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

From the Daily Caller News Foundation

“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.”

Related Topics:#DailyCaller #IllegalImmigration #JasonHopkins PresidentElectDonaldTrump TrumpUSBorder TrumpVSMexicanCartels

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Global Military Industrial Complex Has Never Had It So Good, New Report Finds

Published on December 1, 2025

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From the Daily Caller News Foundation

By Wallace White

The global war business scored record revenues in 2024 amid multiple protracted proxy conflicts across the world, according to a new industry analysis released on Monday.

The top 100 arms manufacturers in the world raked in $679 billion in revenue in 2024, up 5.9% from the year prior, according to a new Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI) study. The figure marks the highest ever revenue for manufacturers recorded by SIPRI as the group credits major conflicts for supplying the large appetite for arms around the world.

“The rise in the total arms revenues of the Top 100 in 2024 was mostly due to overall increases in the arms revenues of companies based in Europe and the United States,” SIPRI said in their report. “There were year-on-year increases in all the geographical areas covered by the ranking apart from Asia and Oceania, which saw a slight decrease, largely as a result of a notable drop in the total arms revenues of Chinese companies.”

Notably, Chinese arms manufacturers saw a large drop in reported revenues, declining 10% from 2023 to 2024, according to SIPRI. Just off China’s shores, Japan’s arms industry saw the largest single year-over-year increase in revenue of all regions measured, jumping 40% from 2023 to 2024.

American companies dominate the top of the list, which measures individual companies’ revenue, with Lockheed Martin taking the top spot with $64,650,000,000 of arms revenue in 2024, according to the report. Raytheon Technologies, Northrop Grumman and BAE Systems follow shortly after in revenue,

The Czechoslovak Group recorded the single largest jump in year-on-year revenue from 2023 to 2024, increasing its haul by 193%, according to SIPRI. The increase is largely driven by their crucial role in supplying arms and ammunition to Ukraine.

The Pentagon contracted one of the group’s subsidiaries in August to build a new ammo plant in the U.S. to replenish artillery shell stockpiles drained by U.S. aid to Ukraine.

“In 2024 the growing demand for military equipment around the world, primarily linked to rising geopolitical tensions, accelerated the increase in total Top 100 arms revenues seen in 2023,” the report reads. “More than three quarters of companies in the Top 100 (77 companies) increased their arms revenues in 2024, with 42 reporting at least double-digit percentage growth.”

Daily Caller

Tom Homan Predicts Deportation Of Most Third World Migrants Over Risks From Screening Docs

Published on November 30, 2025

Todayville

From the Daily Caller News Foundation

By Jason Hopkins

White House border czar Tom Homan predicted Sunday the Trump administration will deport the majority of Third World migrants due to vetting challenges.

Two National Guardsmen were shot Wednesday, allegedly by an Afghan national brought into the U.S. under the Biden administration. The attack prompted President Donald Trump to announce in a Thursday post on Truth Social that his administration would “permanently pause migration from all Third World Countries.” Homan said on Fox News’s “Sunday Morning Futures” that Third World nations could not be relied upon to provide accurate information for vetting migrants.

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“[T]hese Third World nations, they don’t have systems like we do. So, a lot of these Afghanistans, when they did get here and get vetted, they had no identification at all. Not a single travel document, not one piece of identification,” Homan said. “And we’re going to count on the people that run Afghanistan, the Taliban, to provide us any information [on] who the bad guys were or who the good guys are? Certainly not. And many people need to understand that most terrorists in this world, most of ’em, aren’t in any database.”

“And the same thing with illegal aliens, the over 10 million that came across the border under Joe Biden. There’s no way to vet these people. You think El Salvador or Turkey or Sudan or any of these countries have the databases or system checks that we have?” he added. “Do you think the government[s] of China, Russia, Turkey, do you think they’re going to share that data with us even if they did have it? There’s no way to clearly vet these people 100% that they’re safe to come to this country from these Third World nations.”

The president also wrote in his Thursday post he would “terminate all of the millions of Biden illegal admissions,” along with deporting those who do not offer value to the United States. Homan said Trump is correct to evaluate all migrants who entered under Biden.

“I really, truly think that most of ’em are [going to] end up being deported ’cause we’re not going to be able to properly vet them,” he said.

Similarly, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem asserted Sunday on NBC News’s “Meet the Press” the Trump administration would deport individuals with pending asylum claims.

West Virginia Army National Guard Specialist Sarah Beckstrom, 20, perished Thursday from wounds sustained in Wednesday’s shooting. The other victim, Air Force Staff Sgt. Andrew Wolfe, remains in critical condition at the time of publication.

The shooting was allegedly carried out by Rahmanullah Lakanwal, who entered the country in September 2021 after the U.S. military’s withdrawal from Afghanistan. Lakanwal previously worked with the U.S. government, including the CIA, and was admitted into the U.S. under the Biden administration’s Operation Allies Welcome, which resettled Afghans who had helped American forces.

Lakanwal applied for asylum in 2024, which the Trump administration granted in April 2025, according to Reuters. The alleged gunman shouted, “Allahu akbar!” before opening fire with a revolver, independent journalist Julio Rojas reported.

As of December 2024, over 180,000 Afghans were resettled in the U.S. following its August 2021 withdrawal, according to the State Department. After the shooting, the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) announced that the “processing of all immigration requests relating to Afghan nationals” would be paused “indefinitely.”

USCIS also asserted Thursday it would conduct a full-scale reexamination of all green cards granted to individuals from 19 countries “of concern” at Trump’s direction. The agency added in a later statement that, when vetting migrants from those nations, it would weigh “negative, country specific factors,” such as whether the country was able to “issue secure identity documents.”