If the Mexican cartels are concerned about President Donald Trump’s plans for them, it sure didn’t seem like it this night.
If only because someone who was worried probably wouldn’t show a reporter the guns he’d just smuggled from the U.S. nor the fentanyl he was about to ship back north. Not to mention a safe house filled with migrants about to be crossed illegally at the border wall.
And yet that’s what we saw, spending two nights with members of one the largest cartels in Mexico the week of Trump’s inauguration.
They asked us not to share which cartel, but safe to say you’ve heard the name, as has Trump.
The president formally declared Mexican cartels as foreign terrorist organizations via executive order and threatened to use the U.S. military against the groups. Deploying the U.S. military to the border is also meant as a deterrence to cartel smuggling.
The goal of our time with the group was to understand how the cartel is reacting to being squarely targeted by this new administration. The collective response was a shrug.
“We’re not worried. This is day to day,” one cartel member told us. “This is what we’re going to do.”
It’s business as usual, they say, as they unloaded two rifles and three handguns from hidden compartments in an SUV that had just driven across the border from the U.S. To be clear, they passed through an official port of entry, right past border guards.
Every single one of the guns this group traffics, they say, is bought in the U.S. and then shipped south.
The Mexican Department of Foreign Relations officially estimates that somewhere between 70% and 90% of guns in Mexico originated from and passed through the U.S.
“Because we all know that in the U.S. it is easy to find them. They sell them in stores and here in Mexico you don’t find that,” a cartel member said. “You have to keep a very, very careful record [here]. Not everyone [in Mexico] is approved for these types of weapons and not just anyone is sold or given a license. In the U.S., yes.”
Trump is seemingly not worried about American guns being smuggled south but he is very concerned about fentanyl flowing to the north.
Shortly after the cartel unloaded the guns, they loaded five sandwich-sized packages of fentanyl into that same SUV, stashed in a hidden compartment beneath the center console.
With a total of 10,000 pills, the street value is $50,000 or more, contributing to an untold number of potential overdose deaths. The ease with which they can be smuggled has fundamentally changed the drug game, in horrific ways.
The CDC estimates that the fentanyl trade has killed hundreds of thousands of Americans and tonight, it showed no signs of stopping.
By designating cartels as foreign terrorist organizations, many speculate that Trump is taking the first step toward deploying U.S. special forces in Mexico. However, the cartel members tell me special operators have been here for years.
“They’ve been here for a long time. They’ve been working directly, they’ve trained personnel here,” a cartel smuggler said. “The U.S. military has sent people here to Mexico for that.”
The SUV took off shortly thereafter. We were told by the group later it made it across the border without incident.
One night later, in another part of this Mexican border town, we were invited into a non-descript house in an otherwise unremarkable neighborhood.
Inside, we were greeted by a half dozen armed men and two Indian families, taking the last step of being smuggled into the US.
This is the second-most lucrative part of this organized crime group’s portfolio—human smuggling.
“There is a lot of demand,” said one masked smuggler.
Business has been good and he thinks it will be getting better, thanks to some of Trump’s immigration policies.
Mass deportations could lead to more customers, he says. Deploying the military to the border means the group can raise their prices.
“They’ll need our services more,” he told us. The pitch to migrants is that they won’t be able to cross without the group’s help.
The U.S. government and independent experts say that human smuggling by cartels significantly increased during the Biden administration. Hundreds of thousands of people were transported to the border, often enduring terrible conditions, while cartels made billions in profits.
Trump has promised to take action against them. However, for smugglers, little has changed.
“The demand is still there,” a smuggler told me. “The deal is already done. We can’t do anything. Whatever they change there, we have to keep sending people [into the US].”
They all did admit a renewed focus on their illicit activities will likely make them harder to do. But the idea that it can be totally stopped, they said, is a joke for a simple reason. Demand.
As long as the U.S. continues to consume massive amounts of drugs, and as long as migrants are desperate to get within its borders, they believe their business will continue. Attacking these issues simply from the supply side by targeting cartels is not going to make them stop.
Who knows if this is all macho bravado, trying to sound tough in front of a reporter with a camera.
But for now, whatever its worth, the drugs keep flowing and so do smuggled migrants. Whether Trump can change that remains to be seen.
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