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Donald Trump 2016 Presidential Campaign

Trump to meet with Mexico President Peña Nieto ahead of immigration speech

Steph Solis
USA TODAY


Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump said he has accepted an invitation to meet with Mexican President Enrique Peña Nieto on Wednesday, hours before he is expected to deliver a key speech on immigration.

Following multiple reports about his trip, Trump confirmed on Twitter he accepted the invitation, which the president made last week to both candidates:

Trump tweeted before speaking in Everett, Wash., after The Washington Post, Reforma and other newspapers reported word of the scheduled meeting.

Trump did not say where they are meeting, though Pena Nieto suggested the gathering would be on his side of the border.

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The meeting falls on the same day that Trump says he will deliver a "major" immigration speech in Arizona (that's scheduled for 9 p.m. ET in Phoenix), a week after he suggested he was "softening" his immigration approach.

Immigration is considered Trump's signature platform, from his promise to build the wall to his controversial, but wavering stance on what he would do with the 11 million undocumented immigrants in the country.

Trump has said in interviews that despite his "softening" approach, he still intends to have the wall built at the U.S.-Mexico border. He has suggested he won't use detention camps.

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Peña Nieto has been one of Trump's harsher critics. He has compared the GOP presidential nominee to dictators such as Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini.

"There have been episodes in the history of humanity, unfortunately, where these expressions, this strident rhetoric has only really been (a) very fateful stage in the history of mankind," he told the Excelsior newspaper. "That's how Mussolini got in, that's how Hitler got in."

It's worth noting that Peña Nieto has a 23% approval rating in a survey published earlier this month by the Reforma — the lowest any Mexican president has received since the paper started conducting the poll 21 years ago (the poll had a margin of error of 3 percentage points). And, yes, he is the same president who was accused of plagiarizing his university thesis. The day after his meeting with Trump, Peña Nieto is expected to deliver his annual written report to Congress on Thursday.

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The Clinton campaign questioned the Trump campaign's intentions behind his meeting in a statement issued Tuesday night via Twitter.

"From the first days of his campaign, Donald Trump has painted Mexicans as 'rapists' and criminals and has promised to deport 16 million people, including children and U.S. citizens," the campaign stated. "He has said we should force Mexico to pay for his giant border wall. He has said we should ban remittances to families in Mexico if Mexico doesn't pay up. What ultimately matters is what Donald Trump says to voters in Arizona, not Mexico, and whether he remains committed to the splitting up of families and deportation of millions."

Some of Trump's high-profile backers have said his position remains consistent.

"Nothing has changed about Donald Trump's position on dealing with illegal immigration," Indiana Gov. Mike Pence, Trump's running mate, said on CNN Sunday, adding that the real estate mogul's previous proposal for a deportation force "was a mechanism, not a policy."

Contributing: Associated Press.

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