A new directive signed last week by President Donald Trump gives the Pentagon authorization to use military force against Latin American drug cartels designated as terrorist organizations, according to administration sources.
A U.S. official familiar with the matter confirmed to Rolling Stone certain details regarding the Trump-signed directive, which was first reported by The New York Times. Other knowledgeable sources, working in or close to this iteration of the Trump White House, say that unless Mexico gives Trump what he wants, this administration is serious about attacking its neighbor to the south. And according to administration officials and others familiar with the Trump administration preparations, it’s not a bluff: This American president wants to violently breach Mexico’s sovereignty — if and when he feels like it. He, after all, effectively campaigned on doing so during his 2024 bid.
Just don’t call any of this a plan for an invasion, U.S. government officials implore.
Speaking about the new directive, a senior administration official says, “It’s not a negotiating tactic. It’s not Art of the Deal. The president has been clear that a strike … is coming unless we see some big, major changes.”
Indeed, this seems less like a negotiating tactic and more like a Mafia-style intimidation campaign, with the supposed goal of extorting the Mexican government into miraculously solving America’s fentanyl crisis. But that doesn’t make the threat to Mexico’s sovereignty any less real.
In response to Trump’s directive to target drug cartels, Mexico President Claudia Sheinbaum last week rejected the use of U.S. military forces in Mexico. But earlier this week, Mexico extradited 26 alleged cartel members to the United States in a move hailed by Attorney General Pam Bondi as part of the Trump administration’s “historic efforts to dismantle cartels and foreign terrorist organizations.” The fugitives face a variety of federal and state charges, including drug trafficking, kidnapping, murder, and money laundering. Among those apprehended are leaders from major drug cartels, including the Jalisco New Generation cartel (CJNG).
A similar transfer occurred in February, when 29 cartel members were sent to the United States by the Mexican government. Both transfers came in the wake of saber-rattling by the Trump administration. The moves, according to experts tracking cartel operations, are an attempt to stave off U.S. military intervention and preserve ongoing trade negotiations.
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For years, Trump and other leaders in the Republican Party have openly threatened Mexico with an American invasion, citing the fentanyl crisis and drug cartels as a justification. The GOP and its leader are not shy about this: They openly talk about it and embrace it as if it’s sound policy.
At a December event held at Harvard University to discuss the 2024 election, Rolling Stone asked several Trump lieutenants why the then-president-elect and other Republicans kept talking so much about invading Mexico. James Blair, now a White House deputy chief of staff, replied with a straight face that candidate Trump “never” proposed invading Mexico. (As recently as late January, the president told reporters that he absolutely was not taking the possibility of sending U.S. special ops into Mexico off the table. “Could happen,” he said, adding that “stranger things have happened.”)
The administration took a first step in January, when the State Department declared eight cartels — the Sinaloa cartel, CJNG, the Northeast cartel, the Michoacán family, the United Cartels, and the Gulf Cartel — to be foreign terrorist organizations. The Salvadoran MS-13 and the Venezuelan Tren de Aragua gang were also on the list. This designation triggers U.S. sanctions, including asset freezes, restrictions on financial transactions, and prohibitions on U.S. citizens and organizations providing support. But Geoffrey Corn, director of the Center for Military Law and Policy at Texas Tech University School of Law, says the terror designations don’t authorize the use of force.
“You have to make a credible argument that the U.S. faces an armed attack,” says Corn, a retired U.S. Army judge advocate officer who served as the Army’s senior law of war adviser. “This characterization that we’re under attack by these cartels is essential to using the president’s war powers.” (The terror designations also provided the justification to ship hundreds of Venezuelan migrants to a notorious mega-prison in El Salvador.)
He argues that the Trump administration has characterized migration as an invasion, so it isn’t a stretch to think they’d consider the shipment of drugs as an attack. Corn admits he could craft an argument that drugs are an attack, Mexico is unable to prevent use of its territory for this attack, and special operations raids are thus a proportional response. But is that a viable policy? America tried to shoot its way out of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan with disastrous effects.
“It is really easy to get the United States into a war and very hard to get us out,” Corn tells Rolling Stone, adding that there is little to check military adventurism after the attacks on Sept. 11. “It’s gotten too easy to go to war.”
