Trump again warns he may shut down southern border

Sergio R. Bustos | USA TODAY

Show Caption Hide Caption Migrant caravan's first wave arrives at U.S. border Several hundred migrants have arrived in Tijuana after a month-long journey from Honduras.

President Donald Trump on Thursday again threatened to close the southern border if the Mexican government fails to do more to secure its side of it.

"If we find that it's uncontrollable, if we find it gets to a level where we are going to lose control or where people are going to start getting hurt, we will close entry into the country for a period of time until we can get it under control,” he told reporters at his Mar-a-Lago club in Florida, where the president is spending Thanksgiving with his family.

He added he would shut down “the whole border … I mean, the whole border.”

Trump said he wants Mexico to do its part to secure the 2,000-mile border that stretches from San Diego to Brownsville, Texas.

“We are either going to have a border, or we’re not,” he said. “When they lose control of the border on the Mexico side, we just close the border.”

Any closing of the border could cause economic damage to not only the four border states but throughout the country. The State Department estimates that $1.7 billion in goods and services, and hundreds of thousands of people, legally cross the border each day.

Last month, Trump fired off a series of tweets warning he would close the border if the governments of Mexico and Central America did not control a caravan heading toward the United States.

More: Trump threatens to seal U.S.-Mexico border over migrant caravan. Can he do it?

Trump has been railing for more than a month about the thousands of Central American migrants who left Honduras last month and trekked through Mexico en route to the U.S.-Mexico border to seek asylum. The migrants said they were escaping extreme poverty and gang violence. Trump has called it “an invasion” and has deployed thousands of military troops to support U.S. Border Patrol agents to secure the southern border.

The latest wave of migrants traveling through northern Mexico is part of a large caravan that began arriving this week to Tijuana, near the border with San Diego, where hundreds, and possibly thousands, more migrants are expected to follow in coming days.

Several charter buses arrived just after midnight Tuesday at the Unidad Deportiva Benito Juarez, the sports complex the city opened as a makeshift shelter. It’s unclear exactly how many migrants were in the latest group. But inside, there were 3,000 other migrants who had arrived in Tijuana since last week.

The municipal government opened up the Benito Juarez sports complex last Wednesday. Originally planned to hold 3,000 migrants, the latest arrivals have put the shelter over capacity.

So far, the city has not said whether they intend to open a second shelter as hundreds more migrants make their way to Tijuana. Another 3,000 migrants have been in the nearby city of Mexicali, about 90 miles away.