From Todd Bensman for the Daily Wire

As Mexico prepares to position 10,000 troops between cartels and their drug money, odds are the lead will fly

The chosen political slogan of Mexico’s last and current president, “Abrazos, no balazos” (“Hugs, not Bullets”), is often embraced to describe official government policy toward the country’s ultra-violent drug-trafficking cartels. The beauty of this slogan is that it requires no explanation.

The reverse, however, “Bullets, not Hugs,” is probably up next whether Mexico likes it or not. President Donald Trump has just forced Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum to capitulate to a threat of ruinous 25% trade tariffs on Mexican exports unless she uses military force to suppress the flow of fentanyl (and illegal immigrant smuggling) over the U.S. southern border. She’s deploying 10,000 troops to cartel country, right smack in the drug-trafficking lanes of Mexico’s far northern precincts along the U.S. border.

This deployment of Mexican troops, however, is quite different from previous ones, in which the main mission was to slow illegal immigration only, including during Trump’s first term and throughout the Biden term. For this one, the Trump mission demand is, as State Department Spokeswoman Tammy Bruce put it recently, that Mexico needs to “…dismantle transnational criminal organizations, halt illegal migration, and stem the flow of fentanyl and precursor chemicals from China.”

That American priority has just put Mexican forces in the crosshairs of the most sensitive cartel hotspot: the blood-soaked zone between heavily armed cartel forces and their money just across the U.S. border.

John Moore/Getty Images

As if this was not provocative enough on its own, a senior Trump official with direct knowledge told me bilateral plans call for at least some of the more trusted of Mexico’s forces to physically attack cartel-run narcotics depots that would include pre-smuggling fentanyl hubs inside Mexico.

Certain U.S. intelligence groups are working with the Mexican government “to give them an exact laydown. They say they’re going to target the narcotics. We’re literally still at the table.”

All of this should prove triggering, literally, to any of Mexico’s nine main cartels once the whole enterprise ramps up in earnest.

I have a good feel for what this set of circumstances portends. As a reporter for Hearst News in San Antonio, Texas, from 2006-2009, I regularly covered the exceptionally bloody civil drug war against the cartels that Felipe de Jesus Calderón Hinojosa (2006-2012) declared and which, after hundreds of thousands of Mexican casualties, spawned the popularly preferred “Hugs, not Bullets” policies of his successors. The U.S. partnered with Mexico throughout the war, providing targeting intelligence and billions of dollars to modernize its security forces. All of that was for a quest to stem the flow of illegal drugs into the United States.

But after six years of ferocious combat and widespread torture and assassination, Mexico retreated in almost total defeat. The drug flow may have dipped from time to time but it never stopped.

In the years since, I’ve often pondered whether Calderón and his successors should have trebled down when defeat seemed inevitable, as did former President George W. Bush during the Iraq war. When the chips were down amid calls for a humiliating U.S. withdrawal during the Iraq war, Bush famously turned the tables by deploying 30,000 more troops. With Mexico, however, disrupting fentanyl production and trafficking with the military will not be easy, and may very well spark another government-cartel war similar to 2006-2012.

John Moore/Getty Images

The stars and planets all seem to be aligning for more violence, including from an unexpected quarter: President Sheinbaum herself may be aching for this fight.

Rodrigo Nieto-Gomez, a Mexico-born and educated national security research professor for the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, California said Sheinbaum has installed anti-cartel Morena Party hardliners over much of Mexico’s state security apparatuses. This wing of her party, Nieto-Gomez explained, has been spoiling to shed the “Hugs, not bullets” policy for a good hard fight with the cartels.

Trump is now providing a “top-cover” excuse for them to finally exert the military pressure they’ve been wanting.

“Trump’s actions have temporarily tilted the playing field in favor of Morena,” Nieto-Gomez said. “With the right philosophy and the right level of American support, we may see a different type of violence in Mexico.”

Perhaps a worthy achievable goal for Mexican military fireworks is that it forces a sort of devil’s truce where the cartels, whose leaders are the most consummate and pragmatic of capitalists, ultimately agree to voluntarily quit fentanyl altogether as a good business decision — if the other drugs are allowed to roll in as usual. After all, when the operatives are shooting and dying, they’re spending rather than earning.

What seems certain, however, is that Trump’s inevitable following through on his campaign promises to suppress fentanyl ups the chances of a conflict between the Mexican military and the cartels. No doubt the cartels are now feeling uncharacteristically pinched these days on many other fronts thanks to Trump’s return.

John Moore/Getty Images

Trump has asked his Secretary of State to designate them as foreign terrorist organizations, which would open authorities for America and its allies to seize assets and prosecute banks and people who work with the cartels on serious “material support” crimes. To isolate and weaken them where it counts, in the pocketbook, and disrupt their global operations.

