WASHINGTON _ President Donald Trump said the U.S. will begin to cut off foreign aid to Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador after thousands of migrants continued to march through Central America toward the U.S.
"Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador were not able to do the job of stopping people from leaving their country and coming illegally to the U.S," Trump said Monday morning on Twitter. "We will now begin cutting off, or substantially reducing, the massive foreign aid routinely given to them."
Last week, Trump said the U.S. would cut off "all" foreign aid to those countries if the so-called caravan of migrants was not stopped. The migrants, mostly from Honduras, are traveling through Mexico toward the U.S.
Trump also said Monday that he had alerted the U.S. military that the caravan represented a national emergency, misspelling the word. Without evidence, he raised the specter of "criminals and unknown Middle Easterners" mixed with the group of asylum seekers.
"Sadly, it looks like Mexico's Police and Military are unable to stop the Caravan heading to the Southern Border of the United States," Trump tweeted on Monday. "Criminals and unknown Middle Easterners are mixed in. I have alerted Border Patrol and Military that this is a National Emergy. Must change laws!"
Trump's tweets on Monday came after Fox News broadcast several images of the caravan, saying that the group of migrants had grown to 7,000.
The U.S. provided more than $175 million in foreign aid to Honduras in the 2017 fiscal year, according to the U.S. Agency for International Development. Guatemala received $249 million and El Salvador got $115 million. Much of the money went to counter-narcotics and security, and critics of Trump's approach have said cutting off aid would create more refugees.
Honduras and El Salvador have some of the highest homicide rates in the world, according to data from the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime.
