President Donald Trump and Attorney General Pam Bondi instructed all federal agencies with jurisdiction along the Mexican border to “implement drastic measures” and intensify efforts to stem the southward flow of guns that fuel the violence of Mexican drug cartels, officials said at a joint press conference in Arizona.
Representatives from the Department of Justice, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms (ATF), and Customs and Border Protection (CBP), among others, warned intermediaries who purchase guns from U.S. retailers that they will face harsher criminal penalties following the cartels’ designation as foreign terrorist organizations.
“We work for President Donald Trump and Attorney General Pam Bondi, and their direction is to crack down on firearms trafficking. Now that they’ve designated some of these organizations as terrorists… it opens up a wide range of new or additional charges that we can add,” said Phoenix ATF Special Agent Brendan Iber.
Last February, the Trump administration designated the Sinaloa Cartel, the Jalisco New Generation Cartel, Carteles Unidos, the Cartel del Noreste, the Gulf Cartel, and La Nueva Familia Michoacana, as well as Venezuela’s Tren de Aragua gang and El Salvador’s MS-13 gang, as foreign terrorist organizations and “global” threats.
When a group is designated as a Foreign Terrorist Organization (FTO) by the State Department, it carries legal and practical consequences for both the group and any person or entity that interacts with it.
“Our presence here aims to demonstrate that we have a unified government effort to stop arms trafficking into southern Mexico, because that trafficking fuels the violence and power of the cartels,” said Acting Arizona Attorney General Timothy Courchaine, who has handled various criminal cases involving border crimes and the actions of Mexican drug traffickers.
“These cartels are now foreign terrorist organizations, and we needed to change our attitude to think of them that way, because the violence in Mexico, the violence they brought to the United States, is abhorrent,” the attorney general added.
Violation of the law can carry a fine or a prison sentence of up to 20 years, or both.
“It makes no difference whether it’s a foreign citizen supporting foreign terrorist organizations or a U.S. citizen supporting them,” Courchaine explained.
“The change now, especially with this administration, is that nothing is off the table, and with these designations, various tools have been opened up for both law enforcement and prosecutors to intensify these sanctions. It doesn’t matter if you’re a Mexican citizen or a U.S. citizen supporting foreign terrorist organizations, the prosecution and consequences will be as severe as possible,” he noted.
An ATF report shows a 63 percent increase in the tracing of firearms recovered in Mexico between 2017 and 2023. “The majority of firearms traced and recovered in Mexico originated in Texas (43 percent), Arizona (22 percent), and California (9 percent),” the report states.
The new emphasis on combating arms trafficking to Mexico comes as the Trump administration has been examining the possibility of labeling some suspected cartel and gang members inside the United States as “enemy combatants” to facilitate their arrest and limit their ability to challenge their imprisonment, people with knowledge of the deliberations told CNN.
“The ‘enemy combatant’ designation could also be applied to suspected narco-terrorists outside the United States, sources said, as a possible justification for the country to carry out lethal attacks against them,” according to a CNN report.
Source: milenio