And Trump, despite campaigning as a peace president, seems eager to rely on the military as his hammer, deploying troops to Los Angeles to quell protests against immigration raids and now to Washington, D.C., after a group of teens allegedly beat up a Trump administration staffer known as “Big Balls.”
“When your only tool is a hammer, then everything looks like a nail,” Corn says.
Rolling Stone reported in November that Trump’s incoming administration was considering a “soft invasion” of Mexico, in which American special operations would be sent covertly to assassinate cartel leaders. Potential plans on the table at the time included everything from drone strikes and commando raids, airstrikes on cartel infrastructure or drug labs, sending in military trainers and “advisers,” and waging cyber warfare against drug lords and their networks.
But a former intelligence officer who’s been tracking the issue says the new Trump directive is bigger than just the Mexican cartels. The focus is on interrupting cartel operations throughout the region. Before the terror announcement, the U.S. military and CIA were already increasing surveillance flights of Mexican drug cartels. The drone flights are part of the ongoing blitz of surveillance flights likely intercepting and decrypting cell phone signals near the southern border.
U.S. officials say since Trump was sworn back into office in January, there have been multiple Pentagon, White House, and intelligence-strategy meetings on how to use the American military for cartel operations, and that the president and some of his top advisers have personally demanded items like target lists for potential drone strikes on Mexican territory. A Defense Department source says units at Fort Bragg are preparing target packages. The source declined to share which unit or who the targets might be, but the North Carolina post is home to both the Army Special Operations Command and the Joint Special Operations Command, which oversees Delta Force and Seal Team Six.
A federal agent working on the southern border says there has been an “extreme refocusing” on cartel operations in the past few months. In the blood sport of interagency cooperation, the agent says there was a real sense of cooperation, including intelligence sharing with agencies usually focused on external threats.
If, or when, Trump decides to blow something up in Mexico, he will be presented with an already prepared menu of options, sources say, which would include possible targets like high-profile cartel hubs or leadership hideouts, or drug-making facilities, as identified by American intelligence gathering. Stefano Ritondale, a former Army intelligence officer who uses the handle All Source News on X, says if the Trump administration does act, the target will likely be big and symbolic.
“Why piss off the Mexican government for a chemist or arms dealer or money launderer?” says Ritondale, who also works as chief intelligence officer for Artorias, a private intelligence and data analysis company.
In such a scenario, the president, according to those who’ve spoken to him about this, would want a target deemed important enough to drug-lord operations that he could go on TV to make a national address and tout the historic nature of the military operation, as he did with the death of ISIS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi.
If Ritondale was betting, his money is on Nemesio Oseguera, also known as El Mencho, the leader of CJNG. The U.S. government has offered a reward of $10 million for information leading to his arrest, one of the highest bounties ever offered.
“El Mencho is the only person worth doing it,” he says.
One of the six designated cartels, CJNG, is considered by the Mexican government to be the most powerful drug cartel in Mexico. With assets estimated at $20 billion, CJNG generates revenue from drugs like fentanyl and cocaine as well as extorting the tortilla, avocado, lime, and chicken industries. Fuel theft and counterfeit timeshare dealing also provide a revenue stream. On Wednesday, the U.S. Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control sanctioned four individuals and 13 companies in Mexico for timeshare fraud orchestrated by the CJNG.
Another target might be Iván Archivaldo Guzmán Salazar, a key leader within Los Chapitos. Known as “El Chapito,” the faction’s primary business is international drug trafficking, and it has dominated smuggling fentanyl into the United States.
“The narcos are paying attention,” says Mica Treviño, who runs CartelInsider.com, a website dedicated to researching the cartels. “For now, their focus is still on their rivals. Even so, nobody’s missing the fact that the U.S. is circling overhead, watching every move.”
A strike against a cartel leader would likely do little to accomplish the mission of stopping the flow of drugs across the southern border. Carolyn Gallaher, a professor studying guerrilla and paramilitary violence at American University’s School of International Service, told Rolling Stone in January that a campaign to decapitate the cartels would only create a succession crisis that would be settled with violence, and would ultimately do little to accomplish the administration’s goals of stemming the flow of drugs. This sentiment is echoed by the agent near the border.
“No matter if you take someone off the street, there are countless guys behind them to take that spot,” the agent says. “Will they adapt? Absolutely. Will they recover? Yes. They will not cease to operate.”
From Rolling Stone US
