DEEP DIVE — When the U.S. intelligence community (IC) declared last week that the greatest danger to American national security is old-fashioned organized crime – mainly Mexico’s drug cartels – many former IC experts wondered about other major threats: global terrorism, cyberattacks, and the multiple menaces traced to China, Russia, Iran and North Korea.
But the placement of Mexico at the top of the Annual Threat Assessment is welcome news for law enforcement veterans who have worked inside Mexico and on the southwest border for years, and also for many community leaders and citizens in places beset by drugs and crime. Their views of the drug threat have collided with conciliatory approaches urged by the Washington foreign policy establishment and the American business community, which often oppose any move that might disrupt Mexico’s status as America’s top trading partner.
"This is the first time since the Mexican-American war of 1846 that Mexico is the number-one foreign policy priority for the U.S. government,” Paul Craine, formerly the DEA regional director for Mexico, Central America, and Canada, told The Cipher Brief. “That's never happened since the battle for Texas independence and Texas becoming a state. Drug trafficking and the border went from page 36 of last year's assessment under [President Joe] Biden to the number priority on this year’s assessment."
To be sure, traditional national security hot-button issues, particularly China, get their share of attention in this year's threat assessment. “The IC sees China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea engaging in activities that could challenge U.S. capabilities and interests, especially related to our security and economy," the document says.
Still, the Trump administration is bent on sending a clear message that Washington will no longer tolerate the surge in power of Mexico’s cartels. Born during the Prohibition era, reinvigorated by U.S. demand for Mexican marijuana during the rebellious 1960s and 1970s, and enriched by the cocaine boom of the 1980s and the recent traffic in the synthetic opioid fentanyl, Mexico’s organized crime groups have never been stronger. They now have a presence in every U.S. state and dozens of countries, according to the DEA’s latest assessment. They control nearly the full length of the U.S.-Mexico frontier. The DEA says the cartels have forged alliances with Chinese organized crime to handle money-laundering needs, and to supply industrial quantities of chemicals for their superlabs, which make fentanyl and methamphetamines for the U.S. and world markets.
Presenting the threat assessment last week, Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard told Congress that today’s cartels should be considered a grave danger to American national security threats for “engaging in a wide array of illicit activity, from narcotics trafficking, to money laundering, to smuggling of illegal immigrants and human trafficking,” which “threatens the United States and the well-being of the American people … putting American lives and livelihood at risk.” They are responsible for 54,000 overdose deaths in the U.S. over the year that ended in October 2024, Gabbard said.
Gabbard's testimony – and the report itself – obscured one piece of good news: the U.S. overdose fatalities have actually declined recently, from a peak of 114,000 deaths over the year that ended in August 2023. Nonetheless, the IC assessment was a clear statement of priorities, in lockstep with President Donald Trump’s view that the trafficking in narcotics and people must be considered top-tier national security problems.
“The emphasis of every Annual Threat Assessment (ATA) changes with every administration,” Beth Sanner, who served as Deputy Director of National Intelligence at ODNI and was the preparer of the Presidential Daily Brief in the first Trump administration, told The Cipher Brief. “It's the prioritization, and I think we're going to see this throughout all the national security strategies that are coming out. And as [Secretary of State] Marco Rubio said, foreign policy now is about the safety, prosperity and protection of Americans. It's all about Americans.”
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Stopping the traffickers
Beyond the threat assessment, the Trump administration has put forth a series of plans to deal with the issue. Experts are divided as to how well those ideas will work against the vast militarized and economic powers of the cartels.
“Shutting down the border would immediately transform the drug trade, but it would also impact our economy, so that's not going to happen,” Ray Donovan, the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration’s chief of operations until 2023, told The Cipher Brief. “The next best thing to do is what we've done. Designating the cartels foreign terrorist organizations is going to impact their ability to operate. Now you have a whole-of-government strategy in the United States that's being formed to go after them. It's not just law enforcement. It's literally a national security issue now. And that elevates strategic priorities across the United States. All the agencies that were normally working typical historical [Middle Eastern] terrorist groups are now focused in on the Mexican cartels. That means more capacity, more resources, more action, more results.”
