President Donald Trump signaled on Monday after designating Mexico’s drug cartels as Foreign Terrorist Organizations (FTO) that they are now fair game for the U.S military to take care of inside of Mexico’s borders.
“If the cartels are going to be seen as foreign terrorist organizations, would you consider sending U.S. special forces into Mexico to take them out?” a reporter asked Trump as he signed dozens of executive orders in the Oval Office behind the Resolute Desk.
“Could happen,” Trump said with a large grin on his face. “Stranger things have happened.”
Trump signed an executive order on Monday night that designated the cartels as FTOs, warning that they work with hostile foreign governments, have characteristics of insurgencies, engage in asymmetric warfare, and have infiltrated foreign governments across the Western Hemisphere.
“The Cartels functionally control, through a campaign of assassination, terror, rape, and brute force nearly all illegal traffic across the southern border of the United States,” the order said. “In certain portions of Mexico, they function as quasi-governmental entities, controlling nearly all aspects of society.”
The order said that the cartels’ incursions into the physical territory of the United States pose an “unacceptable national security risk to the United States.”
