Right on Immigration, the immigration policy arm of the Texas Public Policy Foundation (TPPF), is calling on the Biden administration to designate Mexican drug cartels as “foreign terrorist organizations”.
The call for the Mexican drug cartels to be formally designated by the United States as terrorist organization comes as Texas Governor Greg Abbott has also urged the designation in a letter to President Biden and Vice President Harris. Speaking of the cartels, Governor Abbott underscored that they “smuggle narcotics and weapons into the United States to fund their illegal enterprises. They force women and children into human and sex trafficking, enriching themselves on the misery and enslavement of immigrants.”
TPPF Senior Fellow in Border Security Josh Jones, a former federal prosecutor and expert on transnational criminal organizations, said: “Governor Abbott is correctly recognizing what U.S. law enforcement has known for a long time, that the Mexican cartels are more than mere drug trafficking organizations. They are transnational criminal organizations working with corrupt governments and other terrorist organizations and responsible for trafficking everything from military-grade weapons to deadly opioids. The reach of their criminal enterprise extends throughout the world, but no countries are more impacted than Mexico and the United States. The terrorist organization designation is long overdue.”
In 2019, Rep. Chip Roy (R-TX), introduced a bill for Secretary of State Mike Pompeo to specifically designate three Mexican drug cartels as foreign terrorist organizations. “These dangerous groups terrorize through, fear intimidation, violence and murder to control the government and bend society to their will. It is clear to the men and women of the Border Patrol and those on the ground that cartels have operational control of our border, which endangers the U.S., Mexico, and the migrants who seek to come here.”