President Donald Trump, who has frequently suggested he might use U.S. military force against the cartels in Mexico, currently has options to do so. However, even with the new executive order he signed designating cartels as Foreign Terrorist Organizations (FTO), Trump would still face several legal and policy hurdles, as well as geopolitical considerations, before he could broaden the scope of any actions across the border, according to former military, intelligence and government officials we spoke with. Such a move would be unprecedented – the U.S. military has never directly attacked cartels in Mexico, some of those former officials explained.
The most recent indication of the Trump administration’s intentions came last week when Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth was asked if he would use the military to combat cartels.
“All options will be on the table if we’re dealing with what are designated to be foreign terrorist organizations who are specifically targeting Americans on our border,” he told Fox News. Hegseth did not provide any specifics because he didn’t want to get ahead of Trump on the issue. The president has yet to publicly divulge his plans.
However, a number of actions have to take place before we see anything like the scene depicted in the 1994 movie Clear and Present Danger, in which a U.S. Navy F/A-18 Hornet carries out a missile strike on a Colombian cartel leader.
“Presidents – and especially this President – assert very broad power to use force unilaterally, at least up to a certain level, without congressional authorization” under Article II of the U.S. Constitution, Matthew C. Waxman, Liviu Librescu Professor of Law at Columbia University, said. “The claim is generally that as commander in chief and chief executive, the president has power to [use] military force to defend the United States.”
A direct attack by cartels north of the border would give Trump the widest latitude for responding with military force inside Mexico, Javed Ali, who worked in the National Security Council’s (NSC) counterterrorism unit during the first Trump administration, commented on Monday. There is already reported chatter about that, with claims that cartels are discussing using weaponized drones against U.S. Customs and Border Patrol (CPB) and law enforcement personnel along the border.
In addition to spurring Trump to invoke Article II, such an attack would allow him to respond under United Nations Article 51’s self-defense provisions, noted Ali, now an associate professor of practice at the Gerald R. Ford School of Public Policy at the University of Michigan teaching courses on counterterrorism and domestic terrorism, cybersecurity, and national security law and policy. Trump could also invoke the War Powers Act, which would give him 60 days to carry out military operations before seeking Congressional approval, Ali added.
Meanwhile, the new executive order on cartels, which has yet to be enacted, would not greatly open the aperture on U.S. military actions in Mexico, Waxman stated. That executive order is one of several Trump signed to deal with the problems of drugs, unchecked immigration, and human trafficking.
“Designating cartels as FTOs has some legal effects and some political ones,” said Waxman, who served in senior positions at the State Department, Department of Defense, and National Security Council during the George W. Bush administration. As a National Security Council aide, he was involved in the White House response to the attacks on Sept. 11, 2001. “Legally, [the executive order] triggers a range of criminal law enforcement and immigration authorities, as well as financial measures, that can be used to squeeze them and cut off support for them. Politically, it can help elevate their threat by treating them like other grave national security threats, and thereby lay some groundwork for future actions. However, FTO designations do not directly trigger authorities to use military force.”
The designation, for instance, would not automatically give Trump the ability to carry out special operations forces raids against cartels akin to the U.S. Navy SEAL Team 6 Operation Neptune Spear mission that killed Osama Bin Laden in Pakistan on May 1, 2011. However, there is an existing law that could make such an action against cartels possible. President Barack Obama invoked Title 50, the U.S. law permitting a president to carry out clandestine operations in foreign countries, to justify that operation.
“Every president has a powerful tool under Title 50 in which military operations could be approved and conducted against a priority U.S. target in a foreign country, but without the consultation or coordination of the foreign government in which the target is located,” explained Ali.
“It’s possible that the president could authorize and notify to the congressional intelligence committees a covert action program against the cartels,” under Title 50, Waxman noted. “I don’t know if Trump or a previous president has done so, or what the parameters are of such a covert action program. The intelligence oversight statutes allow the president quite broad authority to initiate covert action programs, subject to certain special procedures and reporting requirements.”
There are other precedents for using force against terror groups on foreign soil. U.S. raids like the one that killed ISIS leader Abu Bakr Al-Baghdadi in 2019, drones strikes like the one that killed Iranian Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps leader Qassem Soleimani in 2020, and the airstrike carried out last week against ISIS leaders in Somalia were all conducted against terror groups. You can see the latest attack in the following video.
