immigration

Updated at 12:25 p.m. ET Friday

President Trump says he will begin imposing tariffs on all goods imported from Mexico beginning June 10, unless that country does more to help reduce illegal immigration from Central America.

Shares of automaker stocks fell Friday morning following the news. It also drew a response from carmakers — many of whom have built facilities in Mexico in recent years to take advantage of cheaper labor and easy access to the U.S.

Updated at 5:25 p.m. ET

President Trump has announced an immigration proposal that would dramatically reshape the legal immigration system in the United States.

The plan "puts jobs, wages and safety of American workers first," Trump said in the White House Rose Garden on Thursday.

"We must implement an immigration system that will allow our citizens to prosper for generations to come," he said.

President Trump is calling for his administration to restrict the asylum process, issuing a presidential memorandum that proposes charging asylum-seekers fees and other broad changes.

Trump's proposals were widely criticized by Democrats and immigration advocates, who predicted a new legal battle over the president's policy.

Updated Saturday 8:47 p.m. ET

President Trump confirmed reports that he is strongly considering sending detained immigrants in the country illegally to "sanctuary cities" to try to punish Democrats who have opposed his stringent immigration proposals. The comments came hours after White House and Homeland Security officials said the idea had been scrapped.

"We'll bring them to sanctuary city areas and let that particular area take care of it, whether it's a state or whatever it might be," Trump told reporters at the White House on Friday.

President Trump is backing down from his threat to shut down the U.S. Southern border as soon as this week.

Trump had issued the warning in a bid to curtail surging border crossings by asylum-seekers from Central America. Instead, he is now giving Mexico "a one-year warning" to address his concerns about its handling of immigrants traveling through the country on the way to the United States. He also demanded that Mexico tamp down on the flow of drugs.

Updated at 3:08 p.m ET

Frustrated by the large number of Central Americans who have been entering the country from Mexico, President Trump doubled down on his threat to close the Southern U.S. border.

"I'm ready to close it," Trump said Tuesday. "If we don't make a deal with Congress, the border is going to be closed, 100 percent."

The U.S. Border Patrol apprehended more than 66,000 migrants at the Southern border in February, the highest total for a single month in almost a decade.

The Trump administration began implementing a new hard-line immigration policy by sending a single asylum-seeker from Central America back to Tijuana, Mexico, to await his assigned court date later this year in San Diego.

Politicians often have to change course when their campaign promises run up against reality. But when President Trump ran for office, and throughout his presidency, an explicit part of his pitch was that he wasn't like all the other politicians. Trump's "great wall" was a big concrete symbol of that.

Except that now it isn't even concrete. In recent weeks, he has been saying it will be made of "beautiful" steel slats. The way Trump has described the wall has changed a lot over time, to the point of contradiction. That includes how the wall will be paid for.

President Trump traveled to a Border Patrol station in McAllen, Texas, today, continuing on his campaign to drum up support for a $5.7 billion border wall. The visit came after weeks of Congressional debate about border security that has resulted in a partial government shutdown.

President Trump has suggested that he might resort to using "emergency" powers to build his border wall if he is not able to reach agreement on funding with congressional Democrats.

"We are looking at it very strongly," Trump told reporters on Sunday. "We're looking at a national emergency, because we have a national emergency."

The president does have broad powers to act in a crisis situation, but those powers are not unlimited. And critics say Trump should be careful about invoking them in this instance.