Mexico has opened migrant legal aid centers at 50 consulates across the U.S. in order to help its citizens resist American immigration authorities, the Mexican government announced Saturday.

“Today we are facing a situation that can paradoxically represent an opportunity, when suddenly a government wants to apply the law more severely,” Mexican Foreign Minister Luis Videgaray said in a statement.

“Mexico has more consulates in the United States than any country has in any other country in the world.”

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Faced with a U.S. administration that intends to enforce rather than circumvent the law, Mexican officials seemed aware their efforts would be perceived as aiding law-breakers.

“We are not promoting illegality,” Videgaray claimed.

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“Let’s face it, it’s in Mexico’s best interest to ensure that as many Mexican nationals as possible are allowed to remain in the U.S,” Dave Ray, director of communications for the Federation for American Immigration Reform, told LifeZette.

“It increases Mexico’s political influence in the U.S. while protecting the steady stream of remittances from Mexican expatriates back home,” Ray continued. “Under eight years of the Obama administration, illegal immigration went largely unchecked and some countries might very well see it as a ‘right’ to send their citizens here,” he said.

Videgaray appeared to admit that the Mexican government is concerned with ensuring a steady flow of remittances into Mexico.

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“It is becoming more than evident that to apply the law, which is the obligation of any state, would also imply a real economic damage to this country which highlights the need for immigration reform, an immigration reform that resolves once and for all the legal status of the people,” Videgaray said.

Of course, in addition to a steady flow of extra cash into the Mexican economy, keeping illegal Mexican aliens within the U.S. has the added bonus for Mexico’s elite of keeping many destitute citizens out of Mexico.

“This solicitude on the part of the Mexican elite for their illegal immigrants in the United States is notable because of the lack of such solicitude when those people were still in Mexico,” Mark Krikorian, executive director of the Center for Immigration Studies, told LifeZette.

“The Mexican ruling class — the political and business and media class — basically don’t [care] about the common man and that’s one of the reasons all those people felt the need to leave [in the first place].”

Kirkorian noted that this isn’t the first time the Mexican government has tried to influence domestic American affairs through its consulates. “In the ’90s and the 2000s, their various consuls would lobby state legislatures — they’d go around to local jurisdictions, police departments, sheriffs departments — to get them to recognize the Matrícula Consular card, the Mexican government’s illegal alien ID card,” Kirkorian said.

“A government has one embassy in a foreign country but they can have many consulates … and Mexico has more consulates in the United States than any country has in any other country in the world,” Kirkorian said.

“They have in fact used those consulates in the past as a network to exert political pressure in the United States. They stepped back from that some, this may be a move back in that direction,” Kirkorian continued.

But Kirkorian also cautioned that Americans can’t place blame solely on the Mexican government, as their interference in American affairs was encouraged by previous administrations.

“A lot of that at the time though was winked at by our administration … especially under Bush,” Kirkorian said “His administration tacitly encouraged the Mexican government to involve itself in American domestic affairs,” he said. “It’s sort of hard to blame them for those past actions when they were actually being encouraged by Washington.”

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But with the Trump administration in Washington, it seems the days of the federal government encouraging illegal immigration — tacitly or otherwise — are over.

“America’s primary concern should be to focus on what is in our best interest,” said Ray. “And clearly, allowing millions of illegal immigrants to remain in the U.S. not only depresses wages and working conditions for U.S. workers, but costs state, local, and federal taxpayers roughly $113 billion annually.”