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Trump hints at complete shutdown of U.S. border in response to migrant caravan

"Do it by plane, do it by bus, do it anyway you want, but they are NOT coming into the U.S.A."

Central American migrants -mostly from Honduras - sit along the concrete waterway of the bordering Tijuana River right across the El Chaparral border crossing point in Tijuana, Baja California State, Mexico, on November 25, 2018. US officials closed the San Ysidro crossing point in southern California on Sunday after hundreds of migrants tried to enter the country. (Photo credit: GUILLERMO ARIAS/AFP/Getty Images)
Central American migrants -mostly from Honduras - sit along the concrete waterway of the bordering Tijuana River right across the El Chaparral border crossing point in Tijuana, Baja California State, Mexico, on November 25, 2018. US officials closed the San Ysidro crossing point in southern California on Sunday after hundreds of migrants tried to enter the country. (Photo credit: GUILLERMO ARIAS/AFP/Getty Images)

President Donald Trump in a Monday morning tweet threatened a permanent shutdown of the U.S. border if “stone cold criminals” from several Central American countries waiting at the U.S.-Mexico border are allowed to enter the country.

“Mexico should move the flag waving migrants, many of whom are stone cold criminals, back to their countries,” Trump wrote. “Do it by plane, do it by bus, do it anyway you want, but they are NOT coming into the U.S.A. We will close the Border permanently if need be. Congress, fund the WALL!”

The president offered no proof to back his claim that the migrants at the border had criminal histories. Many are Honduran asylum seekers fleeing violence or poverty in their home countries who were illegally turned away at the San Ysidro Port of Entry in San Diego over the weekend.

The migrants are part of a larger caravan of Central American asylum seekers making their way to the United States to seek refuge from dangers back home. The president has denigrated the caravan repeatedly over the past year, pushing anti-Semitic falsehoods about who is supporting them and attacking the members of the caravan itself.

Trump’s threat comes days after he brokered a deal with incoming Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador to overhaul U.S. border policy by requiring asylum-seeking immigrants to wait in Mexico while their cases move through the U.S. court system.

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In a pair of Saturday morning tweets Trump described the deal, which has not been signed or formally agreed upon, as the solution to “decades of abuse.”

As ThinkProgress previously noted, Mexican officials initially suggested the deal was simply a diplomatic “short-term” fix, more palatable than Trump’s earlier threats to close the southern border entirely.

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“For now, we have agreed to this policy of Remain in Mexico,” Olga Sánchez Cordero, Mexico’s incoming interior minister, told The Washington Post in a statement last week. “The medium- and long-term solution is that people don’t migrate. Mexico has open arms and everything, but imagine one caravan after another after another. That would also be a problem for us.”

But the reality of the deal remains in flux. Sánchez Cordero backtracked on her earlier statement Sunday, telling the Associated Press that “there is no agreement of any sort between the incoming Mexican government and the U.S. government.”

Meanwhile, the situation at the border has devolved into an international human rights crisis.

Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen on Sunday ordered the San Ysidro Port of Entry be closed “to ensure public safety in response to large numbers of migrants seeking to enter the U.S. illegally.” When migrants attempted to cross the border, the majority of whom are planning on seeking asylum, U.S. Border Patrol officials fired tear gas to disperse the group of roughly 500.

Witnesses said several children were exposed to the gas. Reporters following the group captured photo and video of mothers dragging their toddlers and infants frantically from the scene, many of them clad in diapers, coughing and choking.

Border Patrol claims tear gas was volleyed in response to migrants throwing rocks at officials, although it is unclear when in the chronology the rock-throwing occurred. In the past, officials have killed migrants for throwing rocks, including 20-year-old Claudia Patricia Gómez González, who was shot by Border Patrol last spring.