The Mexican government made clear to visiting US emissaries that it will not accept deportees from third countries under any circumstances, the interior secretary said on Friday.

Miguel Angel Osorio Chong said in an interview with Radio Formula that the US secretary of state, Rex Tillerson, and the homeland security secretary, John Kelly, asked Mexican officials during their Thursday visit if they would host deportees from other countries while their immigration cases are processed in the US.



“They can’t leave them here on the border because we have to reject them. There is no chance they would be received by Mexico,” he said.

“They asked us that while their legal process is happening there if they could be here,” Osorio Chong said. “And we told them that there’s no way we can have them here during that process.”

The visit by the US secretaries came at a tense moment in US-Mexico relations. Donald Trump has carried his tough campaign talk about immigrants and factory jobs that moved to Mexico into the White House, ordering the building of a border wall, stepped-up deportations and a renegotiation of the North American Free Trade Agreement.

A memo published by the Department of Homeland Security earlier this week suggested that US immigration officials could deport immigrants in the country illegally to the contiguous country they had entered from, which in the vast majority of cases would be Mexico. Most of the immigrants crossing the US-Mexico border in recent years have been Central Americans.

Osorio Chong also said on Friday that if the US government tries to pressure Mexico by threatening to withdraw funding from the nearly $2.5bn Mérida Initiative to fight organized crime, Mexico will let that money go.

The initiative that was started in 2008 is winding down with most remaining funding going to Mexican states implementing reforms to the justice system, Osorio Chong said. In its early years, Mérida outfitted Mexico’s military with helicopters and trained its security forces.

“If that resource could be an issue for pressure or if they want to pressure the government, honestly, we have no problem, none, if they withdraw it,” he said.

The US embassy in Mexico City did not immediately respond to a request for comment.