However, those actions were justified under the Authorization for the Use of Military Forces (AUMF) against Islamic terror organizations enacted in the wake of Al-Qaeda’s 2001 attack on New York and Washington D.C. The 2001 AUMF was enacted to allow then-President George W. Bush to go after that operation’s planners and those who aided and harbored them. Another AUMF was authorized in 2002 to give Bush the authority to invade Iraq, and subsequent administrations used it to justify actions against Islamic terror groups around the world.
At present, cartels are not considered to be directly connected in a significant scale to these Islamic terror groups. Should Trump want to launch an airstrike, a special operations forces raid or even a wider military strategy against cartels in Mexico, he would likely need a new AUMF specifically tailored for those organizations, Ali posited. Waxman, however, had a different take, suggesting that Trump would not need a new AUMF to go after cartels, but might want one “to make his legal arguments stronger.”
Either way, a cartel-designated AUMF is something that has been considered before. In a piece he co-authored for Lawfare, Waxman noted that in 2023, some Republican House members introduced an AUMF against fentanyl-trafficking cartels. Current U.S. National Security Advisor Mike Waltz was one of the co-sponsors when he was in Congress. The measure never passed.
While a Title 50 operation in Mexico would not require an AUMF, such a mission would likely be a one-off, Ali suggested.
“Using the 2011 [Bin Laden] raid as an example, given the risky cross-border nature of that kind of operation, the U.S. would probably only do that once under Title 50 versus a new AUMF from Congress that would authorize a longer pattern of military operations similar to the campaign against AQ and the Taliban in Afghanistan or against ISIS in Iraq and Syria in the mid-2010s,” stated Ali.
There is another option at Trump’s disposal. CIA Special Operations Group (SOG) teams could conceivably target cartel personnel.
“This would require a presidential finding and compliance with covert action oversight laws, and because assassinations are barred by an executive order, the CIA would need to argue that this is not a political killing but is something else,” Waxman explained.
Regardless of whether he followed required authorizations or not, Trump’s first option would likely be airstrikes — with drones and/or standoff weapons being the most likely choice — for several reasons.
As we have previously reported, Mexico’s increasingly well-armed drug cartels pose a serious threat to external forces. Some cartel units are extremely well-equipped and have adopted some of the latest features of warfare. They have been using drones to attack enemies for years now, for instance.
These organizations also often move around in increasingly well protected so called “narco tanks.”
Cartels can also have defacto control over large areas with lots of support at the ready. Inner circles around key drug lords are among the most heavily defended and fortified positions in these areas, which makes them challenging targets. But the same ‘find and fix’ tactics that have been used to take out terrorists in the Middle East, especially with the help of drones, could potentially be brought to bear to help solve that problem. Unless Mexico agrees to their employment, they would not be operating in totally permissible airspace. While Mexico’s air defenses are extremely rudimentary, this could still be an issue.
Any sort of ground raid without prior authority from Mexico raises the concern that any U.S. troops inadvertently left behind or otherwise captured could be without legal protection. That’s why U.S. military deployments frequently take place with Status of Forces Agreements (SOFAs) giving military personnel and civilian contractors protection from being subject to unfair criminal or civil justice systems.
“This is important not only to protect the rights of U.S. service members and to vindicate the United States’ interest in exercising disciplinary jurisdiction over U.S. uniformed personnel, but also because U.S. willingness to deploy forces overseas – and public support for such deployments – could suffer significant setbacks if U.S. personnel were at risk of being tried in an inherently unfair system, or at any rate, in one that departs fundamentally from U.S. concepts of basic procedural fairness,” according to the U.S. State Department.
While far less risky to U.S. troops, the downside of relying solely on airpower is the loss of valuable intelligence U.S. forces could gather on the ground to rapidly exploit, as they did in Afghanistan and Iraq.
Either way, whether an airstrike or a raid, the U.S. directly attacking the cartel in its own bastion would be a huge escalation and could spark a wider, sustained crescendo of hostilities, especially along the U.S.-Mexico border. Even cartel reprisal actions inside the U.S. are possible.
Beyond direct military action, designating cartels as terror organizations would also not necessarily increase the ability to collect intelligence against them, a former senior U.S. intelligence official told The War Zone.
“As long as they’re not a U.S. person, you can collect on all you want,” said the former official, speaking on condition of anonymity. “Drug traffickers would certainly fall into that category.”
In one example of that underway already, a U.S. Air Force RC-135V/W Rivet Joint surveillance jet on Monday was spotted by an online flight-tracking site executing an unprecedented set of missions through the narrow Gulf of California. This is directly adjacent to notorious cartel hotspots. The use of U.S. military surveillance aircraft in the counter-narcotics role is far from new, but placing one of America’s most capable strategic aerial collection platforms right in the Mexican cartels’ backyard certainly is.
