WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump signed an executive order Monday that could designate drug cartels in Mexico as foreign terrorist organizations, a move that has some bipartisan support, while experts have expressed caution about that approach and suggested that Congress pass legislation to deal with the issue.

The order directs officials to examine whether drug cartels, which are blamed for transnational crimes and the flow of fentanyl into the United States, should be officially designated as foreign terrorist groups as defined by the State Department.

The directive gave the secretary of State two weeks to recommend whether any cartel should be designated as a foreign terrorist group, as well as make operational preparations to implement any decision Trump makes on the issue.

“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,” the order states. “In certain portions of Mexico, they function as quasi-governmental entities, controlling nearly all aspects of society.”

If the United States designates a cartel as foreign terrorist organization, it would become unlawful for a person in the United States to knowingly provide it “material support or resources,” according to a 2024 brief from the Congressional Research Service. Members of the cartel would be unable to come into the United States, and U.S. financial institutions could be required to block transactions involving cartel assets.

Two witnesses at a Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee hearing last week warned senators that designating drug cartels as terrorist groups doesn’t quite fit the problem.

Adam Isacson, director for defense oversight at The Washington Office on Latin America and witness for the minority during the hearing, said the terrorist designation wasn’t appropriate because “an organized crime group is not an insurgency.”

“These aren’t leftist guerrillas,” Isacson said. “This isn’t ISIS. If you pound them harder, you haven’t weakened them, you haven’t gained control over that territory. Rather, they’re harder to fight them [as] an insurgency because they depend on their relationship with corrupt elements in the Mexican government.”

Kenneth Cuccinelli, who was a top official with the Homeland Security Department during the first Trump administration, has a reputation for advocating stricter restrictions on immigration, but cautioned against an official designation of drug cartels as terrorist groups.

“If you look at the statutes that address foreign terrorist organizations, they come with very sweeping connections to the rest of the community. That statute was designed with isolated cells of Islamists in mind,” Cuccinelli said. “The cartels are integrated into the communities. They take advantage of the communities they live in. They make money off them.”

Cuccinelli said ultimately, “we need a different statute” altogether for addressing drug cartels. “It would be very helpful if Congress formulated a much more surgical approach to dealing with something like the cartels that use terrorist tactics for organized crime goals,” he said.

“They are quasi-governments, because they control territory in Mexico that the Mexican government simply won’t contest,” Cuccinelli said. “This government won’t. The last administration would not. And granted, that is a significant challenge. So that’s an area where this Congress could be quite helpful, is in providing more of those tools specifically to go after the cartels.”

Such policy, Cuccinelli said, should focus in part on money flow and enable the Treasury Department “to seek out and seize their assets around the world.”

Some cross-aisle support

Sen. Richard Blumenthal, D-Conn., a member of the Homeland Security panel, said Tuesday he supports the executive order based on the simple nature of the threat the drug cartels pose: “I think they are terrorist organizations and should be treated as such.”

Blumenthal said several senators had asked for former President Joe Biden to take this action, “but for whatever reason” he did not.

At the hearing with experts, Blumenthal said there is a need to treat the drug cartels as an elevated threat, if not terrorist organizations.

“I would like to pursue the suggestion that seems to unite all of you, that we need to develop the tools, the law enforcement tools, to treat these cartels as terrorist organizations,” Blumenthal said. “Their ideology is simply dollars and cents. It isn’t about converting the world to another religion or another political system. It is about money for them, and I think they need to be treated as terrorist organizations, even if they’re of a different brand.”

Sen. Maggie Hassan of New Hampshire, another Democratic member of the panel, also expressed interest in the idea of treating drug cartels as a kind of “hybrid organization,” given they “are using some terrorist techniques, but for organized crime purposes.”

“As one of the states that has been particularly hard hit by the fentanyl epidemic, you know, I would be very interested, and I know my colleagues on both sides of the aisle would be too, on working on how we really go after those cartels,” Hassan added.

Muzaffar Chishti, senior fellow and director of the Migration Policy Institute office at the New York University School of Law, expressed skepticism about the executive order Tuesday, saying the main purpose was to “expand and beef up this notion of invasion.”

“So it will allow us to go and act against them, maybe inside Mexico, inside their other countries, because they’re traveling threats,” Chishti said. “So therefore, I think, sort of direct action against them is allowed, and using that as a basis to make the argument about the invasion, I think, is an important thing.”

Chishti added he also thought the effect of designating drug cartels as terrorist groups would be to “further restrict immigration” in an end run to restrict asylum cases without explicitly doing so.

“People who have had any contact with any of these organizations will now be deemed ineligible for asylum because they were aided by a terrorist occupation,” Chishti said.

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