US Officially Declares Mexican Cartels, Foreign Gangs as Global Terrorists

The State Department also targets Venezuela’s Tren de Aragua and El Salvador’s MS-13.

A shop's windows are riddled with bullets near City Hall after a gun battle between a heavily armed drug cartel assault group and security forces in Villa Union, Mexico, near the border with the United States, on Dec. 2, 2019. Eduardo Verdugo/AP Photo

The U.S. Department of State has designated several Mexican drug cartels and several transnational criminal gangs as global terrorist organizations, according to a notice in the Federal Register on Feb. 19.

Mexico-based criminal organizations including the Sinaloa Cartel, the Gulf Cartel, the Jalisco New Generation Cartel, the United Cartels, the La Nueva Familia Michoacana organization, and the Northeast Cartel were designated as terrorist organizations.

MS-13, the El Salvador-based gang known as Mara Salvatrucha, and Venezuela’s Tren de Aragua were also designated as terrorist organizations, the notice states.

Secretary of State Marco Rubio said in the notice that these groups contain individuals who “have committed or have attempted to commit, pose a significant risk of committing, or have participated in training to commit acts of terrorism that threaten the security of United States nationals or the national security, foreign policy, or economy of the United States.”

“I have determined that no prior notice needs to be provided to any person subject to this determination who might have a constitutional presence in the United States, because to do so would render ineffectual the measures authorized in the Order,” Rubio wrote.

President Donald Trump issued an executive order on Jan. 20, the day he took office, that called on officials to evaluate whether criminal cartels or transnational gangs could be designated as terrorist groups. During Trump’s first term in office, he considered designating those groups as terror organizations but ultimately did not.

“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,” Trump wrote in his order.

Analysts have said that designating cartels and transnational gangs as terrorists would allow the U.S. government to target their finances and individuals who supply them with weapons. The U.S. military could also strike cartel-operated facilities under the designation, they said.

“You could go after people trafficking firearms to the cartels; you could arrest them for providing material to a foreign terrorist organization,” Ioan Grillo, a Mexico-based journalist and author of several books, told The Epoch Times earlier this month.

François Cavard, a human rights activist who has spent years investigating drug trafficking in Latin America, said the Trump administration designation would “make it clear to the high-level corrupt accomplices these criminals may have within the United States and in U.S. government offices and agencies ... that they’re going after them also.”

Responding to a question on Fox News last month, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said the administration will not rule out striking cartels inside Mexico if those groups have attacked U.S. citizens or officials at the U.S.–Mexico border.

“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,” Hegseth said, adding that Trump would make the final decision.

“Should there be other options necessary to prevent the cartels from continuing to pour people—gangs and drugs and violence—into our country, we will take that on,” the Pentagon chief said. “So the president will make that call. I’ll work with him in that decision-making process.

“Ultimately, we will hold nothing back to secure the American people.”

Also after taking office, Trump ordered top officials to take steps to invoke an early U.S. measure known as the Alien and Sedition Acts, signed into law by President John Adams in 1798, that could allow him to deport alleged gang members without providing them with court hearings.