President Donald Trump says the United States has signed what he called "another very important part of the Immigration and Security deal with Mexico," without revealing any details about its contents.
He signaled Monday on the CNBC network that it was "another powerful tool" to control the surge of Central American migrants headed to the United States, something the U.S. has been "trying to get from Mexico for 20 years."
But he said U.S. and Mexican negotiators purposely agreed to not disclose the specific terms for the time being. Trump said the provision needs to be approved by Mexico's congress.
"We do not anticipate a problem with the vote," Trump said on Twitter, but threatened that if the measure fails there, he will once again return to his threat of imposing new tariffs on Mexican goods.
"It will be revealed in the not too distant future," he said of the undisclosed terms.
Republican colleagues of Trump in Congress have praised the president for concluding the deal, but opposition Democrats have criticized it as not containing much that is new.
When Trump announced the deal Friday night, Senate Democratic leader Charles Schumer joked, "This is an historic night! @realDonaldTrump has announced that he has cut a deal to 'greatly reduce, or eliminate, Illegal Immigration coming from Mexico and into the United States."
"Now that that problem is solved, I’m sure we won’t be hearing any more about it in the future," Schumer added.
The pact calls for Mexico to dispatch 6,000 troops to its border with Guatemala to halt the flow of migrants from there, Honduras and El Salvador, while giving the United States new authority to force asylum seekers to stay in Mexico while their legal cases in the United States are pending.
"In theory, if they do it right," Trump said of the extra border troops, migrants "shouldn't be able to get through."
The New York Times reported over the weekend that officials from the U.S. and Mexico said several terms in the new pact were actually agreed to last December, not in last week's negotiations between the two countries, a report Trump dismissed.
"When will the Failing New York Times admit that their front page story on the new Mexico deal at the Border is a FRAUD and nothing more than a badly reported 'hit job' on me, something that has been going on since the first day I announced for the presidency! Sick Journalism," he tweeted.
Trump has long criticized Mexico for not doing enough to cut the number of people arriving at the southern U.S. border and ahead of Friday's announcement had vowed to impose 5% tariffs, with future escalations, unless the Mexican government took more action to curb the surge of migrants.
"If we didn't have (the threat of) tariffs, we wouldn't have made a deal with Mexico," Trump told CNBC.
