He Wants To Send Uninvited Troops Into Mexico On Assassination Missions
Yesterday, Asawin Suebsaeng reported that Trump is more serious than ever about ignoring both international treaties and U.S. laws in order to kill Mexican cartel lords. He’s planning “to deploy American assassination squads into Mexico soon after he’s sworn into office. Suebsaeng wrote that Señor T “has floated different ideas for bombing or invading Mexico in response to the American fentanyl crisis and to ‘wage WAR’ on notorious drug cartels. As president, Trump even thought it was possible to bomb the cartels’ drug labs, and then potentially pin the strikes on another country, according to his former defense secretary, Mark Esper. What was once a fringe notion that senior Trump administration officials quickly moved to shut down has now become a mainstream GOP policy proposal, including among influential Republican lawmakers on Capitol Hill and conservative think tanks.”
It might be a good time to reflect that there are several laws and legal principles that prohibit a U.S. president from unilaterally authorizing the use of lethal force, including sending an assassination team, into a friendly country, Mexico, to kill criminals without proper legal authorization and adherence to international law. Trump has shown nothing but contempt for the Constitution— other than as a gimmick to sell Bibles to MAGAts— but the Fifth Amendment does prohibit deprivation of life without due process. More definitively, the War Powers Resolution of 1973 limits the president's authority to engage in military actions without congressional authorization and Executive Order 12333, issued by President Reagan in 1981, prohibits assassination as a matter of U.S. policy.
Then there’s international law, which would see this as a blatant violation of Mexican sovereignty. The United Nations Charter, for instance, prohibits the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any state except in cases of self-defense or when authorized by the Security Council. I would guess that Mexico, like the U.S. or any sovereign nation, would be extremely sensitive to any violation of its territorial integrity. The U.S. and Mexico have a long-standing relationship, and any unilateral action by the U.S. that violates Mexican sovereignty would threaten ooperation between the two countries on issues such as drug trafficking and organized crime typically relies on mutual respect and collaboration rather than unilateral actions.
Trump has publicly vowed to, in his words, “make appropriate use of Special Forces, cyber warfare, and other overt and covert actions to inflict maximum damage on cartel leadership, infrastructure, and operations.” Suebsaeng’s sources, including a GOP lawmaker, say “Trump has privately endorsed the idea of covertly deploying— with or without the Mexican government’s consent— special-ops units that would be tasked with, among other missions, assassinating the leaders and top enforcers of Mexico’s powerful and most notorious drug cartels. In some of these discussions, Trump has insisted that the U.S. military has ‘tougher killers than they do’ and pondered why these assassination missions haven’t been done before, arguing that eliminating the heads of cartels would go a long way toward hobbling their operations and striking fear into the hearts of ‘the kingpins.’ (In fact, versions of this strategy have indeed been tried before in the long-running international war on drugs, including in Mexico, where the nation’s government, with U.S. support, devoted substantial resources to wiping out as many cartel bosses as possible. It has not worked.)”
Trump wants the U.S. to develop a “‘kill list of drug lords’… that American special forces would be assigned to kill or capture in a potential second Trump administration… Trump directed his policy advisers to supply him with a menu of military options for attacking Mexican drug cartels, if he reconquers the White House. This included scenarios for potential air strikes, drone attacks, U.S. troop deployments, and other forms of warfare, for taking on the major drug cartels’ leaders, who Trump has long derided as some ‘bad hombres.’”
Just a few short years ago, the concept of a Trump or any modern administration invading or bombing Mexico— including without the cooperation of Mexico’s president— would have been widely viewed as a fanciful scheme or a mere outburst, even coming from a figure as extreme as the 45th commander in chief. However, in recent years, the policy prescriptions have gone far beyond Trump’s venting of frustrations, and entered the Republican Party mainstream.
MAGA-aligned think tanks, such as the Center for Renewing America and the America First Policy Institute, have released policy papers that forcefully endorse wielding significant military force against these criminal organizations. One of these policy blueprints— from CRA and bylined by former Trump official Ken Cuccinelli— was privately briefed to Trump in 2023, and is bluntly titled: “It’s Time to Wage War on Transnational Drug Cartels.”
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis… [had] pledged that if he were elected president, he would order Special Forces to enter Mexico “on Day One.” A growing list of influential GOP lawmakers have announced legislation or publicly blessed a new blitz of military action in Mexico. Last year, Sens. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) and John Kennedy (R-LA) announced legislation that would “give the military the authority to go after these organizations wherever they exist,” causing Mexico’s leader Andrés Manuel López Obrador to denounce it as “an offense to the people of Mexico.”
At the time, Graham told Rolling Stone while he “would like to work with Mexico,” the senator was putting a congressional authorization for use of military force “on the table as a potential” option, should the Mexican leadership not submit to an invasion of its own soil. The AUMF that Congress passed in 2001 in the aftermath of the 9/11 terror attacks has undergirded the decades-long War on Terror, which has led to an international death toll estimated in the millions.
This massive policy drive among the Trumpist and Republican Party elite runs in diametric opposition to their (frequently hollow) rhetoric about supposedly “ending the era of endless wars.”
Military experts, foreign leaders, and even Trump’s famously hawkish former national security adviser John Bolton, have warned against the slate of invade-Mexico proposals. Some argue launching a U.S. offensive or invasion will, simply put, not solve the problem. Others also point out that Mexico is a U.S. partner, not an adversary, and that taking such unilateral action would shred diplomatic relations and likely cause immense chaos and further eruptions of cartel violence.
…[N]one of the cross-partisan objections seem to be blunting Trump and other conservative politicians’ desire for attacking the neighboring country or mass-assassinating cartel honchos. In February, for instance, [bloodthirsty closet case] Sen. Tom Cotton (R-AR) and Rep. Morgan Luttrell (R-TX) introduced companion bills that attempted to pressure the Biden administration to devise plans “to capture or kill the leaders of the Jalisco New Generation Cartel, the most brutal and dangerous cartel operating in Mexico.”
According to Luttrell, the legislation “makes clear that the Jalisco cartel cannot remain emboldened at our border and that the United States military must be ready to engage and eliminate the Jalisco cartel, should it be determined the best course of action is to use the Armed Forces of our great country.”
If Trump returns to power, those two lawmakers will have a much more receptive ear in the Oval Office than they have now with President Joe Biden.
Former Orlando area Congressman and current Senate candidate against Rick Scott, Alan Grayson scoffed. “If that’s what actually happens, I look forward to the military disobeying such obviously illegal orders. I guess that Trump plans to go for the Impeachment Triple Crown. I think that that this plan is something that Trump might want to save until the day after the ‘Caravan’ finally reaches the border, meaning never. It’s sad that Trump’s caca is something that we even have to think about. He had a chance to protect us from a real threat— COVID— and all he came up with was urging people to shine bright lights up their tailpipes.” Wouldn’t it be great to see Grayson back in Congress. He can use some help making that happen here.
It always fascinates me that closet cases like Lindsey Graham and Tom Cotton, petrified about not appearing macho enough, are consistently the first to loudly supoort violence and war. Who do they think they're fooling?
