Trump’s National Security Advisor Suggests Drug Cartels, Gangs Could Face Military Action

President Donald Trump’s National Security Advisor Mike Waltz is suggesting organizations such as drug cartels and gangs could face military action and should be treated more like ISIS than the Cosa Nostra.

The Justice Department utilized the use of the Racketeer-Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act (RICO) to target the Tren de Aragua gang. Just The News notes the RICO act was “made famous for prosecutions of mafia leaders in the United States.”

Earlier this week the Justice Department charged 27 individuals associated with the violent Venezuelan international criminal organization Tren de Aragua and one of its offshoots for murders, sex trafficking, robberies, extortion, and drug dealing.

“[These] groups aren’t like the mafia, they’re more like ISIS,” National Security Advisor Mike Waltz said in an interview on the Just the News, No Noise TV show. “They are combating the Mexican army in full-on-fire fights. They’re shooting at aircraft.”

He explained, “They deserve all aspects of our national power to be used against them, to defend our sovereignty, to defend our borders, and that’s why you’ve seen the Defense Department under Secretary Hegseth and Trump’s leadership shift its assets to actually defend America.”

Just the News reports that “since taking office earlier this year, President Trump ordered 10,000 active-duty troops to help secure the southern border and deployed two warships, military aircraft, and combat vehicles as tools to aid in operations. So far, the soldiers have helped border agents patrol the border and have carried out deportation flights of illegal migrants.”

The military deployments, Waltz said, are part of “a much tougher approach on the cartels” and border security more generally. President Trump sees the southern border as one of the root causes of the drug trade and the origin of the violent criminal groups growing in, and terrorizing, American cities. “Look, these cartels control whole swaths of Mexico and our southern border,” Waltz said. “That is completely unacceptable.”

According to Just The News:

Allies in Congress have moved to grant President Trump an authorization to use military force for the cartels, but historically the president favored using covert capabilities to target terrorists in the Middle East. In his first term, President Trump granted the CIA new authorities to conduct drone strikes against terrorist leaders, a task previously reserved for the Pentagon, as part of an effort to intensify the fight against ISIS. The CIA used this new authority shortly after, conducting a strike against al-Qaeda’s then-second-in-command Abu al-Khayr al-Masri in Syria.

But, President Trump’s designation of several criminal groups—including Mexican drug cartels and foreign gangs like Tren de Aragua—as Foreign Terrorist Organizations sets the stage for enhanced targeting of the groups with military forces or covert intelligence actions. This would go beyond the government’s usual methods of targeting cartels and gangs, which include criminal charges, Drug Enforcement Agency operations, and cooperative actions with Mexican law enforcement.

The executive order says that these groups—which include the Mexican cartels and gangs like Tren de Aragua and the El Salvadoran MS-13—“constitute a national-security threat beyond that posed by traditional organized crime” because they cooperate or interact with “extra-hemispheric actors, from designated foreign-terror organizations to antagonistic foreign governments,” that they use tactics common in “insurgency and asymmetric warfare,” and infiltrate foreign governments in the Western Hemisphere.