López Obrador calls Trump 'a friend,' plans to send letter asking him not to shut border

Mexican president Andrés Manuel López Obrador said former President Donald Trump was “a friend” on Friday and vowed to reach out to him to advise the Republican presidential nominee not to blame Hispanic and Latino migrants for causing America’s drug problems, according to a report published by The Associated Press. 

López Obrador’s decision comes in the wake of a massive influx of illegal immigration at the southwest border and an increase in fentanyl problems in the United States that have taken a noticeable toll on Americans.

According to the National Institute on Drug Abuse, a component of the National Institute of Health, drug overdoses rose dramatically from 2019-2022 with a total of 107,941 drug overdoses in 2022, with 73,838 of those deaths being synthetic opioid related. That number is a sharp increase in the past decade. In 2010, the number was a little more than 21,000. Those numbers, the NIDA and NIH say were corroborated by the Centers for Disease Control.

López Obrador tried to appeal to the former Republican president and nominee for this cycle’s election by calling him “a man of intelligence and vision,” despite some clashes the two shared on border related issues when the two presidencies overlapped.

The MORENO party leader and Mexican president is scheduled to step down later this year when President-elect Claudia Sheinbaum assumes office on Oct. 1. She will be the country’s first female and first Jewish president.

Trump’s history with Mexico is storied. Some have compared López Obrador to Trump in the sense that he has tried to reinvigorate nationalist policies and patriotism while others have observed the differences as a result of Trump’s comments about the neighboring country.

Some Mexicans and Mexican Americans took offense to then-candidate Trump’s comments in 2015 when he said that many of the migrants coming to the United States were “criminals, drug dealers, rapists.” He also promised to build a wall along the entire southwest border and vowed to make Mexican pay for it, an assertion López Obrador repeatedly struck back against.

Once Trump was elected and sworn in, he suggested his administration should close the Mexican-American border “for a long time” unless López Obrador found a way to stop migrants from crossing. López Obrador expressed concern that shutting down the border could have unintended economic consequences and suggested such a closure would damage both nations’ economies even if it were to last for just one month.

In a letter the Mexican president said he planning to send to Trump last week, López Obrador said, “I am going to prove to him that migrants don’t carry drugs to the United States,” adding that “closing the border won’t solve anything, and anyway, it can’t be done,” according to The Associated Press.

“They wouldn’t last a month with the border closed,” he said, referring to U.S. automakers and manufacturers who depend on a steady, uninterrupted supply of parts and finished products for their plants on both sides of the border.

López Obrador also said there was an increase of concerns about American auto plants being relocated to Mexico so that U.S. automotive companies could find workers willing to take lower wages.  

According to the Mexican president, moving automotive industries back to the U.S. “would mean that on average, each automobile sold would cost U.S. citizens between $15,000 and $20,000 more,” ultimately costing Americans a sharp increase for the cars they are purchasing.

Trump came to office in 2017 and López Obrador came in 2018. The two both had both ups and downs during their presidential overlaps from 2018-2020, sometimes agreeing and sometimes disagreeing on various issues.

The Mexican president has tried to work with both the Republican Trump and Democratic Biden presidential administrations by using his own country’s national guard at the southern border to prevent migrants from coming into Mexico on their journey to the U.S.