AUSTIN, TX — Today, the Texas Public Policy Foundation published a memorandum reporting on the conversations, findings, and recommendations generated from an expedition to Mexico City from March 15-20, 2025, in conjunction with America First Policy Institute.

TPPF’s major policy recommendations are as follows:

For the United States, to leverage the forthcoming review of USMCA, due NLT July 1, 2026, as its moment of maximum leverage versus Mexico, expanding it from a renegotiation of trade and commerce to an all-topics and wide-ranging redefinition of the entirety of the U.S.-Mexico relationship. The major points sought by the United States, all in the direct American interest, ought to include:

  • Breaking of the Mexican regime’s alliance with its criminal cartels, to include both political and military ties.
  • Accountability, administered by the United States, for major political and military figures involved in that alliance.
  • Denial of Mexican strategic autonomy with respect to its criminal cartels, leftist autocracies within the hemisphere, and extra-hemispheric powers.
  • Mexican adherence to treaty obligations toward the United States presently unfulfilled, especially the 1944 treaty on Rio Grande-basin water, and the agricultural provisions of USMCA itself.
  • Fair trade between Mexico and the United States.
  • Mexican-regime abandonment of its program to remake Mexican society along Venezuelan lines.

For Texas, to seize the opportunity afforded by a Constitutionally oriented Presidential Administration in Washington, D.C., to continue and accelerate the creation of its own apparatus and force for the protection of its border with Mexico.

Since December 2019, TPPF has consistently argued that Mexico’s cartel-allied MORENA regime is an untrustworthy partner to the United States, and a dangerous neighbor to Texas. Any accommodation or arrangement reached with that regime is, by reason of that regime’s nature, temporary and transactional; and therefore policy for the United States and Texas vis a vis Mexico must be informed by a combination of aggressive verification of any Mexican undertaking or promise, a recognition that the political-criminal alliance is at the core of Mexican civics, and an understanding that the credible threat of unilateral American hard power is the indispensable prerequisite to any relationship with the Mexican regime.

“Neither the American nor the Mexican side in this relationship seem to know the other’s true red lines, nor the consequences of crossing them,” TPPF Chief Transformation Officer Joshua Treviño said. “That communication must be established — and to the extent that the American ones remain unformed, we urge them to be aggressive and comprehensive.”

To read the full memorandum, click here.

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