in World News It’s Time To Start Treating Mexico Like A Hostile Foreign Power
John Daniel Davidson Visit on Twitter @johnddavidson
We’re never going to have peace and security on our southern border until we deal with the corrupt and criminal elements that run Mexico.
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.”