Inside the White House, Trump officials are embroiled in a debate over whether to carry out military strikes against Mexican drug cartels or instead to collaborate with Mexican authorities to jointly dismantle criminal organizations.
On one side, several people familiar with the matter say, some U.S. officials are advocating for unilateral military action against cartel figures and infrastructure to stem the flow of drugs across the border. On the other side, those people say, some officials are arguing for increased partnership with the Mexican government to ensure, among other things, continued cooperation on the issue of migration.
Amid this split, a high-level delegation from Mexico is set to arrive in Washington on Thursday to meet with senior U.S. officials to hammer out a security agreement, a draft of which was crafted last week and will likely anchor the talks.
In discussions so far, American officials have delivered vague ultimatums and unclear policy demands that Mexico dismantle the cartels or face the full force of Washington’s power, according to three people familiar with the preliminary negotiations who were not authorized to speak publicly, leading to confusion among Mexican officials.
One camp is being led by Sebastian Gorka, President Trump’s senior director for counterterrorism within the White House National Security Council, according to three current and former U.S. officials who were not authorized to speak publicly.
Mr. Gorka, a combative defender of Mr. Trump, has been working with a former officer in the Joint Special Operations Command, which oversees highly secretive U.S. military special operations, in an effort to push toward using American military power to take down Mexican drug lords and their operations on the ground, the current and former officials said.
A more cautious stance has been staked out by the White House’s Homeland Security Council, which is led by Stephen Miller. Mr. Miller has staffed his group with federal law enforcement officials who have deep experience in investigating, prosecuting and running capture operations in Mexico against cartel leaders with local counterparts.
According to two people familiar with the talks, Mr. Miller’s more measured approach is over concern that to go too hard against the cartels could shut down the broader cooperation with Mexican forces on one of his signature policy priorities: stopping migrants from reaching the U.S. border.
Officials at the National Security Council denied that there was any divergence of opinion within the Trump administration.
“Everyone from the president to his administration staff is committed to having all options on the table as it relates to addressing terrorist threats,” Brian Hughes, a spokesman for council, said. “There is no debate about how we will use all means necessary to protect Americans from Mexican drug cartels.”
More clarity may come this week, as Omar García Harfuch, Mexico’s secretary of security, and his delegation meet with their American counterparts. The delegation arrives just days before Mr. Trump has said he will impose a 25 percent tariff on Mexican imports as retribution for the Mexican government not doing enough to counter the flow of fentanyl.
The draft security framework, which will lay the foundation for future cooperation, currently calls for more cartel leader arrests and the creation of more Mexican units vetted by American law enforcement to target everything from money laundering to fighting drug groups on the ground, according to three people familiar with it. It is also expected to address migration and the border.
The stakes for Mexico could not be higher.
When the State Department designated six Mexican cartels as terror organizations earlier this month, that action set up the potential for Pentagon and intelligence resources to be deployed against the drug organizations, should Washington choose to do so.
As calls from Trump administration officials grow louder for a military solution to the cartels and to counter drug trafficking, particularly fentanyl, the Mexican government has strongly pushed back.
President Claudia Sheinbaum of Mexico has demanded that any U.S. military action against cartels be done in cooperation with Mexican forces and has vowed to protect Mexico’s sovereignty.
On Tuesday, Ms. Sheinbaum said in a news conference that her government “does not want operations of U.S. forces in Mexico,” adding that there is currently vast sharing of intelligence and information with American authorities.
Mexico aims for “coordination or cooperation, never invasion or subordination,” she said. Ms. Sheinbaum added that her government would pursue amendments to the Constitution to curb the work of foreign agents in Mexico, to ensure they don’t operate independently.
In an effort to aid the Mexican government, the C.I.A. has stepped up secret drone flights over the country, although the agency has not been authorized to use the drones to take any lethal action on its own, officials have said. For now, C.I.A. officers in Mexico have been passing information collected by the drones to Mexican officials.
The U.S. military’s Northern Command is also expanding its surveillance of the border, but unlike the C.I.A., it is not entering Mexican airspace.
“Sovereignty is not negotiable, that is a basic principle,” Ms. Sheinbaum told a news conference earlier this month, after the C.I.A. drone flights were revealed by The New York Times.
Mexican forces have ramped up their fight against the cartels amid the barrage of threats from Mr. Trump, hoping to placate Washington and show that they are willing and able partners in the war on the drug cartels.
In Sinaloa state, the hub of Mexico’s most powerful criminal syndicate, the Sinaloa Cartel, the Mexican government has carried out high-level arrests, drug lab busts and drug seizures that have disrupted fentanyl-production operations there.
In December, Mexican authorities also seized more than 20 million doses of fentanyl in Sinaloa, their biggest-ever synthetic opioid bust.
On Tuesday, Mexico’s defense secretary said that U.S. drones had been used in the effort to apprehend top figures in the Sinaloa Cartel. Mexican officials recently announced the arrest of José Ángel Canobbio Inzunza, said to be right-hand man of Iván Archivaldo Guzmán Salazar, a son of the notorious drug lord Joaquín Guzmán Loera, better known as El Chapo.
Mr. Canobbio Inzunza was indicted in the United States in November on charges of smuggling fentanyl into American cities like Chicago, where two of Ivan Guzmán’s younger brothers — Joaquín and Ovidio Guzmán López — are also facing charges.
But if the United States pushes Mexico too far, it may reverse decades of cooperation between the two nations, analysts and former diplomats have warned. Even before Mr. Trump was re-elected, ties between the United States and Mexico over the issue of drug cartels were already strained.
This summer, Mexican officials were outraged by what they believed to be direct American involvement in the kidnapping of one of the country’s most powerful drug lords, Ismael Zambada García, who was forcibly flown across the border where he was arrested by U.S. federal agents near El Paso. Despite U.S. assertions that the abduction was carried out by one of El Chapo’s sons without any American assistance on the ground, Mexican officials demanded the Justice Department provide more answers.
The episode involving Mr. Zambada García, who is facing sweeping drug charges in Brooklyn, came only a few years after another breach in U.S.-Mexico relations involving the cartels.
In October 2020, U.S. law enforcement agents arrested Gen. Salvador Cienfuegos, the former Mexican defense secretary, at the airport in Los Angeles on a sprawling federal indictment accusing him of having taken bribes from a violent Mexican cartel.
At its highest levels, the Mexican government reacted with a demonstration of collective anger that all but crippled joint U.S.-Mexico anti-narcotics operations. On the orders of William P. Barr, then the attorney general, federal prosecutors in Brooklyn ultimately dismissed the charges against General Cienfuegos and sent him back to Mexico.
Eric Schmitt contributed reporting.