Many in the intelligence community privately believe that shifting counter-terrorism assets to the border and Mexico is a bad idea. Even within the law enforcement community, there’s quiet division. While Trump’s top immigration officials insist that all undocumented migrants inside the U.S. are law-breakers, officials responsible for stanching the illegal drug trade privately worry that the Trump administration is devoting far too much time, energy and money chasing down migrants who aren’t involved in organized crime. As a result, smart, well-insulated cartel figures continue to operate as usual.
President Donald Trump set the administration's dramatic new course on Inauguration Day, when he signed an executive order that designated the Mexican cartels and two Central and South American criminal groups as “foreign terrorist organizations” that “threaten the safety of the American people, the security of the United States, and the stability of the international order in the Western Hemisphere” and “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 was the language that set the stage for the new IC assessment – and a range of actions from the Defense Department.
On January 31, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth placed an introductory call to his Mexican counterparts at the powerful Secretaría de la Defensa Nacional, SEDENA, and according to the Wall Street Journal, startled them by asserting that if they didn’t deal with the corrupt relationship between the country’s government and drug cartels, the U.S. military was prepared to take unilateral action. As everyone on the call knew, if U.S. military boots hit Mexican soil, Mexican citizens would be outraged.
Some experts believe that by implying that the U.S. is willing to use military force, and arraying highly visible military assets along the border, the Trump administration is putting on a performance meant to spur the Mexican government to take its own concerted action and produce tangible results.
“The terrorism designation is going to have a significant effect, because Mexico can't just ignore that these groups are now considered terrorists, and that’s not going to go away,” Craine says. “The message is, if we tell you something's a priority and you don't take effective action, then this” – meaning the U.S. military looming on the border – “is the consequence.”
Mexico acts
Faced with the frightening prospect of an actual U.S. incursion, along with Trump’s threat of heavy U.S. tariffs on Mexican exports, on February 27 Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum handed over 29 cartel figures who were serving time in Mexican jails and wanted in the U.S. for racketeering, drug trafficking, murder, illegal use of firearms, money laundering, and other crimes. Among them was the infamous Guadalajara cartel founder Rafael Caro Quintero, indicted in the U.S. for masterminding the 1985 torture-murder of DEA agent Enrique “Kiki” Camarena, who was on the FBI most-wanted list with a $20 million reward for his arrest. Others were from the Sinaloa Cartel, Cártel de Jalisco Nueva Generación (CJNG), Cártel del Noreste (formerly Los Zetas), La Nueva Familia Michoacana, and Cártel de Golfo (Gulf Cartel). Significantly, Sheinbaum chose to expel rather than extradite the 29, an important concession to Trump. Extradition bars a sentence of capital punishment, meaning that she had essentially agreed that the U.S. could seek the death penalty against Caro Quintero, the accused leader of the torture-murder of DEA agent Camarena, and any other alleged murderers shipped to the States.
Trump and his aides have made clear that the expulsions, while welcome, won’t satisfy the U.S. Last Friday, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem landed in Mexico and met with Sheinbaum and other top Mexican officials. Afterwards, Noem posted on X that Mexico’s moves so far were “a positive step,” before adding that “there is still much work to be done to stop the flow of drugs and illegal immigrants into our country.”
Most of the 29 accused traffickers are older men who have been in prison for years, and according to DEA agents working on the border, they are not the most crucial players in today’s criminal underground. Agents say that Mexico’s most powerful drug kingpins remain safely in their strongholds, managing their global empires: Ivan Archivaldo Guzman-Salazar and his brother Jesus Alfredo Guzmán Salazar, known as the Chapitos, sons of former Sinaloa Cartel leader Joaquin Guzman Loera, aka “El Chapo,” and creators of the Sinaloa Cartel’s fentanyl trafficking operations; and Nemesio Oseguera-Cervantes, aka El Mencho, founder and leader of the CJNG, which is based in Guadalajara and is believed to manufacture and ship tons of methamphetamine. All three face multiple indictments in the U.S. and multi-million-dollar bounties for their capture.
