Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum is urging the White House to rethink a 25% tariff on steel and aluminum, which her economy secretary dubbed “unfair” on Tuesday.
“It doesn’t suit the United States to put a tariff on steel and aluminum from Mexico,” Sheinbaum said during her regular morning press conference on Wednesday.
Trump announced on Monday that he will tariff all steel and aluminum coming into the United States. He granted exclusions on a similar tariff during his first administration for USMCA trading partners Canada and Mexico but says this time there will be no exceptions.
The latest tariff negotiation comes a week after Sheinbaum won praise from many in her country for striking a deal to delay a 25% tariff on all goods from Mexico. That wider tariff could have devastated her country’s economy, as well as raised prices for U.S. consumers.
Observers in Mexico and the United States are taking note of the Mexican president’s measured approach. Sheinbaum has regularly urged a “cool head” in dealing with Trump.
“Sheinbaum was very effective in negotiating with the Trump administration,” Vanda Felbab-Brown, director of the Initiative on Nonstate Armed Actors at the Brookings Institution, said.
To delay the across-the-board tariff earlier this month, Sheinbaum promised to send 10,000 Mexican National Guard troops to the border. There are already thousands of Mexican troops on Mexico’s northern and southern borders. The additional troops don’t represent a meaningful shift in policy, said Stephanie Brewer with the Washington Office on Latin America.
“If we step back and look at the current context, it turns out this doesn’t represent any real change in strategy,” Brewer said.
Just hours after Sheinbaum’s phone call with Trump last week, a U.S. spy plane flew in international airspace over the Gulf of California. Sheinbaum denied the plane had to do with her agreement with Trump. But CNN reports that there has been an uptick in flights like that along the border, indicating the United States could be ramping up its surveillance of Mexican drug cartels.
“What’s said in public is hardly everything that’s going on in the bargaining,” Felbab-Brown said.
Publicly, Sheinbaum has maintained a hard line on protecting Mexico’s sovereignty. Sheinbaum said at her regular morning press conference Wednesday that she wouldn’t allow U.S. interference in her country in response to a question about Trump’s nomination to lead the Drug Enforcement Administration.
“We are never going to allow interference or violations to our sovereignty,” Sheinbaum said. “What there is is coordination and collaboration with U.S. government agencies.”
