By Gordon Lubold, Anthony Harrup and Satiago Pérez
Senior administration officials sought to defend President Trump’s proposal to cut foreign aid to three Central American countries he says are complicit in the flow of illegal migrants toward the U.S., following a wave of criticism that the move was counterproductive.
Since the president’s remarks on Friday and a statement the following day from the State Department announcing the cuts to funding for El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras, the administration has provided little detail of how much would be cut and has declined to clarify how the president had the authority to do so.
The move to cut the funding, along with Mr. Trump’s threat to shut all or a portion of the U.S. border with Mexico, came after the president’s protracted battle with Congress over funding for a border wall. The president has declared a national emergency in an effort to secure the funds, and the foreign-aid cut is his latest attempt to deal with what the administration describes as a crisis at the southern border.
The State Department said on Saturday that it had ended funding for the three countries that was appropriated in the U.S. government’s fiscal years 2017 and 2018; the government is currently midway into its 2019 fiscal year.
The U.S. sends between $500 million and $750 million to those countries to support programs that combat drug and human trafficking, gang violence and promote good governance, the rule of law and anticorruption, according to the State Department.
“If we’re going to give these countries hundreds of millions of dollars, we would like them to do more,” acting White House chief of staff Mick Mulvaney said on CNN on Sunday. “We could prevent a lot of what’s happening on the southern border by preventing people from moving into Mexico in the first place.…If it’s working so well, why are the people still coming?”
Sen. Dick Durbin (D, Ill.) dismissed Mr. Trump’s threat to close the border as a “totally unrealistic boast on his part” and characterized as foolish the proposal to cut funding.
“What we need to do is focus on what’s happening in Central America, where three countries are disassembling before our eyes, and people are desperately coming to the United States,” Mr. Durbin said on NBC on Sunday. “The president’s cutting off aid to these countries will not solve that problem.”
“Once money is appropriated by Congress, it is to be spent. It is very hard for the executive branch to not spend it,” said Shannon O’Neil, a Latin America analyst at the Council on Foreign Relations.
Some portion of the funding falls under the Defense Department, but Pentagon officials said they couldn’t provide any detail. “We have nothing to announce at this time. We refer you to the White House for clarification on their comments,” a Pentagon spokesman said in an email on Sunday.
White House counselor Kellyanne Conway called on Congress to act. “The executive branch has done so much to try to mitigate these awful circumstances, and we need to send a message back to these countries, too,” she said on Fox News Sunday.
A delegation of House Democratic leaders who were traveling in El Salvador over the weekend reacted angrily to Mr. Trump’s proposal. “We will work with our colleagues in Congress to do everything in our power to push back on the president’s misguided approach to Central America,” said the group, which included House Foreign Affairs Committee Chairman Eliot Engel (D., N.Y.).
Immigration analysts said the proposed cuts are likely to backfire and risk fostering the root causes of migration such as grinding poverty and widespread violence, as well as lawlessness that feeds government corruption and extortion by criminal organizations.
“You are shooting yourself in the foot. It’s an irresponsible policy that undermines efforts to help address the drivers of migration,” Adriana Beltrán, who leads the Citizen Security program of the Washington Office on Latin America, an advocacy group, said on Sunday. “Instead of helping stabilize the situation, it makes it worse by gutting programs that had a positive impact.”
U.S. assistance to Central America has fallen steadily since 2016. Following a surge in migration by unaccompanied minors from Central America, the Obama administration increased funding for programs that went beyond security and law enforcement and focused on poverty reduction, violence prevention and anticorruption plans.
U.S. funding for the three countries fell to less than $530 million currently from $750 million in 2016, according to WOLA estimates. The White House has requested from Congress less than $400 million for 2020.
El Salvador’s president-elect, Nayib Bukele, said on Saturday that he hoped that U.S. aid would be re-established and even increased after he takes office in June.
“But we have to understand that we will not get ahead only with humanitarian aid, but with investment, stronger trade, economic growth and job creation,” Mr. Bukele wrote on Twitter.
The Honduran foreign-relations ministry said on Saturday that there were “contradictory policies” coming from the U.S., which this week signed a cooperation agreement with Honduras, Guatemala and El Salvador to curb migration at the source.
In December, the Trump administration said it was committing $5.8 billion in aid and public and private investment to strengthen economic development in Central America, and another $4.8 billion in development aid for southern Mexico.
Days before Mr. Trump said he was cutting funding, his Homeland Security chief, Kirstjen Nielsen, met in the Honduran capital Tegucigalpa with security ministers of the three Central American countries. The countries signed what the department called a “historic regional compact” to address the migration issues.
The agreement aims for more closely synchronized cooperation and intelligence sharing to increase border security and address problems such as human smuggling and trafficking, and cross-border criminal gangs, the DHS said.
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