Republicans’ new border plan: send military into Mexico

Some GOP candidates and lawmakers want to use the US military to battle drug cartels.

Ron DeSantis campaigns in the Texas border town of Eagle Pass. Picture: AFP

Republicans running for president and in congress are coalescing around a way to wage war against illegal drugs: sending the US military into Mexico.

Former president Donald Trump, who has previously called for building a wall along the southern border and giving drug dealers the death penalty, has also proposed creating a naval blockade of Mexico to prevent drugs such as the illicit fentanyl from entering the US.

His leading opponent in the 2024 GOP nomination race, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, promised last week to use “deadly force” against anyone caught smuggling drugs over the border.

On Capitol Hill, senators Lindsey Graham and John Kennedy have voiced support for military operations in Mexico.

Senator J.D. Vance in a recent interview on NBC said cartels should be considered terrorist organisations, meriting a military response.

And representatives Dan Crenshaw and Mike Waltz have sponsored a bill that would formally declare war on the cartels, meaning the military would be authorised to drop bombs on ­cartel targets.

There is a simple reason the idea of a military intervention keeps cropping up – it is popular, and not just with Republicans.

In an NBC poll in late June, sending troops to the border to stop drugs was the single best-liked of 11 GOP proposals tested with Republican primary voters. And it was the only one that gained support from a majority of all registered voters.

The poll findings reflect growing anxiety for Americans as a continuing opioid crisis fuels record numbers of drug-overdose deaths. In many of those cases, Americans are taking other drugs they don’t realise are laced with deadly fentanyl.

The rhetoric is also useful for Republican candidates eager to campaign on border and immigration policy, a topic that polls have repeatedly shown is a top concern for GOP voters but ranks as a lower priority for most Democrats. As illegal border crossings have recently plummeted following implementation of new Biden administration immigration policies, it gives candidates something new to talk about.

“What we see in polling is a pretty big shift towards Republicans on all questions related to border security and immigration,” said Patrick Ruffini, a Republican pollster and digital strategist. “It’s not surprising you’re seeing Republican primary candidates up the ante.”

Doris Meissner, who was the top immigration official in the Clinton administration, said the Republican proposals were problematic because deploying the US military on domestic soil to perform law-enforcement functions was illegal, and performing military operations in Mexico without the explicit co-operation of the Mexican government would be an act of war against a sovereign country. “Military training and military operations are intended to kill in warlike situations. That’s not what we need here. It’s completely rhetorical and intended to arouse,” she said.

In a plan to “end America’s drug addiction crisis” released in June, Mr Trump promised to partner with companies willing to hire people formerly addicted to opioids and fund faith-based treatment programs. But the top items on his agenda involve sending the military to “inflict maximum damage” on cartel operations and pressure Mexico to co-operate in a military operation on their soil.

The Mexican government has met numerous times with Biden administration officials to forge closer co-operation to fight drug production and smuggling between the two countries but Mexican President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador has repeatedly said, in response to Republican proposals, that he was unwilling to host the US military on Mexican soil. “We are not going to allow any foreign government … and much less foreign armed forces to intervene in our territory,” he said at a news conference in March.

Mr DeSantis has for months advocated blockading legal ports of entry with Mexico, from where nearly all the illicit fentanyl is thought to be smuggled in, but in the first formal policy rollout of his campaign, he escalated that language, saying anyone caught at the border with drugs could be shot. “You’re already on US soil once you’re cutting through the wall. You have hostile intent,” he said at the Texas border last week. “You absolutely can use deadly force … We absolutely can respond if you’re breaking into our country and sawing through a border wall.”

In 2019, Mr Trump sent thousands of troops to the border to assist with a surge of asylum-seeking migrants, although the troops weren’t allowed to perform arrests and didn’t cross into Mexico.

Mr Biden did the same this spring, anticipating a wave of illegal migration associated with the end of Title 42, a pandemic-era border policy.

The Wall Street Journal