Mexico president says water will be delivered to Texas

Mexico’s President Claudia Sheinbaum said her country would deliver more water to Texas as part of a border agreement but that supplies had been limited by several years of drought.

Sheinbaum said rain could alleviate some of Mexico’s shortages and improvements to irrigation would aid its efforts to hand over enough water to the U.S. to meet treaty obligations. Earlier this week, President Donald Trump threatened Mexico with sanctions after he said it failed to deliver water to Texas.

“We’ve argued to date that there’s a quantity of cubic meters that we have to deliver, but if there isn’t any water, than how do you do it? That’s why there’s a review of the technical part,” Sheinbaum said at a news briefing Friday. “To the farmers of Texas who are asking for the water, there will be immediate delivery.”

Sheinbaum also said the U.S. had not expanded a water treatment plant in California that was supposed to be the counterpart to a plant in Tijuana. She added her government had participated in prior talks with U.S. officials over compliance with the 1944 treaty that governs the division of water.

The U.S. in March declined to send water to Tijuana, suggesting the decision was due to Mexican failures in its own water deliveries. Trump indicated Mexico owes about 1.3 million acre-feet of water in total.

“We’ll hand over an important quantity of water without it affecting us and depending on the amount of water that’s available, and then we hope that the rain will give us more to give to the United States,” Sheinbaum said on Friday.

Now, the Texas Water Development Board will have to decide whether the conflict exists.

The project will take carbon dioxide from the air and sequester it more than 4,000 feet underground.