President Donald Trump said Friday he would consider economic retaliation against countries that refuse to take back their citizens the U.S. is trying to deport.
Trump was meeting with senior U.S. officials at the Customs and Border Protection National Targeting Center in Virginia to discuss border security challenges in the coming year. When a State Department official mentioned that China has a “long history” of not accepting removals from the U.S., Trump said he would slap tariffs on Chinese imports to force Beijing to change its policy.
“We’ll put tariffs on the countries,” the president said. “They’ll take them back so fast your head will spin. We’ll just tariff their goods coming in, and they’ll take them back in two seconds.”
Trump has threatened to implement tariffs on several countries, especially China, for what he says are unfair trade practices that undermine American producers. But the use of import taxes to change the behavior of countries that don’t cooperate on deportations would be a new tactic in the Trump administration’s tough immigration enforcement agenda.
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The State Department has already resorted to visa sanctions on several countries that are historically recalcitrant when it comes to accepting deportees. In September, the U.S. hit Eritrea, Cambodia, Guinea and Sierra Leone with a range of visa restrictions for “denying or unreasonably delaying” the return of their citizens from the U.S.
Before the Trump administration, visa sanctions were rarely used as punishment specifically for non-cooperation on deportations. Since 2000, the U.S. has resorted to visa sanctions against non-accepting countries just twice — against Guyana in 2001 and the Gambia in 2016.
Separately, Trump warned Friday that foreign aid could be cut off to uncooperative countries that don’t change their deportee policy.
“And to those countries, we’ll stop giving aid, and they will take them back instantaneously,” he said, adding that homeland security officials “just have to let us know just who they are.”
As of August, DHS listed 12 countries that are habitual offenders when it comes to denying the return of their citizens. They are China, Cuba, Vietnam, Laos, Iran, Cambodia, Burma, Morocco, Hong Kong, South Sudan, Guinea and Eritrea.
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