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Daily Caller

‘Explore Every Action Necessary’: Here’s How Trump Admin, GOP May Change Fight Against Mexican Cartels

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From the Daily Caller News Foundation

By Jason Hopkins

“When I am back in the White House, the drug kingpins and vicious traffickers will never sleep soundly again.”

The Trump transition team and congressional Republicans have promised an unprecedented immigration crackdown, which could also include a novel approach to combating drug cartels.

President-elect Donald Trump’s immigration platform includes a number of hardline measures, such as resuming construction on the U.S.-Mexico border wall, reviving the Remain in Mexico program for asylum seekers, conducting the largest deportation operation in U.S. history and a number of other hawkish proposals. Trump allies and upcoming administration officials have also called on the U.S. to officially designate key drug cartels as terrorist organizations, which would open more resources to combating the crime syndicates that have long sowed chaos at the southern border.

“The drug cartels are waging war on America — and it’s now time for America to wage war on the cartels,” then-candidate Trump said in December 2023, and declared that his plan to fight the cartels included designating them as foreign terrorist organizations.

“Millions and millions of families and people are being destroyed,” he continued. “When I am back in the White House, the drug kingpins and vicious traffickers will never sleep soundly again.”

Nearly a year after that announcement was made, Trump is now due to return to the White House for a non-consecutive second term, bringing his proposal for cartels far closer to reality.

Former Immigration and Customs Enforcement acting director Tom Homan — who Trump recently tapped to serve as his immigration czar — declared that he’d like to see cartels be given the terrorist designation, having said in a news interview in November that they have “killed more Americans than every terrorist organization in the world combined.”

A foreign terrorist organization (FTO) designation by the State Department — which has so far been mostly applied to Islamic terrorist groups that pose a significant threat to American security — would trigger U.S. authorization to freeze financial assets, prohibit entry into the country and prosecute members for supporting terrorism. The proposal itself is not new, as it’s been championed by border hawks over the years.

“What we need to do is make sure that legally we are approaching cartels as the dangerous organizations that they are, and I think an FTO designation is appropriate,” Texas Rep. Chip Roy said to the Daily Caller News Foundation.

Roy was an early proponent in the House of Representatives for this action, having introduced legislation in 2019 that called on then-Secretary of State Mike Pompeo to designate cartels as terrorists. The Texas lawmaker introduced a bill in 2023 that called for the Gulf Cartel, Cartel Del Noreste, Cartel de Sinaloa, and Cartel de Jalisco Nueva Generacion to be given the FTO designation.

While the incoming Trump administration appears to be fully on board with this approach, it remains to be seen if it can be done. Trump himself explicitly called for drug cartels to be labeled as terrorists in November 2019 — largely in reaction to the massacre of American Mormons living south of the border by drug lords earlier that month — but those plans never came to fruition in his first term.

The Mexican government has also long opposed the idea of FTO designation for drug cartels, believing the approach to largely be an affront to their national sovereignty.

In a statement to the DCNF, Todd Bensman, who serves as a senior national security fellow for the Center for Immigration Studies, said he doesn’t “outright oppose the idea” of an FTO designation, but noted that a cartel organization can employ tens of thousands of individuals. For this reason, careful scope would be needed so U.S. officials are not overwhelmed as they carry out their counterterrorism mission.

Roy argued that a specific FTO designation isn’t completely necessary, but some sort of formal action is needed in order to fully take on the threat of these drug cartels.

“We can get hung up with words and designations and whatever,” the Texas lawmaker said. “Alright, if you want to come up with a special designation that’s the equivalent, then so be it.”

“But the bottom line is that we need to designate them as the dangers that they are and then be able to take action with the full tools at our disposal,” Roy continued. “We need to explore every action necessary to stop them.”

On Election Day, Republicans won control of not only the White House and the Senate, but also maintained their majority in the House of Representatives, which will allow the Trump administration to more freely foment its agenda to control illegal immigration and tackle crime emanating south of the U.S.-Mexico border. Roy urged lawmakers to get behind the White House to push these goals over the finish line.

“What we need is the executive branch to act and we need the legislature to give the executive branch the tools necessary to act,” Roy said. “We can’t blink. We need to move now.”

Daily Caller

UN Chief Rages Against Dying Of Climate Alarm Light

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From the Daily Caller News Foundation

By David Blackmon

The light of the global climate alarm movement has faded throughout 2025, as even narrative-pushing luminaries like Bill Gates have begun admitting. But that doesn’t mean the bitter clingers to the net-zero by 2050 dogma will go away quietly. No one serves more ably as the poster child of this resistance to reality than U.N. chief Antonio Guterres, who is preparing to host the UN’s annual climate conference, COP30, in Brazil on Nov. 10.

In a speech on Monday, Guterres echoed poet Dylan Thomas’s advice to aging men and women in his famed poem, “Do not go gentle into that good night:”

Do not go gentle into that good night,
Old age should burn and rave at close of day;
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

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Though wise men at their end know dark is right,
Because their words had forked no lightning they
Do not go gentle into that good night.

Seeing that his own words have “forked no lightning,” Guterres raged, raged against the dying of the climate alarm light.

“Governments must arrive at the upcoming COP30 meeting in Brazil with concrete plans to slash their own emissions over the next decade while also delivering climate justice to those on the front lines of a crisis they did little to cause,” Guterres demanded, adding, “Just look at Jamaica.”

