Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum said Saturday she declined President Trump’s offer for US troops to crack down on the fentanyl produced by cartels in her country.
The world leaders spoke recently by phone when Trump broached the topic of making American military service members available for operations inside Mexico, where traffickers concoct the deadly synthetic opioid using precursor chemicals imported primarily from China.
“I told him, ‘No, President Trump, our territory is inviolable, our sovereignty is inviolable, our sovereignty is not for sale,’” Sheinbaum revealed during an event.
“We will never accept the presence of the United States Army in our territory,” she said.
The Mexican president noted that a Wall Street Journal report published Friday first recounting the call with the president was “true” though “not as described.”
Thousands of Mexican and US troops were already deployed to their respective sides of the border in February.
Since January, the Drug Enforcement Administration has seized thousands of kilos of fentanyl, enough to kill more than 119 million Americans, or roughly a third of the country, an agency spokesperson previously told The Post.
It remains the leading cause of death for Americans ages 18 to 44, according to the CDC.
Sheinbaum did accept an offer on the April 16 call to receive more intelligence from the US, per the report.
Trump was also asked by Mexico to thwart more arms traffickers crossing the border into Mexico.
Sheinbaum has previously claimed that her nation is cooperating with the US on stemming the tide of migration north as well as halting drug trafficking.
“Decisive actions were taken against organized crime and fentanyl trafficking, as well as bilateral meetings on security and trade,” she said in March as the threat of 25% tariffs from the US against her country loomed.
Along with China and Canada, Mexico remains one of America’s largest trading partners, and Trump later relaxed the duties on goods exported into the US under a trade agreement he signed during his first term.
The 25% import tax on cars assembled in Mexico as well as steel and aluminum still remains.
“The cartels are waging war on America, and it’s time for America to wage war on the cartels, which we are doing,” Trump said in his first joint address to Congress that month.
“The territory to the immediate south of our border is now dominated entirely by criminal cartels that murder, rape, torture and exercise total control,” he told lawmakers.
Later in April, Trump told Fox Noticias host Rachel Campos-Duffy that Sheinbaum’s government remained “very, very afraid of the cartels.”
“We want to help her. We want to help Mexico, because you can’t run a country like that. You just can’t,” he said.
