President Donald Trump's blunt diplomatic touch is creating new headaches for the deeply troubled U.S.-Mexico relationship.

The Trump administration riled Mexican officials by choosing Tuesday — on the eve of visits by the U.S. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson and Homeland Security Secretary John Kelly to Mexico City — to release sweeping guidelines on deportations and a border wall.


As Mexican officials rushed to contact the State Department for more information, the timing of the guidelines' release threatened to severely hinder what could have been a diplomatic make-up session, U.S. and Mexican officials and analysts said.

"It does poison the general context in which the trip is taking place," said Arturo Sarukhan, a former Mexican ambassador to the United States. "It will create public opinion backlash and congressional backlash in Mexico."

It also could hurt America's ability to gain Mexico's cooperation on enforcing the new guidelines, a U.S. diplomat familiar with the region said. When it comes to deportations, for example, "you can’t just leave people in the middle of a bridge — this has to be negotiated with the Mexicans,” said the diplomat, who confirmed that Mexican leaders had been calling the State Department.

The memos’ release makes Tillerson's and Kelly’s jobs “that much harder," the diplomat added.

Kelly's agency released the guidelines, which give federal agents new powers to detain and deport immigrants. The memos also lay out some details on Trump’s plan to build a wall along the Mexican border, indicating that the U.S. is still looking at ways to get Mexico to pay for the structure.

It wasn’t clear whether Kelly, and by extension the White House, considered how the timing of the guidelines' release would affect their visit. The White House did not respond to questions about the timing of the guidelines, and the State Department deferred comment to Homeland Security. A spokeswoman for Kelly and Homeland Security downplayed the connection.

"The release of the implementation guidance was not at all tied to the secretary’s trip to Mexico," Gillian Christensen said. "However, the secretary looks forward to a strong partnership with the Mexican government and to reaffirming that partnership this week."

But this is not the first time the month-old Trump administration has diplomatically snubbed the Mexicans. The White House chose Jan. 25 , the day Mexican officials were in Washington meeting with Trump aides, to unveil new executive orders on immigration and a border wall. The dust-up over those orders, and Trump’s taunting on Twitter, led Mexican President Enrique Peña Nieto to cancel plans to visit the U.S. the following week.

Since then, Mexican officials have spoken with Tillerson and others in an effort to get the relationship back on track. Peña Nieto and Trump also spoke on the phone, a conversation that reportedly included Trump suggesting he’d send U.S. troops into Mexico to help the country battle crime. Mexican officials, for their part, have denied Trump issued any threats during the conversation.

U.S. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, pictured, and Homeland Security Secretary John Kelly are due to visit Mexico City Wednesday. | Getty

The Mexican government, in announcing that Tillerson and Kelly would visit this week, said the point was to keep up efforts to develop “a respectful, close and constructive relationship between the countries.” Mexican Embassy officials did not immediately respond to a request for comment about the timing of the new deportation guidelines. A Mexican official, did, however, confirm that the country has seen an increase in the number of people seeking help from its consulates in the United States.

Tillerson will visit Mexico on Wednesday and Thursday. Kelly is heading to Guatemala first, and expected to join Tillerson by Thursday.

Homeland Security and State Department officials have revealed little about Tillerson's and Kelly’s goals this week in Mexico. But statements from the agencies have said border security is on the discussion menu, and that Peña Nieto is among the people the pair will meet.

Trump repeatedly targeted Mexico during his presidential campaign, saying the country was sending rapists and drug dealers across the border and insisting that it was taking advantage of the U.S. through the North American Free Trade Agreement. Mexico is America’s third-largest trading partner, and millions of jobs in both countries rely on that relationship.

Over the weekend, a group of Democratic U.S. senators visited Mexico to try to calm fears over the Trump administration’s direction and speak out against Trump’s calls for a border wall. Mexico has insisted it will not pay for that wall, which by some estimates would cost more than $20 billion.

One of the visiting senators, Ben Cardin of Maryland, told CNN on Tuesday that Tillerson and Kelly will “hear pretty clearly the hostilities on the wall.” The senator noted that the number of undocumented Mexican immigrants to the United States is actually falling, while migrants from other parts of Latin America are still flowing in, crossing Mexico along the way.

To stem that flow, “you do need Mexico’s cooperation,” Cardin said. “If they believe that this immigration policy is aimed against their country, the cooperation with American will certainly be much less.”

While Trump, and by extension his aides, may be pushing the new immigration rules in a bid to hold fast to campaign pledges and appease the conservative base, Mexican officials, too, face their own political realities. Trump’s rhetoric and policies have energized leftist Mexican political parties, whose rise troubles business leaders on both sides of the border. Just a few days, ago, thousands of people rallied against Trump in Mexico City. As a result, Peña Nieto and others can’t seem to simply submit to Trump’s agenda.

“The body politic in Mexico reacts negatively to the negative rhetoric coming out of this White House,” said Ted Piccone, a Latin America expert at the Brookings Institution.

He added that the Trump administration also threatened to undo decades worth of effort to build what was once a far less friendly U.S.-Mexico relationship. On the defense front, for instance, the countries basically had no relationship as recently as the mid-1990s, Piccone said.

“We’ve come a long way, and there’s now serious turbulence,” he said. “A lot of agencies across the U.S. government want to preserve the good things about the cooperation. I think cooler heads will prevail.”

Eli Stokols and Gabriel Debenedetti contributed to this report.