If they are captured, agents say, there are plenty of ambitious, clever young players ready to take their places. Many are likely to prove even more formidable foes, because they are adept at 21st-century tradecraft. Already, group leaders, known as “cell heads” and “plaza bosses,” have shown themselves to be innovative at harnessing spyware and encryption technologies to control their territory, spot and neutralize outsiders, and protect themselves and their drug loads.
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The U.S. and Mexican military responses
Responding to Trump’s pressure and hoping to avert his tariffs, the Mexican government has also mobilized 10,000 Mexican National Guard troops to key areas along the border. It’s not at all clear they can prevail against the traffickers’ private armies, which are equipped with special operations-style weapons and armor, encrypted communications, and which employ large numbers of human spies and lookouts. Drug-producing areas are tightly controlled surveillance states; in March, according to Mexican press reports, Mexican national guard troops tried to capture El Mencho in a Jalisco village, only to get caught up in an ambush and firefight. At least three soldiers died, many were injured and survivors retreated empty-handed.
On the U.S. side, some 10,000 U.S. military service members have been assigned to support Joint Task Force Southern Border, headquartered at Fort Huachuca, Arizona. In March, Hegseth added a Stryker brigade combat team and general support aviation battalion to the task force, and ordered troops to patrol key smuggling corridors and on foot and in Stryker armored vehicles. On March 15, Hegseth and the U.S. Northern Command deployed the Arleigh Burke-class guided missile destroyer USS Gravely to Texas’ Gulf coast. And on March 23, NORTHCOM announced on X that the guided missile destroyer USS Spruance, deployed out of Naval Base San Diego, used its radar to help a U.S. Coast Guard cutter and U.S. Customs and Border Protection interceptor boat take 13 suspects and a vessel into custody “as part of the ship’s mission to bolster security on the southern border.”
The U.S. military and the intelligence community are also reported to be using surveillance aircraft and drones along the border. Overflights are fine for spotting bands of migrants wading into the Rio Grande or trekking through the Sonora desert toward the Arizona border, but they are
of limited utility for spotting drug labs, since meth and fentanyl manufacturing facilities are industrialized operations inside buildings in urban areas, not huts out in the jungle, like Colombian cocaine labs back in the 1980’s.
Meanwhile, U.S. troops and surveillance platforms can’t do more than observe and report; Reconstruction-era law forbids the American military from making arrests. The Pentagon says U.S. troops will report suspicious sightings to U.S. Customs and Border Protection and the U.S. Border Patrol, or, in the case of the Gravely, to the U.S. Coast Guard. In previous administrations, officials from those agencies complained of being overwhelmed. With the Trump administration’s ongoing personnel reductions, it’s not clear that enough military and law enforcement personnel can be fielded to respond to sightings of suspected smugglers in the rugged backcountry.
More important than the ships and aircraft?
Law enforcement officials say that the most valuable asset the Pentagon and intelligence community bring to the effort is intelligence, particularly communications intercepts. According to law enforcement officers on the border, cartels are organized into cells that communicate constantly via multiple layers of transmissions over heavily encrypted mobile phone apps that mimic two-way radios. Encrypted radio-over-internet (ROIP) and voice-over-internet (VOIP) communications modes are practically impossible for law enforcement to tap. The terrorism designation may empower federal agents to request help from the National Security Agency to break into some transmissions – although weeding out the most fruitful communications from billions of signals emitted by cartel and civilian devices along the border will remain a severe challenge.
