Mexican President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador said on Wednesday that he had a telephonic conversation with his US counterpart Donald Trump in which both the leaders have expressed their willingness to maintain a bilateral relationship based on friendship and cooperation between the two neighbouring countries.
Taking to Twitter, Lopez Obrador said that the phone chat with Donald Trump had been “good”,
“The will to maintain a relationship of friendship and cooperation between our peoples and our governments was reaffirmed,” the Mexican president said.
Trump later retweeted his counterpart’s post, which was written in Spanish.
A few hours earlier, Lopez Obrador had described the meeting between his foreign affairs secretary, Marcelo Ebrard, and US officials in Washington – where both parties evaluated the progress made on an immigration agreement signed in June – as “successful.”
During his press briefing, Obrador said that the meeting in the US capital ended with both sides agreeing to keep up their development cooperation policies and to “put confrontation aside.”
Lopez Obrador even thanked President Trump for having a respectful attitude toward Mexico.
Meanwhile, earlier on Wednesday, the US Supreme Court provisionally gave the Trump administration the green light to deny asylum to undocumented migrants who had previously gone through Mexico or other countries without requesting refuge there first.
The 7-2 ruling is not definitive but is set to affect the US government’s asylum policy as the legal battle rages on in the lower courts.
Trump took to Twitter, shortly after the decision became known, saying “BIG United States Supreme Court WIN for the Border on Asylum!”
Since he came into office in January 2017, Trump has made the toughening of the US’ asylum system one of his main priorities as part of a broader nativist platform and discourse that tapped into the pervasive xenophobia of his political base.