US ambassador to Mexico resigns amid strained relations between the two countries

The US Ambassador to Mexico has announced she will leave her post in May amid rising tensions over the border wall and the North American Free Trade Agreement (Nafta).

Roberta Jacobson has been in the position for a little under two years and her resignation comes in the wake of several US State Department and Trump administration departures.

“This decision is all the more difficult because of my profound belief in the importance of the U.S.-Mexico relationship and knowledge that it is at a crucial moment,” Ms Jacobson wrote in her resignation letter.

According to the New York Times, Ms Jacobson “was one of the most experienced Latin America experts in the State Department, having spent most of her 31 years there focusing on the region”.

The Trump administration has a nominee to fill Ms Jacobson’s vacancy already but has not yet released the name.

She leaves at a time when President Donald Trump has continued to insist that Mexico will pay for the nearly 2,000-mile long border wall.

The issue of the wall has been a contentious one since Mr Trump began repeating the mantra on the campaign trail. He said in 2015: "When Mexico sends its people, they're not sending their best. They're sending people that have lots of problems… They're bringing drugs. They're bringing crime. They're rapists".

It prompted former Mexican President Vicente Fox to say: "we're not paying for the f****** wall".

The Trump administration also tied wall construction to a bill on the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (Daca) programme, which is intended to protect those brought into the US illegally while they were minors from deportation.

There are approximately 800,000 people - so-called 'Dreamers' - who have benefited from DACA in the US since its beginning in 2012 under former President Barack Obama's administration and many were brought into the country from or through Mexico.

The programme allows Dreamers to obtain work permits as well.

The Trump administration also asked for $18bn (£13bn) over the next decade, for the initial phase of the border wall - significantly more than Mr Trump’s initial cost estimate of around $10bn.

On Nafta, withdrawing from the trade agreement between Canada, Mexico, and the US was one of Mr Trump's key promises on the campaign trail in 2016. He claimed it is a "job killer" and was antithetical to his "America First" approach to foreign policy.

The deal, one of the largest trade agreement in the world, was originally signed in 1994 by President Bill Clinton and allows free trade between the three countries in North America.

According to the CBC News in October 2017, a source told them the US delegation at the round of negotiations on reforming the deal have been “uncomfortable with the demands they are presenting, which appear to have been dictated to them by the Trump administration.”

It appears the hectic pace of the two-week rounds of negotiations, which aim to be wrapped up by the end of the year, are only exacerbating the “confusion” about what the US actually wants out of the deal.

Ms Jacobson had to wait nearly a year to be confirmed after her appointment by Mr Obama and soon after Mr Trump's election, "Jacobson was left working with her Mexican counterparts to assuage growing concern — and anger — at the new president’s tough talk," the newspaper reported.

Her job was also made more difficult by the appointment of Jared Kushner, the President's son-in-law and White House senior adviser, as the go-to person for US-Mexico relations.