President Donald Trump said Monday that another agreement with Mexico existed, but that for now it was kept secret, a claim the Mexican foreign minister vehemently denied.
“We have an agreement on something that they will announce very soon. It’s all done. They have to get approval,” President Trump told reporters on Monday. “They will get approval. If they don’t get approval, we’ll have to think in terms of tariffs,” he added, noting that Mexico’s legislative body would grant the approval.
Just hours before his comments at the White House, Trump tweeted that the U.S. had “fully signed and documented another very important part of the Immigration and Security deal with Mexico” that they had been seeking for a long time.
However, the President fell short of providing additional information as to what the alleged agreement contained, CNN reports.
Mexican Foreign Secretary Marcelo Ebrard, who was among the leading negotiators of the Friday deal, indicated later in the day that he did not know of any other deal.
“Aside from what I’ve explained, there is no agreement of any kind, that has been made known. Everything I’ve been talking about was known since Friday,” he said to reporters in Mexico City.
U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, meanwhile, also failed to give a concrete answer as to whether another deal with Mexico had been struck. When asked about it, Pompeo said, “As for other agreements, there were a number of commitments made. I can’t go into them in detail here, but each side was committed to a set of outcomes.”
Trump further said on Twitter that if approval for the deal is not granted, he would reinstate tariffs. Pompeo likewise noted that if Mexico does not keep his promise to halt illegal migration into the U.S., “there’s risk that those tariffs will go back in place.”
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