Mexico’s President Claudia Sheinbaum renewed her position on sovereignty Thursday, saying that operations on Mexican soil are carried out by Mexican forces, as a dispute over how a detained former Olympic snowboarder was captured continued to roil bilateral relations. Her comments came at her daily news conference after questions surfaced around the case of Ryan Wedding, a Canadian who had been in hiding in Mexico and was later sent to the United States to face charges.
Sheinbaum said she spoke by phone with President Donald Trump, and that the conversation did not include Wedding’s arrest. She acknowledged that earlier this week she did not have the details of the arrest and said she did not want to argue with FBI Director Kash Patel, who has addressed the case publicly.
At the center of the dispute are competing accounts of what led to Wedding’s detention. Sheinbaum and U.S. Ambassador Ronald Johnson have said Wedding turned himself in at the U.S. embassy last week, an account Wedding’s lawyer denies. Patel, however, said Wedding—accused of moving drugs into the United States—was captured in a “high-risk” joint operation conducted “hand-in-hand” and “on the ground” with Mexican forces.
After speaking with Trump, Sheinbaum pointed to Mexico’s stance on cross-border enforcement. “We will never accept joint operations by the United States … operations on our territory are carried out by Mexican forces … we always tell President Trump that,” she said during the Thursday briefing. She said the two leaders instead discussed drug trafficking, the border and trade, adding that Trump did not press for operations in Mexico.
Observers have also connected the latest developments to the broader atmosphere of heightened U.S. pressure on cartel activity. Sheinbaum has repeatedly said Mexico would not allow unilateral U.S. military intervention in the country on sovereignty grounds, but she has promoted bilateral cooperation. The Wedding case, according to the reporting, has resurfaced anxieties about how U.S. agencies operate on Mexican territory, especially in the wake of a U.S. military operation in Venezuela earlier this month that deposed former President Nicolás Maduro.
Sheinbaum said that in the latest call Trump did not raise any demand for operations in Mexico, but that they discussed Mexico’s most recent transfer of dozens of imprisoned cartel members to the United States. She said those discussions came as her government has sought to defuse mounting threats by Trump of taking military action against cartels, after previous steps including boat attacks in the Caribbean and the Pacific.