Regardless of what Trump decides, U.S. military efforts to fight the cartels on the ground in Mexico, or at all, would greatly benefit from the approval of the host nation. That does not seem to be forthcoming from the Mexican government at this point. This would be another complicating factor for any assault, even a one-off operation, as it could end up with the Mexican military confronting U.S. soldiers if things go deeply awry.
Mexico President Claudia Sheinbaum recently said that Trump’s executive order would only be applicable if there’s close coordination between the two governments, The Associated Press reported. Mexico would defend its sovereignty and independence while seeking coordination with the U.S. in the wake of the order, she stated on Monday.
“We all want to fight the drug cartels,” Sheinbaum said at her daily press briefing. The U.S. “in their territory, us in our territory.”
A retired special forces officer we spoke with noted that there have been times in the past when the U.S. was kicked out of a country by its leadership. He pointed to Bolivia as one example.
“If you don’t have the host nation backing, it will get bad,” he said. “We had a situation with [then president] Evo Morales in Bolivia. He was upset and asked the DEA to leave. We had traditionally sent two SF teams there since 1986. We had a good relationship with them.”
While there is a lot of conjecture about what could take place, the U.S. military has a long history of efforts to counter cartels in Mexico and elsewhere in Latin America. These have been advise and assist missions to help host nations conducted by the U.S. Army Special Forces, better known as Green Berets. As part of their Foreign Internal Defense (FID) mission, Green Berets help host nations fight cartels without taking direct action themselves.
These missions have traditionally fallen to the 7th Special Forces Group, the experts we spoke with explained. That’s because that group, headquartered at Eglin Air Force Base in the Florida panhandle, has Latin America as its area of responsibility and many members are fluent in Spanish and knowledgeable about the region and its customs.
“They would be the right guys,” said the retired SOF officer, who spent a dozen years assigned to the U.S.-led Plan Colombia. That was the counterinsurgency/counternarcotics fight against the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), a guerilla group heavily involved in the drug trade that undermined security and the rule of law in Colombia and across Latin America.
“During the Plan Colombia period that I participated in from 1999 to 2011, the 7th Special Forces trained the 3,500-man Colombian Army Counterdrug Brigade, the 600-man Junglas (Police Airmobile Antinarcotics Unit), the Colombian Army special forces units: the Lancero Battalion and the Commando Battalion,” said the expert. “They organized the instructor cadre for the Police Mobile Carabinero Squadrons (80 x 120-man police units that operate in rural areas), and they trained the 80-man national unit, the AFEU.”
The expert foresees similar efforts with Mexico’s special military and law enforcement units who take the lead in the fight against cartels. They also noted that these are law enforcement missions, and these special units are employed when greater force, advanced military skills, and special equipment are needed to provide the decisive edge in confronting the heavily armed cartels.
He laid out several steps that have already been taken.
“US Special Operations Forces (Army, Navy, Marines) can train Mexico’s special military and police units in operations planning and execution,” he stated. SOF liaison officers, known as LNOS, “are assigned to the Embassy Working Group. They meet with the Mexican special units to assist in planning and provide the US Embassy with situational awareness.”
“All of these missions (border and Mexico) have been done by the U.S. military in the past,” he explained. “They can be implemented quickly and with no foreign or domestic controversy.”
The chances of Trump ordering some sort of unilateral action against the cartels in Mexico may have somewhat diminished as of yesterday. He reached a deal with Mexico to delay the imposition of a 25% tariff on goods imported from there over what he perceived as that government’s unwillingness to stop the flow of drugs and people across the border. Meanwhile, Sheinbaum announced a series of steps she is taking.
“We had a good conversation with President Trump with great respect for our relationship and sovereignty,” she stated on X. “…Mexico will immediately reinforce the northern border with 10,000 members of the National Guard to prevent drug trafficking from Mexico to the United States, particularly fentanyl” while “The United States is committed to working to prevent the trafficking of high-powered weapons to Mexico.”
Both nations, she added, “will begin working today on two fronts: security and trade.”
While this moment of detente may seem encouraging, and the results could help slow the flow of drugs and human trafficking across the border further, the cartels remain. Strangling their cash flow, which can often lead to turf wars amongst themselves, certainly is a critical aspect to any fight against them. But if Trump really plans on going after the cartels directly, it will take more than that, and what that could look like remains to be seen. But clearly, he does have options.
Contact the author: howard@thewarzone.com