Trump sends military after the cartels and it's long overdue

Fox News

5 days ago

On Friday, Aug. 8, President Donald Trump ordered the U.S. military into action against Mexican and other Latin American drug cartels, taking an anticipated step after declaring these violent groups to be foreign terrorist organizations less than a month into his second term.
Sending the military to our southern border, and potentially beyond, is a much-needed step for national security. Because the problem is worse than most Americans realize. Evidence shows that corrupt Mexican military and law enforcement officials are aiding the cartels on U.S. soil. Trump has succeeded in securing the border where former President Joe Biden failed — unless failure was the objective.
But securing the border is about more than stemming illegal entrance into America — it also encompasses interdicting deadly drugs and preventing or catching criminals, terrorists and hostile agents from entering, as well.
From May to July, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) released no illegal immigrants from the border to the nation's interior. In 2024, over the same three-month period, Biden released 212,000 illegal aliens into the interior with a simple promise to report to an immigration judge at some point. Most didn't bother to report and simply disappeared.
Border security isn't just an immigration problem — it's a national security imperative. Six years ago, the Texas Public Policy Foundation filed a Freedom of Information Act request with DHS for reports of Mexican military or law enforcement operating on U.S. soil or in U.S. airspace. The DHS responded in July 2025, after the Biden administration suppressed the response for years.
We carefully reviewed 190 pages of Serious Incident Reports that detailed Mexican incursions into America over the six-year period of 2014 to 2019, covering the last three years of the Obama administration and the first three years of the first Trump administration.
The reports detailed 78 separate incidents, of which 39 appeared significant and 39 benign. The latter included police in hot pursuit of suspects, or training aircraft taking off from airports close to the border and briefly straying into U.S. airspace. The remaining 39 reports indicated something more troubling: Mexican authorities purposefully violating U.S. territory, likely in corrupt service of the Mexican drug and human trafficking cartels.
Of particular interest, of the 39 incidents confirmed on U.S. territory, only four happened during the night. That only one in 10 incidents happened during the cover of darkness appeared odd. Of this, Ammon Blair, a colleague and former Border Patrol agent, told me that, "The cartels owned the night," he went on to remark that nighttime was "Gotaway Central," referring to those whom the Border Patrol saw or had evidence of, but did not apprehend.
This means that there could have been hundreds of instances where either the Mexican military or law enforcement crossed the border under cover of darkness to aid the cartels, but that the lack of a positive ID prevented DHS from logging the incursion as being by Mexican government personnel. Further, Border Patrol's rules of engagement are very risk-adverse. If it's determined that a heavily armed force is operating in the area, Border Patrol teams — often just two agents — are ordered to pull back.
Blair told me of an incident where he and his partner, armed only with handguns, were urgently ordered back to their vehicles. They were told that national intelligence methods had picked up radio traffic that indicated that a Mexican army squad, "Has you in their sights." Ten with rifles against two with sidearms are not good odds.
But that was then. Today, after significant investments initiated during the first Trump administration and boosted under the One Big Beautiful bill, both Customs and Border Protection at our ports of entry, and Border Patrol at points in between, have better technology. Autonomous Surveillance Towers with night thermal technology and aerostat surveillance balloons provide far better nighttime coverage than was the case six years ago.
Border security isn't just an immigration problem — it's a national security imperative.
That said, not every property owner along the border will allow a tower packed with sensors on their property, leaving dead spaces in ravines and low spots uncovered. About one-third of cameras are broken at any given time. And there are still only about two Border Patrol agents covering each mile of the southern border.
Unfortunately, in war, the enemy gets a vote. In 190 pages of reports covering six years there was only one mentions of a quadcopter flown by Mexican police over U.S. soil. Last year, DHS reported that 60,000 drones were sighted within a few hundred yards of the border — that's 330 a day. Whether employed by the cartels or Mexican officials, these drones serve two main purposes: counter surveillance — figuring out where Border Patrol, law enforcement or military personnel are; and area denial — Border Patrol won't fly its helicopters in areas where drones are operating.
Even today, we still don't know the reason for the crash of a National Guard reconnaissance helicopter with the loss of three aboard in March 2024 near Rio Grande City, Texas, on the border.
And now there are reports that not only have Mexican cartels sent people to fight in Ukraine to learn drone tactics, but they've also deployed fiber optic-controlled drones in Mexico. These drones are resistant to jamming.
Second to the threat from China, the rise of the Mexican narco-state on our southern border presents a grave national security challenge, one that DHS can't handle alone — they lack the personnel, the equipment, the training and the doctrine to do so.
Instead, only targeted military operations can interdict armed incursions into America — something the U.S. military was built to do. Applying the lessons of past conflicts, using the military to ambush and capture armed border infiltrators will raise the costs of violating American sovereignty while sending a powerful message to Mexico City.