MEXICO CITY — The action may be on the streets of Los Angeles, but fallout from the immigrant protests is roiling politics in Mexico at a delicate moment — days before Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum is expected to meet President Trump in their much-anticipated inaugural face-to-face encounter.
Sheinbaum has been on the defensive since Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem — at an Oval Office event in Trump’s presence — accused the Mexican president on Tuesday of “encouraging violent protests.”
While Sheinbaum has assailed the U.S. immigration raids and backed immigrants’ rights to protest, there is no public record of her ever having backed violence. A day before Noem’s accusation, she said the exact opposite and called on Mexicans in Southern California to act peacefully.
Nonetheless, Mexican opposition figures have embraced Noem’s charges and enthusiastically sought to amplify them. Critics also have seized upon Sheinbaum’s comments last month — weeks before the L.A. protests — calling on Mexicans in the United States to “mobilize” against a planned U.S. tax on cash transfers to Mexico.
An opposition senator, Lily Téllez, posted a video on X last week accusing Sheinbaum of emboldening compatriots in the U.S. to “violate the law without consequences, as if it were Mexico,” an assertion echoed by other critics.
The barrage of accusations has put Sheinbaum in a delicate position: She is obliged to defend immigrants in the United States, as Mexican leaders have always done, but cannot be seen as inflaming bilateral tensions. Still, she has lashed out at her domestic critics as “anti-patriotic.”
Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum attends her morning news conference at the National Palace in Mexico City in April.
(Marco Ugarte / Associated Press)
“How is it that Mexicans dare to say I promoted violence in the United States? With what objective?” the president asked Friday. “So that there’s not a good relationship between Mexico and the United States? Or, worse, that the United States does something to Mexico? They are willing to have something bad happen to the country just to indulge their hypocrisy or hate.”
News coverage of the protests has transfixed Mexico, where reports have heavily sided with the immigrants against U.S. efforts to detain and deport them. Commentators have largely condemned the Trump administration actions, while the airwaves and social media are filled with mostly sympathetic accounts and video from immigrants and advocates on the ground in Southern California.
Sheinbaum, elected to a six-year term a year ago in a landslide vote, has a 70% public approval rating, polls indicated. Her ruling Morena bloc dominates state legislatures and the Mexican Congress. She has little to fear politically from the ire of reeling opposition parties.
But, in the era of social media, the Sheinbaum-as-agitator narrative has gained traction among some U.S. conservative commentators. They have depicted her as a kind of master manipulator scheming violent resistance from her perch in Mexico City.
“This woman, the president of Mexico, is talking about leading an uprising in the interior of America,” Charlie Kirk, a far-right talk-show host, declared June 9 in a video posted on X, where he has more than 5 million followers. “And she has a lot to work with because she has a lot of sleeper cells here.”
In comments last week, Sheinbaum has embraced nonviolence as a daily mantra, citing the legacies of Mahatma Gandhi, the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., Nelson Mandela and Cesar Chavez.
“Any demonstration has to be peaceful,” she told reporters Friday. “We are always seeking, diplomatically, the defense of Mexicans outside the country.”
And, while Sheinbaum is a regular on X — where she has 4.3 million followers — she urged people not to “make politics” on the social media forum, where much of the polemics about her purported role in the immigrant protests has played out.
Helping to fuel the controversy are the proliferation of Mexican flags at the Los Angeles protests. Sheinbaum has neither endorsed nor criticized the flag-waving, but she has expressed dismay at one widely distributed image — of a shirtless L.A. protester brandishing a Mexican flag as he stands atop a burned-out car. She has called the photo a “provocation,” hinting of dark motives, but has failed to clarify her suspicions.
A protester is fired upon with non-lethal weapons by the L.A. Sheriff’s eputies on Saturday in downtown Los Angeles.
(Carlin Stiehl / Los Angeles Times)
The image, Sheinbaum said Friday, “doesn’t fit with the millions of Mexicans who contribute to the economy of the United States and are the best of people.”
In their broadsides against Sheinbaum, her opponents also have cited the president’s animated calls for Mexicans in the United States to “mobilize” against a completely separate issue — the Trump administration’s plans to impose a 3.5% tax on foreign remittances, part of the massive White House spending bill pending in Congress.
That proposed levy has met universal condemnation in Mexico, where the cash transfers support tens of thousands of poor families and are a $64-billion-a-year economic linchpin.
In an address last month in the northeastern state of San Luis Potosí, Sheinbaum called on U.S. residents of Mexican ancestry — both immigrants and those born in the United States — to send letters, emails and social media messages to Congress urging lawmakers to vote against the remittance tax.
“If necessary, we are going to mobilize,” declared an animated Sheinbaum, raising her right fist, the image recalling her youthful days as a left-wing student demonstrator.
Sheinbaum never called for street protests, much less violence. But she also never clarified whether “mobilize” referred to organizing rallies, bolstering diplomatic pressure or some other strategy to help thwart the remittance tax.
The clip of Sheinbaum urging people to “mobilize” has bounded across the internet. It’s Exhibit A for those accusing her of fomenting violent protests. Some online versions have been dubbed so that Sheinbaum speaks in a heavily accented English.
Since Trump took office, Sheinbaum has won wide acclaim for deftly handling sensitive bilateral issues such as tariffs and drug trafficking. As the immigrant protests spread across the United States, the Mexican president will be again walking a fine line with her U.S. counterpart in their first meeting at the Group of Seven summit, which started Sunday in Canada.
Sheinbaum confirmed Saturday that she planned to meet with Trump in coming days and would raise the recent treatment of Mexicans in the U.S.
“We are going to defend Mexicans with dignity,” she told a crowd outside Mexico City.
The Mexican leader has made it clear that she disputes the administration’s view of immigrants as “invaders” and of L.A. demonstrators as insurrectionists.
“We don’t agree with the treatment of honest Mexicans who work every day for the good of the United States and pay their taxes,” Sheinbaum said on Friday. “Eighty percent of their earnings remain in the United States, in consumption, in taxes. And they are people who are integrated into life there.”
And Sheinbaum, who did doctoral studies for four years at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, added: “California would not be what it is without Mexicans.”
Times staff writer Kate Linthicum and special correspondent Cecilia Sánchez Vidal contributed to this report.
