Biden legacy: Bigger, richer cartels

OPINION:

President Biden’s de facto alliance with Mexican drug gangs on his four-year open southern border brought millions of illegal immigrants, deadly drugs and cartel wealth.

The cartels also executed an arms buildup, increasing weapons smuggled to military-style outposts that brutally control the other side of a nearly 200-mile border.

This was what President Trump inherited as he officially designated five cartels as foreign terrorist organizations. His first-day action is perhaps a prelude to a “hot war” with American airpower and special operations striking headquarters, labs and shipping routes for cocaine, heroin, fentanyl and those who smuggle U.S.-bound criminals.

Early in the Biden disaster, the drug and human trafficking cartels, such as Sinaloa and the Jalisco New Generation Cartel, were reaping $1 billion monthly in migrant handling fees and drugs, House Republicans said.

“There is no question that the cartels are significantly wealthier now than in 2021,” Jessica Vaughan, director of policy studies for the Center for Immigration Studies, told me. “They made a killing off the Biden administration’s open-door policies. Some experts estimated that they earned about $13 billion a year and that they made more from human smuggling than from drug smuggling. That means more money for guns, technology, bribes and recruitment of operatives. It’s been a terrible development for public safety and civil society in the entire hemisphere.”

The violent cartels operate relatively crude military units using rifles, shotguns, grenades and pistols to do the killings. Their air force is a fleet of off-the-shelf spy drones. Their armor is the “narco-tank,” a plated, gun-mounted truck.

In 2024, the open border’s third year, InsightCrime.org reported that the “tanks” had evolved.

“They are getting bigger, but above all, we are starting to see a very important leap in technology,” Alexei Chevez Silveti, a security analyst in Mexico, told Insight Crime. “The latest vehicles to have been secured have signal inhibitor systems for drones, tools for perforating tires, and can transport eight to 10 people inside. They have turrets where you can put a rifle platform and closed-circuit television cameras that allow those inside the tank 360-degree vision.”

The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives publishes data on the illegal arms flow under the category of U.S. Sourced Firearms Recovered in Mexico.

In 2020, pre-Biden border, ATF executed 7,302 confirmed traces of firearms bought from U.S. retailers. Three years later, the number shot up to nearly 10,000.

Mexico uses statistics such as these to put the cartel onus on the U.S., not on its own corruption and ineptness.

Mexico sued seven major U.S. gun dealers, seeking billions of dollars in damages for cartel violence in a case that has reached the Supreme Court.

A few TV national security pundits claim NATO weapons sent to Ukraine have ended up in Mexican cartel arsenals.

I asked the ATF’s Washington headquarters. Spokesperson Cara A. Herman said, “ATF cannot confirm reports of firearms being trafficked to Mexico from Ukraine. However, ATF works closely with Mexican authorities to identify sources of firearms into the country.”

Todd Bensman, an author and former Texas Department of Public Safety intelligence analyst, has studied the border chaos for years. He rejects Mexico’s argument that U.S. ammunition retailers are central to cartel armaments. A Center for Immigration Studies analyst, Mr. Bensman, wrote an op-ed in February for The American Mind. He said: “The truth is that Mexico’s drug cartels have, for many years now, equipped themselves with military weaponry stolen or bought from the stores of Mexico’s own corrupted military and similarly from the armories of corrupt officials in Central American and South American nations, which buy large amounts of older, hand-me-down military equipment from foreign nations around the world. That’s the force with which they substantially arm themselves today, after years of arms races to outdo one another.”

Mr. Bensman said videos, leaked documents and press reports combine to tell this story: Cartels rely on older black-market weapons and Mexican military corruption to stock belt-fed machine guns, grenade launchers and rifles such as Israeli models made in Colombia.

Jaeson Jones, also a former Texas Department of Public Safety intelligence officer, has watched, close up, how the cartels grew.

He told the House Homeland Security Committee in 2023, “They have evolved from organized crime in 2006 into an insurgency in Mexico. … So I can’t stress to you that you have to take extreme, extreme action to go after these cartels and to truly create relationships with Mexico and the rest of the world in what we call a unified command and treat them as the dark networks that they are.”

The Republican, conservative journalists and think tanks are just about the only researchers who have chronicled Mr. Biden’s four-year, no-border debacle. Democrats, in a desperate hunt for more voters, couldn’t care less.

With Mr. Biden bequeathing to Mr. Trump a bigger, stronger and richer network of Mexican cartels, the president quickly declared war.

On his first day in office, Mr. Trump designated five cartels and three invading criminal gangs as foreign terrorists. Such a label gives the secretary of state the power to locate and freeze an organization’s money assets.

“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,” Mr. Trump said. “The cartels functionally control, through a campaign of assassination, terror, rape and brute force, nearly all illegal traffic across the southern border of the United States.”

Why would any U.S. president open the country’s borders to people like this? For four years? I don’t think Mr. Biden was ever asked, but his honest answer would be “More Democratic Party voters.”