Yes, because, as everyone must assuredly know, the Earth has never produced major hurricanes in the past, so it must be the all-powerful climate change bogeyman that produced this major storm at the end of an unusually slow Atlantic hurricane season.

Actually, Guterres’ order to all national governments to arrive in Belem, Brazil outfitted with aspirational plans to meet the net-zero illusion, which everyone knows can and will never be met, helps explain why President Donald Trump will not be sending an official U.S. delegation. Trump has repeatedly made clear – most recently during his September speech before the U.N. General Assembly – that he views the entire climate change agenda as a huge scam. Why waste taxpayer money in pursuit of a fantasy when he’s had so much success pursuing a more productive agenda via direct negotiations with national leaders around the world?

The Green New Scam would have killed America if President Trump had not been elected to implement his commonsense energy agenda…focused on utilizing the liquid gold under our feet to strengthen our grid stability and drive down costs for American families and businesses,” Taylor Rogers, a White House spokeswoman, said in a statement to the GuardianPresident Trump will not jeopardize our country’s economic and national security to pursue vague climate goals that are killing other countries,” she added.

The Guardian claims that Rogers’s use of the word “scam” refers to the Green New Deal policies pursued by Joe Biden. But that’s only part of it: The President views the entire net-zero project as a global scam designed to support a variety of wealth redistribution schemes and give momentum to the increasingly authoritarian forms of government we currently see cracking down in formerly free democracies like the U.K., Canada, Germany, France, Australia and other western developed nations.

Trump’s focused efforts on reversing vast swaths of Biden’s destructive agenda is undoing 16 years of command-and-control regulatory schemes implemented by the federal government. The resulting elimination of Inflation Reduction Act subsidies is already slowing the growth of the electric vehicles industry and impacting the rise of wind and solar generation as well.

But the impacts are international, too, as developing nations across the world shift direction to be able to do business with the world’s most powerful economy and developed nations in Europe and elsewhere grudgingly strive to remain competitive. Gates provided a clear wake-up call highlighting this global trend with his sudden departure from climate alarmist orthodoxy and its dogmatic narratives with his shift in rhetoric and planned investments laid out in last week’s long blog post.

Guterres, as the titular leader of the climate movement’s center of globalist messaging, sees his perch under assault and responded with a rhetorical effort to reassert his authority. We can expect the secretary general to keep raging as his influence wanes and he is replaced by someone whose own words might fork some lightning.

David Blackmon is an energy writer and consultant based in Texas. He spent 40 years in the oil and gas business, where he specialized in public policy and communications.

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Daily Caller

US Eating Canada’s Lunch While Liberals Stall – Trump Admin Announces Record-Shattering Energy Report

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From the Daily Caller News Foundation

By Audrey Streb

The Department of Energy (DOE) touted a report on Wednesday which states that America broke records in liquefied natural gas (LNG) exports.

The U.S. became the first country to export over 10 million metric tonnes of LNG in one month in October, Reuters reported on Monday, citing preliminary data from the financial firm LSEG. The DOE posted on X on Wednesday that “there are big opportunities ahead for U.S. natural gas” and has consistently championed LNG in a sharp departure from former President Joe Biden’s crackdown on the resource.

“The fact that America’s oil and gas industry was able to pass this stunning milestone is impressive considering all the roadblocks to progress which were thrown up by the Biden administration,” David Blackmon, an energy and policy writer who spent 40 years in the oil and gas business, told the Daily Caller News Foundation. “It is a testament to both the resilience and innovative mindset of the industry and to the phenomenal wealth of America’s natural gas resource.”

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Two facilities in Louisiana and Texas are responsible for the LNG export surge, according to Reuters. The U.S. LNG industry emerged as an energy sector giant in recent decades, with America now leading the world in LNG exports after being projected to be a net importer as late as 2010, according to S&P Global.

The Biden administration enacted a freeze on new LNG export permits and “intentionally buried a lot of data and released a skewed study to discredit the benefits of American LNG,” the DCNF previously reported. The environmental lobby applauded Biden’s January 2024 freeze on new LNG export terminals, though critics argued that the policy stalled investment, would not reduce emissions and undermined America’s global strategic interests.

In contrast, President Donald Trump sought opportunities to bolster LNG and reversed the new permit pause through a day-one executive order. Some energy policy experts told the DCNF that the reported milestone highlights the resiliency of the industry and the benefit of Trump’s “American energy dominance” agenda.

“By expediting LNG terminal expansion and signing off on export agreements, the Trump administration is rapidly powering the world while simultaneously keeping his commitment for U.S. energy dominance,” Sterling Burnett, director of the Arthur B. Robinson Center on Climate and Environmental Policy at The Heartland Institute, told the DCNF. “The world wants U.S. gas, and under Trump they are getting it, in the process showing the world what a market economy can do when unfettered by unnecessary, duplicative, regulations that stifle growth.”
“The only thing that has held the U.S. economy and our energy independence and dominance back over the decades is Democratic administration’s pushing inane, futile, climate policies, restricting fossil fuel use,” Burnett continued. “New LNG export data shows those days are over and what America can accomplish for itself and the world, when a President puts America first.”
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