In recent months, President Donald Trump has made clear that he wants to amp up America’s fight against Mexican drug cartels, which play a significant role in the epidemic of opioids and other drugs sweeping across the U.S. Now, the president is on the verge of taking a big step forward in that regard.
Trump told Bill O’Reilly on Tuesday that his administration is set to designate various Mexican drug cartels as foreign terrorist organizations, a move that would open up the government to a wide array of resources to combat the dangerous groups, The Daily Wire reported Wednesday.
A big move
Designating the cartels as terrorist organizations isn’t a new idea; in fact, O’Reilly noted that Trump himself has suggested doing so in the past. “One of the things that you’ve said to me…is that if another country murdered 100,000 Americans with guns we would go to war with that country,” O’Reilly said Tuesday, according to Newsweek. “Yet, the Mexican drug cartels kill more than 100,000 Americans every year by the importation of dangerous narcotics.”
The journalist went on: “Are you going to designate those cartels in Mexico as terror groups and start hitting them with drones and things like that?”
For Trump’s part, he wouldn’t reveal his exact plans, but promised the cartels “will be designated.”
“I’ve already offered Mexico…to let us go in and clean it out and [the Mexican president] so far has rejected the offer but at some point, something has to be done,” Trump said. “Look, we are losing 100,000 people a year to what is happening and what is coming through on Mexico.”
When O’Reilly pressed Trump on whether he is definitely “going to designate the Mexican cartels as terror groups,” the president replied: “Yeah, I will be.”
“I have been working on that for the last 90 days. You know, designation is not that easy, you have to go through a process, and we are well into that process,” Trump vowed.
A step forward
According to the Congressional Research Service, an entity suspected of engaging in terrorism or terrorist activity can be designated as a Foreign Terrorist Organization (FTO) if it meets three distinct criteria: it is a foreign organization; it engages in or retains the capability and intent to engage in terrorism; and it threatens the security of U.S. nationals or the national defense, foreign relations, or the economic interests of the United States.
Such a designation makes it unlawful for anyone in the U.S. to provide “material support or resources” to the organization, allows the Treasury Secretary to require U.S. financial institutions to block transactions involving assets possessed or controlled by the organization, and makes members of the organization inadmissible to the U.S. In most cases, members of the group are also subject to deportation if already within the country.
The Mexican drug cartels are already described by the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) in their 2018 National Drug Threat Assessment as being “Transnational Criminal Organizations” (TCOs) that, along with trafficking illicit drugs, “represent significant threats to public health, law enforcement, and national security” in the U.S.
For now, the only real hurdle stopping the cartels’ designations as FTOs is the Mexican government, which, for its own reasons, has resisted such measures. But it looks like that may not matter to President Trump any longer.
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