And, of course, Trump has all but killed the biggest cash cow those cartels have seen in years by shuttering the southern border almost hermetically in a matter of days. Their smugglers are moving probably fewer than 500 illegal immigrants a day now, most of them caught and deported right away, compared to 14,000 a day last December. Those numbers are a catastrophe and should drive the cartels to invest everything they have in drug trafficking again.

Because they are now free from babysitting and processing illegal migrants all day long, Border Patrol is back on the drug traffickers full force and they have help, the U.S. military is down there glassing the landscape and using surveillance assets to spot the traffickers.

Some of the cartels were already so frustrated their leaders approved the use of drones to attack U.S. agents standing in the way of drug loads. Cases of firearms attacks on Border Patrol are rising.

Now Mexico’s going to put 10,000 troops in between them and their money?

If she is not already, Sheinbaum should be preparing for the worst right about now. President Trump absolutely expects some kind of real action — with demonstrable results — or else he’ll push that tariff button. She’s under pressure right now to produce something, anything, whether for show or not. And the cartels are ever ready to go to war.

Thanks to former President Joe Biden’s mass migration program, it could very well happen, because now the impulsive, brazen, money-hungry cartels are are extremely well-armed from the billions they all earned over the past four years.

John Moore/Getty Images

Sheinbaum undoubtedly discerns the dangers here and will have to tread carefully between appeasing Trump and sparking another all-out civil war, which many in the United States believe is long overdue. And maybe it is. She and all the cartel leaders would probably feel lucky to cap things down to merely a “splendid little war” like the 1898 Spanish-American war.

But President Trump knows the art of the deal often pivots on what’s good business for everyone involved.

Mexico’s 2006-2012 war shows the cartels will more than likely survive whatever fireworks are coming, if any. Trump may make them realize sooner rather than later that they just have to give up the fentanyl.

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Todd Bensman is a Senior National Security Fellow at the Center for Immigration Studies and a two-time National Press Club award winner. He is a graduate of the University of Missouri School of Journalism and a 23-year veteran newspaper reporter. He is the author of “America’s Covert Border War,” and “Overrun: How Joe Biden Unleashed the Greatest Border Crisis in U.S. History.”

U.S. Border Patrol agents prepare to transport immigrants for processing next to the U.S.-Mexico border fence on January 19, 2025, near Sasabe, Arizona.

From LifeSiteNews

By John Cassara

Actions facilitating illegal immigration are committed with ‘full knowledge and deliberate consent,’ and they are even more egregious when the facilitator financially benefits.

The first piece of legislation that President Trump signed into law is the Laken Riley Act. This law mandates the federal detention of illegal immigrants accused of serious crime. The legislation is named after a Georgia nursing student who was sexually assaulted and brutally murdered by a Venezuelan illegal alien who was previously arrested and paroled into the United States during the Biden administration’s “open border” policies.

It is well-documented that illegal immigration is responsible for various forms of human suffering and degradation. Murder, gang violence, human trafficking, sex trafficking, narcotics trafficking, theft, terrorism, organized crime, torture, rape, assault, kidnapping, corruption, money laundering, various forms of fraud, and environmental crime all result from illegal immigration.

Statistics are sterile. Like Laken Riley, each victim has a story. Loved ones are devastated. There are countless heinous and barbaric crimes linked to illegal immigration perpetrated against individuals, families, and communities. Some involve horrendous suffering, torture, and the loss of life.

Crimes against children are particularly abhorrent. The U.S. Department of Homeland Security’s Office of Inspector General released a report that the Biden-Harris administration lost track of approximately 300,000 migrant children. Unfortunately, many of these children are undoubtedly trafficked, victims of sexual abuse, and/or are engaged in abusive child labor.

I previously wrote an article for Crisis Magazine discussing illegal immigration and the Catholic Church. I explained that from an investigator’s standpoint the key to solving criminal activity based on greed is to determine who benefits from the crime. In other words, follow the money.

During the Biden years, the U.S. Catholic Church accelerated its entanglement in the “illegal immigration complex.” Various Catholic charities and organizations facilitate the illegal immigration pipeline by providing food, clothing, shelter, transportation, legal services, counseling, and so on.

The United States Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB) and the charities and organizations it supports promote facilitating illegal immigration as “acts of mercy.”

Perhaps. But there is another way of looking at it. Let’s use an analogy.

The Catholic Church teaches that it is a mortal sin to facilitate a mortal sin. For example, if someone knowingly and willfully assists in facilitating an abortion by providing counseling, shelter, or driving the mother to an abortion clinic, the enabler is guilty of sin. The sin is even more egregious if the facilitator financially benefits. It is blood money.

Similar to the driver who committed a mortal sin by taking the expectant mother to an abortion clinic, the Church’s actions facilitating illegal immigration are committed with “full knowledge and deliberate consent.”

Making the matter even worse, the Church is accepting billions in what could reasonably be labeled blood money.

According to recent numbers obtained from Complicit Clergy, the Biden administration granted Catholic non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and charities nearly $3 billion in immigration-related funding over the past four years. In comparison, Catholic charities received $0.8 billion during the first Trump administration. Since 2009, Catholic Charities and related organizations have received over $5.2 billion tax dollars by providing immigration-related services to the federal government.

