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Several hundred migrants arrived in Tijuana after a month – long trip from Honduras.
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President Donald Trump meets with soldiers via teleconference from his Mar-a-Lago estate in Palm Beach, Florida, on Thursday, November 22, 2018. (AP Photo / Susan Walsh) ORG XMIT: FLSW111(Photo: Susan Walsh, AP)

President Donald Trump again threatened Thursday to close the southern border if the Mexican government did not do more to secure his side.

"If we find that it's uncontrollable, if we find that we will lose control or that people will start to get hurt, we will close the entry into the country for a while until we reach so that we can get it "under control," he told reporters in his Mar-a-Lago club in Florida, where the president spends Thanksgiving with his family.

He added that he would close "the entire border … I mean the whole border."

Trump said he hoped Mexico would do its part to secure the 2,000-mile border that stretches from San Diego to Brownsville, Texas.

"We will either have a border, or we are not," he said. "When they lose control of the border on the Mexican side, we just close the border."

Any closure of the border could cause economic damage not only to the four border states, but to the country as a whole. the The State Department estimates that $ 1.7 billion worth of goods and services, and hundreds of thousands of people, legally cross the border each day.

Last month, Trump launched a series of tweets informing him that he would close the border if the governments of Mexico and Central America did not control a caravan heading to the United States.

More: Trump threatens to seal the US-Mexico border on the migrant caravan. Can he do it?

For more than a month, Trump has been reluctant about the thousands of Central American migrants who left Honduras last month and crossed Mexico to the US-Mexico border to seek asylum. Migrants said they escaped extreme poverty and gang violence. Trump called it an "invasion" and deployed thousands of soldiers to support US Border Patrol agents to secure the southern border.

The last wave of migrants crossing northern Mexico is part of a large caravan that began arriving this week in Tijuana, near the border with San Diego, where hundreds, if not thousands, of other migrants should follow in the next few days.

Several chartered buses arrived Tuesday afternoon at the Benito Juarez Unidad Deportiva, the city's sports complex that opened as a makeshift shelter. It is not clear exactly how many migrants were in the last group. But inside, another 3,000 migrants have arrived in Tijuana since last week.

The municipal government opened the Benito Juarez sports complex last Wednesday. Initially planned to accommodate 3,000 migrants, recent arrivals have sheltered above its reception capacity.

Until now, the city has not yet announced its intention to open a second reception center as hundreds of additional migrants travel to Tijuana. Three thousand other migrants went to the nearby town of Mexicali, about 90 kilometers away.

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