President Donald Trump announced on his first day in office that organized drug trafficking groups will be designated Foreign Terrorist Organizations. While the United States has waged aggressive campaigns against such groups for decades, the move still has implications for enforcement—while increasing threats of both US military action and further violence in countries like Mexico.
Trump’s January 20 inauguration speech mentioned this measure among a series of policies relating to the border, immigration and asylum, declaring a national emergency at the southern border and promising to deploy the military against an “invasion” of migrants.
“Under the orders I sign today we will also be designating the cartels as Foreign Terrorist Organizations,” he said. “And by invoking the Alien Enemies Act of 1798, I will direct our government to use the full and immense power of federal and state law enforcement to eliminate the presence of all foreign gangs and criminal networks bringing devastating crime to US soil, including our cities and inner cities.”
The same day, Trump signed a raft of executive orders, including one that “creates a process by which certain international cartels (the Cartels) and other organizations will be designated as Foreign Terrorist Organizations.” The order states that drug trafficking groups work with terrorist groups and “antagonistic foreign governments,” are engaged in “insurgency and asymmetric warfare,” and have infiltrated foreign governments.
“The Cartels have engaged in a campaign of violence and terror throughout the Western Hemisphere that has not only destabilized countries with significant importance for our national interests but also flooded the United States with deadly drugs, violent criminals, and vicious gangs,” it reads.
“The Cartels functionally control, through a campaign of assassination, terror, rape, and brute force, nearly all illegal traffic across the southern border of the United States,” it continues. “Their activities, proximity to, and incursions into the physical territory of the United States pose an unacceptable national security risk.”
Political ramifications potentially include preemptively seeking to justify military attacks.
The order alludes to trafficking organizationa that it says control “certain portions of Mexico,” but does not name specific groups such as Sinaloa or Jalisco Nueva Generación. It does however, reference the El Salvadoran group MS-13 and the Venezuelan Tren de Aragua. It asserts a policy to “ensure the total elimination of these organizations’ presence in the United States.” Within 14 days, the secretary of state and other cabinet officials will recommend which groups should be designated as terrorists, and may invoke the Alien Enemies Act to “expedite the removal” of anyone deemed to pose a threat.
Some experts have questioned how substantively the Trump administration’s policy toward foreign trafficking organizations will differ from that of the Biden administration, which already pursues the groups using counter-narcotics powers. Biden’s government frequently sought to crack down harder, including through collaborations with the Mexican government, financial enforcement and extraditing suspected leaders to face US charges.
But there will be some enforcement consequences of the re-designation of trafficking groups—besides political ramifications that potentially include preemptively seeking to justify military attacks.
The Department of State currently designates a total of 68 groups as Foreign Terrorist Organizations (FTO), having made its first series of designations in 1997. The groups listed have a range of political identities, including communists, nationalists and religious fundamentalists, and some are state actors. Examples include Al-Qaeda, the New Irish Republican Army, ISIS, Boko Haram, the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) and the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps—the main military arm of the Iranian government.
To be listed, a group must be a foreign organization deemed to engage in terrorist activity (or to have the “capability and intent” to do so) and to threaten the security of US nationals or US foreign, defense or economic interests.
Once a group is listed, it is illegal to give it “material support or resources”—including money, property, documents, training or expert advice. Any FTO member will be considered inadmissible to and removable from the US. Any bank that holds FTO assets is required to transfer them to the Treasury Department. The US government’s stated intent is to stigmatize and isolate FTO, discouraging donations and financial support and signaling to other countries that the US wants their support and cooperation in targeting them.
Trump responded to a question about potentially deploying special forces against the organizations by saying, “Could happen … Stranger things have happened.”
Under Trump’s plan, a foreign drug-trafficking group can now be designated an FTO on the basis that its activities threaten US citizens and interests. Immediately, any US citizen or resident who works with that group, by distributing its products, for example, could be threatened with terrorism charges.
But will it lead to military conflict between the US and Mexico, or other nations? Going to war with trafficking groups, particularly in Mexico, is something that Trump and other elected Republicans have suggested for years. In 2023, Representative Dan Crenshaw (R-TX) introduced a bill in Congress to authorize use of military force to “Combat, Attack, Resist, Target, Eliminate, and Limit Influence” of such groups.
On January 20, Trump responded to a question about potentially deploying special forces against the organizations by saying, “Could happen … Stranger things have happened.” He might also authorize air strikes or other actions.
Any military strike on foreign soil would violate that country’s sovereignty, something of which Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum is acutely conscious. “We all want to fight the drug cartels,” she said on January 21, as the Associated Press reported, but emphasized this meant the US “in their territory, us in our territory.”
In an attempt to head off any potential US military action besides the threat of trade tariffs, Sheinbaum said she will pursue dialogue, and noted that she has taken steps to reflect some of Trump’s policy priorities, by cracking down harder on fentanyl trafficking and increasing detentions of migrants who travel through Mexico to reach the US.
“If these new powers .. are focused only on preventing drugs from reaching the US, they will continue to provoke violent dynamics in Mexico.”
Supply-side crackdowns have not only failed to reduce access to drugs over many decades of the drug war, but typically increase violence, as factions fight for control of lucrative markets if certain organizations are decapitated or destroyed. Arrests of people selling drugs on a local level are also associated with higher overdose risk, as people’s access to a known drug supply is disrupted.
Amid enforcement of all kinds, demand for drugs persists and will be met one way or another, which is why harm reductionists call instead for interventions to make drug use safer, and for legal regulation to make the supply safer.
“Mexico’s objective must always be focused on reducing the violence generated by drug cartels,” Mexican author and international relations researcher Carlos Pérez-Ricart said in an interview with El Pais. “The United States’ objective is to prevent drugs from reaching its country. There is a huge gap between both. Even by pursuing one, you weaken the other … If these new powers granted to the United States government are focused only on preventing drugs from reaching the US, they will continue to provoke violent dynamics in Mexico.”
Photograph of Trump in the Oval Office via the White House Facebook page