The total numbers are undoubtedly much higher. The above only includes money that is clearly earmarked for immigration. For organizations that are not subject to meaningful audits and oversight, money can be moved to and from other programs. The total also does not include money received from state and local sources. And the study only focused on entities that had “Catholic” as an identifier.

Is this blood money? Is the Church responsible?

We deserve straightforward answers. Unfortunately, there is a lack of transparency. We lack specifics about the assistance. This is partially by design. My area of expertise is anti-money laundering. The flow of money to Catholic Charities has many of the elements of the second stage of money laundering which is called “layering” or obfuscating the money trail.

The Biden administration funneling billions of taxpayer money to NGOs to facilitate their open border policies was done for two reasons: 1.) The federal agencies involved did not have the capacity to provide the logistics necessary for such a massive influx of people. 2.) Primarily because of issues of venue, jurisdiction, and NGO non-accountability, the federal money flow was not transparent. I believe it was intentional. The taxpayer money was effectively laundered in order to advance the Biden administration’s open border policies.

Apologists for the Church claim that the illegal immigrants have been “vetted”; they claim it is the government’s responsibility to approve who enters into the country. Once the aliens are admitted, the Church assumes that it has a green light to provide assistance.

That argument is fallacious. Some Catholic NGOs and nonprofits have been accused of assisting in the entry of the illegals. Regarding vetting, I have experience tracing and obtaining foreign national record checks. Simply put, it is impossible to effectively vet over 10 million illegal immigrants, many from failed and/or uncooperative states. Simply put, during the Biden administration, government and NGO due diligence did not happen.

Catholic Charities’ and the USCCB’s position is that they would never knowingly help a criminal alien. That position is also spurious for two reasons.

1.) By definition, illegal aliens are illegal. Every single illegal migrant has broken U.S. immigration law. They are all criminals. Similar to being a “cafeteria Catholic” or picking and choosing what Church teaching is valid, the Church cannot pick and choose what federal law is valid or decide who is a criminal and who is not.

2.) Approximately fifteen million illegal immigrants entered the U.S. under the Biden administration’s open border policies. Approximately 700,000 had criminal records before they even entered the country. Some are known murderers and rapists. Additional illegal immigrants were released from mental institutions and sent into the United States. Individuals on the terror watch list were admitted into the homeland. Chinese nationals of military age who are subservient to the CCP and possibly trained in forms of asymmetric warfare have flooded the country. Outside of Latinos, more Chinese have entered the country than any other ethnic group. There are also large numbers of illegals who committed horrendous crimes (human trafficking, smuggling, sexual predation, etc.) during the migration pipeline. Unknown numbers have committed crimes while in the United States. Many are recruited into criminal gangs. In other words, well over a million and probably many more have been involved with serious criminal and anti-American activity in addition to breaking immigration law. Rules of statistics and probability dictate with certainty that many of these criminal aliens were aided and abetted by Catholic Charities.

The Church has to know the above facts. Willful blindness is not a defense. In other words, there has been “full knowledge and deliberate consent.”

Contrary to what some claim, the illegal immigrants are not innocents. They made a freewill choice of bypassing the long legal pathway for a chance at expedited illegal entry. And as much as the media and the Church are going to emphasize the good that migrants do and put forward sob stories that play on our sympathy, from an enforcement perspective when one mixes illicit with licit the whole becomes tainted.

Similarly, the billions received by the U.S. Catholic Church and its NGOs and charities are also tainted. If nothing else, there is the appearance of impropriety. For example, is there a correlation between the $3 billion the Catholic Church received during the Biden presidency and the Catholic hierarchy refusing to criticize Biden and his policies that, according to George Weigel, could be “properly described, not simply as ‘un-Catholic’ but as anti-Catholic?”

Or is there any correlation between the $5 billion the Church has received from U.S. taxpayers to assist in illegal immigration and the $5 billion that Catholic dioceses and religious orders in the United States have spent in the past 20 years to settle the financial costs of the sex-abuse scandal?

Vice President J.D. Vance, a Catholic, looking at the financial record, said:

And so when the USCCB condemned Trump’s executive orders on immigration, did it have a pecuniary interest in doing so? … I think that the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops needs to actually look in the mirror a little bit and recognize that when they receive over $100 million to help resettle illegal immigrants, are they worried about humanitarian concerns? Or are they actually worried about their bottom line? We’re going to enforce immigration law. We’re going to protect the American people.

The Church does not need any more scandals. Nor does she need to jeopardize her direct funding from the laity. Many of us refuse to contribute to the USCCB and Catholic Charities because of the above issues. There are many other worthwhile and non-tainted charities that support the good work of the Church.

The USCCB should get ahead of this issue and end its involvement in the illegal immigration complex before President Trump does it for them.

Reprinted with permission from Crisis Magazine.