any reason or reason in the United States, first, they requested it in Mexico so that they could not even get close to the southern border of the United States.

 
Luis Videgaray and the Mexican ambassador in Washington, Gerónimo Gutiérrez Fernández publicly denied the negotiation of the TPS, however, Proceso and various US media outlets, including The New York Times , published evidence to the contrary.

 
After an interview ( Proceso 2180), Ambassador Gutiérrez Fernández accepted that the TPS case was reviewed with the United States government, but assured that the idea of ​​specifying the agreement had already been rejected.

 
With the financing of 20 million dollars, the Trump administration was looking for the Mexican government to accept a kind of deportation quota for undocumented immigrants.

 
The New York Times , in its print edition today, publishes a dispatch that gives an account, as does Proceso, about Trump's intention to get the Mexican government to accept the repatriation of undocumented immigrants.

 
The New York newspaper even announces that the 20 million dollars would cover the costs of Mexico's deportation to their countries of origin of some 17,000 undocumented immigrants.

 
The migratory funds in the Mérida Initiative focused on the repatriation of migrants from continents such as Africa and Asia.

 
In Mexico, and due to the infrastructure and training incapacity of the personnel of the National Institute of Immigration (INI), immigrants detained from countries such as Bangladesh, Cameroon or India, are released and people arrive at the northern border to try to enter the  United States.

 
The $ 20 million from the State Department would pay the cost of intercontinental flights of undocumented immigrants in Mexico, which would be convenient for Trump to prevent the flow of migrants in its southern border, another migratory filter not of the TPS puff that he intended to sign with the government of Peña Nieto."

 
In the case of Central American immigrants detained in Mexico as undocumented, the elderly are deported by land (in buses) and minors by plane.

 
"The 20 million dollars are there, in the Mérida Initiative, the government of President Peña Nieto has already rejected them for immigration purposes, and it will be up to the next president (López Obrador) to decide whether to take them or not," the official added. outgoing government.

 
The New York Times, having ignored the refusal of the Mexican government to accept the money from the State Department, in his office on the matter, even, reported the refusal of legislators to the idea of ​​wanting Mexico to do the dirty work of Washington.

 
"The intention of the Congress to approve this money (in the Merida Initiative) is to support the communities to face the problem of crime, corruption and many other challenges, not to expand the deportations crusade of this administration," he told The New York Times the Democratic representative for the state of New York, Eliot Engel, member of the Committee of International Affairs.

 
On October 11 and 12 in Washington, the Second Conference on Prosperity and Security in Central America will be held with the participation of the governments of that region, Trump, Peña Nieto and members of the Andrés Manuel López Obrador team."