Washington – The United States is cutting off aid to El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras, known collectively as the “Northern Triangle,” the State Department said on Saturday, a day after President Donald Trump blasted the Central American countries for sending migrants to the United States.
Subscribe to our Daily Roundup Email
“We are carrying out the President’s direction and ending FY (fiscal year) 2017 and FY 2018 foreign assistance programs for the Northern Triangle,” a State Department spokesperson said in a statement. The department declined to provide further details.
The State Department said it would “engage Congress in the process,” an apparent acknowledgement that it will need lawmakers’ approval to end the funding.
A U.S. House Appropriations Committee aide estimated that around $700 million of aid was affected.
Democratic Representative Nita Lowey, who chairs the committee, tweeted that the move to cut aid was “immoral and more likely to deteriorate conditions that push people into the kind of poverty and despair that exacerbates migration.”
New Jersey Senator Bob Menendez, the top Democrat on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, called Trump’s order a “reckless announcement” and urged Democrats and Republicans alike to reject it.
“U.S. foreign assistance is not charity; it advances our strategic interests and funds initiatives that protect American citizens,” Menendez said in a statement.
Trump claimed on Friday during a trip to Florida that the countries had “set up” caravans of migrants in order to export them into the United States. A surge of asylum seekers from the three countries have sought to enter the United States across its southern border in recent days.
“We were giving them $500 million. We were paying them tremendous amounts of money, and we’re not paying them anymore because they haven’t done a thing for us,” Trump said.
Trump also threatened on Friday to close the U.S. border with Mexico next week if Mexico does not stop immigrants from reaching the United States, a move that could disrupt millions of legal border crossings and billions of dollars in trade.
Thank you president Trump once again for making this great nation great again.
So Jim Acosta, is there a crisis at our border or no? Guys at what point does our border become a national emergency issue? Right now border patrols are swampped with hundreds of thousands of migrants . We have no facilities nor personnel to deal with them. Watch how NPR will be all over ice when a migrant child with diseases die under rotten conditions as if it’s trumps fault that thet are swamping us
All part of the smooth handover of world leadership to the Chinese.
That is really smart because with all their citizens here now we will need all that money for welfare, free medical, school, etc. their entire lives. Plus with all the disease they brought with them such as all the childhood diseases and adult diseases our ERs will be constantly at their maximum emergency status. So those countries should not whine we have all their free loaders now.
How is it immoral for the President to demand a return on U.S. investment
It may be the wrong move because it might exacerbate the situation but how is it immoral.