It’s Time To Start Treating Mexico Like A Hostile Foreign Power

Earlier this week, suspected Mexican drug cartel gunmen fired on U.S. Border Patrol agents in Texas, who fired back. This took place on a strip of land in the middle of the Rio Grande called Fronton Island, also known as “Cartel Island” because it was previously used as a staging area for cartel smuggling operations. Texas authorities took over the island as part of Gov. Greg Abbott’s Operation Lone Star and declared it Texas territory in November 2023.

The incident illustrates why it’s time to start treating Mexico as a hostile foreign power that represents a direct threat to the American homeland — not just for the way the Mexican state has facilitated and encouraged illegal immigration, but also because it has allowed the cartels to take control of vast swaths of Mexican territory, infiltrate the Mexican government at the highest levels, and carry out sophisticated operations on both sides of the Rio Grande.

Having just issued an executive order designating some of these cartels Foreign Terrorist Organizations and Specially Designated Global Terrorists, Trump should take the next step and begin military operations against them — inside Mexico. The president floated this idea five years ago, early in his first term, asking his military advisers about the possibility of launching missiles into Mexico to take our cartel drug labs. His advisers at the time dismissed the idea out of hand, but Trump’s instincts were right: If we want to control our southern border and stop the flow of illegal, deadly drugs into our country, we have to take the terrorist designation seriously and go to war with the cartels by taking the fight to them.

It’s not an outrageous or reckless idea. In early 2023, Reps. Dan Crenshaw and Mike Waltz, both military combat veterans, introduced legislation creating the Authorization for Use of Military Force (AUMF) to target Mexican drug cartels responsible for the fentanyl crisis at America’s southern border. The bill never went anywhere, just as previous Republican bills designating the cartels as terrorist organizations never went anywhere, but under the Biden administration it didn’t really matter. Biden was never going to do anything about the border, much less the cartels that control it. 

But now with Trump in office there’s an opportunity to solve our border problem by treating it like the national security issue it has always been. Waltz, a former Green Beret who deployed to Afghanistan, the Middle East, and Africa, has been tapped by the Trump White House to be his national security advisor. He seems to understand the nature of the threat south of the Rio Grande. “The situation at our southern border has become untenable for our law enforcement personnel,” Waltz said in a 2023 statement introducing the AUMF. “It’s time to go on offense.”

He’s right. We can’t secure the border if our Border Patrol agents are going to be attacked by cartel gunmen from the south banks of the Rio Grande. The exchange of gunfire on the border happened exactly a week after Trump began his crackdown on illegal border crossings and ordered federal immigration authorities to begin arresting and deporting criminal aliens across the country. Border crossings have plummeted since Trump took office, dealing a blow to the cartels that profit off migrant trafficking.

In retaliation for Trump targeting a major source of their income, the Mexican cartels operating on the border reportedly gave a “green light” to open fire on U.S. federal law enforcement, essentially declaring war on the United States. So be it. If they want war with the U.S., that’s what we should give them. That’s one of the reasons Trump designated them as terrorist organizations, to make it easier for the U.S. military to target them.

But because of the Mexican government’s complicity in cartel activities, going to war against the cartels will mean acting unilaterally, without the permission or cooperation of Mexican officialdom. We shouldn’t let that deter us. As a sovereign nation, the United States has the right and indeed the duty to secure our border. What that will entail, because the Mexican state is deeply corrupt and elements within it have been colluding with the cartels for years now, is ensuring the Mexican military and state and local police don’t interfere with our operations against the cartels.

And as I’ve argued elsewhere, those operations should include cross-border incursions into Mexico, whether to capture or kill cartel leaders, establish a buffer zone to protect U.S. border communities within range of small arms fire from Mexico, or to disrupt and destroy the cartels’ drug and migrant trafficking operations across northern Mexico. The only way to reestablish our southern border is to make war on those who control it, which means taking the fight directly to the cartels. Christopher Landau, who served as Trump’s ambassador to Mexico during his first term and has now been tapped for deputy secretary of state, has said that up to 40 percent of Mexican territory is controlled by the cartels. And where the cartels don’t exercise direct control, they collude and cooperate with the Mexican government, which has effectively synthesized with the major cartels. It’s not too much to say that Mexico has become a narco-state.

It should have never come to this. The situation we face now is the predictable result of four years of the Biden administration’s open border policies, which emboldened the cartels to monetize illegal immigration on a massive scale and take complete control of all border crossings. Every man, woman, and child who crosses the border is being trafficked. Under the iron rule of the cartels and cartel-connected smuggling networks, no one crosses without paying — and often these payments continue in the form of remittances to the cartels after migrants enter the U.S. What the cartels have created by seizing control of illegal immigration and extorting illegal immigrants and their families is a tax base inside the United States.

The Mexican government, going back at least to the administration of Felipe Calderón from 2006 to 2012, is involved in all of this. Calderón’s own security chief, Genaro García Luna, whose position in the Calderón administration was roughly equivalent to the director of the FBI, is facing life in a U.S. prison after being convicted of taking huge payoffs from the Sinaloa Cartel.

Then there was the 2020 case of Gen. Salvador Cienfuegos, a former Mexican defense secretary who was arrested by federal agents in Los Angeles on drug trafficking and money laundering charges. The arrest drew loud protests from top officials in Mexico, and the charges were quickly dropped after Mexico threatened to expel the Drug Enforcement Administration’s regional director and all DEA agents from the country. Trump’s Attorney General William Barr reportedly made the decision to drop the charges in order to preserve cooperation with Mexico on other matters.

Beyond these high-profile cases, there is strong evidence that Mexico’s last president, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, took millions from drug traffickers in exchange for tolerating the cartels’ operations. As The New York Times reported last year, American law enforcement officials spent years investigating allegations that López Obrador was in the pay of the cartels.

And now, his protégé and successor, Claudia Sheinbaum, has struck a defiant pose against Trump and his efforts to wrest control of the border from the cartels. Asked recently about Trump’s designation of cartels as terrorist organizations, Sheinbaum said, “They are free to take action in their territory … What we will defend is our sovereignty and our independence.”

What this means is that Sheinbaum’s government will not be a partner or an ally in the fight against the cartels. If that’s the case, then we should stop thinking of Mexico as a partner and an ally, recognize it for the hostile foreign power that it is, and proceed accordingly. 

John Daniel Davidson is a senior editor at The Federalist. His writing has appeared in the Wall Street Journal, the Claremont Review of Books, The New York Post, and elsewhere. He is the author of Pagan America: the Decline of Christianity and the Dark Age to Come. Follow him on Twitter, @johnddavidson.