The cartels’ favored method for moving tons of drugs is not people with backpacks, trekking through the mesquite along the Rio Grande, but eighteen-wheelers plowing up the four-lane highways and passing directly through ports of entry. The traffickers have fitted cargo trucks with hidden compartments, and they sometimes use even more creative ploys. On Feb. 18, U.S. Customs officers at the Eagle Pass Port of Entry discovered 13,101 pounds – 6½ tons – of methamphetamine in the back of a tractor-trailer truck heading for Houston. Manifested as a “drying agent for piglets,” it was the largest single drug load ever encountered by law enforcement and was valued at more than $117 million. On March 10, Customs and Border Patrol officers at the Roma, Texas, port of entry stopped a tractor-trailer hauling a shipment of mineral water and discovered 1,632 bottles weighing 2268 pounds – more than one ton. The contents were actually liquid methamphetamine, valued at $20 million.
Such triumphs are the exception. Street prices for meth and fentanyl remain low, an indicator that seizures aren’t causing shortages in the U.S. black market. The reason is overwhelming volume. According to the U.S. Transportation Department, in 2024 nearly 6 million trucks and 40 million personal cars entered the U.S. from Mexico, far too many to be unloaded, pulled apart, thoroughly inspected and the cargo tested for drug chemicals.
The ripple effects
Donovan said the foreign terrorist designation is likely to have a serious impact on international banks that have been involved - even indirectly - in the drug traffic. A sweeping 1996 U.S. anti-terrorism statute makes it illegal for any person or business in the U.S., or people and entities overseas and subject to U.S. jurisdiction, to “knowingly provide material support to a foreign terrorist organization that has been designated by the Secretary of State.” Since all legitimate banks participate in the SWIFT (Society of Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication) system that facilitates money transfers across borders, bankers anywhere can be prosecuted or penalized under the “material support” clause if they fail to take measures to know their customers and make sure they’re not associates of terrorist groups – and now, the Mexican cartels.
“Most banks have some nexus with drug trafficking through money laundering, so that's a big risk for them, especially now,” Donovan said. To avoid crippling financial penalties, he said, banks and companies are scrambling to seek legal guidance. No one wants to follow in the footsteps of Canada’s TD Bank, which last October pleaded guilty to conspiracy to commit money laundering and agreed to pay a record $3.1 billion in fines. TD Bank’s lax internal policing measures were found to have been exploited by money launderers for Colombian and Asian drug groups and other criminals.
The Trump administration’s initiatives on the border, Donovan says, “are starting to transform the cartels. The drug trade is going to pivot and there's a lot more attention, like never before. I think it's going to impact their ability to traffic fentanyl, methamphetamine and cocaine into the United States.”
But he doesn't believe it means that the Mexican cartels can be put out of business.
“Four years ago, we said that the Sinaloa cartel was in 47 countries,” Donovan says. “Now we think they're in closer to 65 countries...Just because we're tightening up the Southwest border doesn't mean that they stop producing fentanyl or methamphetamine. It just means that they outsource it, and they're going to go to other countries. The U.S. market used to be the only market for Colombian cocaine. That is not the case today. Now, cocaine is in high demand in Europe, high demand in Australia, in Canada, and many other countries throughout the world.”
Which is why experts like Donovan and Craine believe the cartels will adjust to the new reality and ship their wares to easier, more lucrative markets. The new Trump administration measures “are going to impact the trade as it relates to the United States,” Donovan says. “That drug trade is going to continue, but it's going to continue to grow elsewhere.”
Ultimately, experts say, Mexico’s cartels flourish because the powerful class in Mexico has been getting a big piece of the action – worth many billions of dollars. “All of this stems from incredible corruption and impunity, and that still goes to the top levels of the entire government and especially the states and the governors,” Craine says. “Until they address and sever the corrupt connections between the high-level politicians in many of the Mexican states and the cartels, there will be minimal change."
Ultimately, experts say, members of the Mexican elite, not just the cartels, have to be persuaded that the U.S. is dead serious, is prepared to take action and will persist over years, not days. One pronouncement from the White House won’t convince them. But for the moment, the Trump administration has certainly gotten their attention.
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