Amid days of unrest in Los Angeles, with police officers firing beanbag rounds, protesters waving Mexican flags and the Trump administration sending in thousands of soldiers in what it called a mission to secure the streets, influencers on the Trumpist right started to lay the blame south of the Rio Grande.
The loudest voice was that of the activist and author Charlie Kirk, who posted a misleading video for his millions of followers on social media under the headline “Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum is a bigger threat to America than Vladimir Putin.” As he put it, “This woman, the president of Mexico, is talking about leading an uprising in the interior of America.”
People say a lot of crazy things online, but the argument appeared to get the attention of Kristi Noem, the homeland security secretary, who echoed it on Tuesday at the White House. “Claudia Sheinbaum came out and encouraged more protests in L.A., and I condemn her for that,” Ms. Noem told reporters. “She should not be encouraging violent protests that are going on.”
In fact, the opposite is true. Ms. Sheinbaum, the 62-year-old Mexican president, was quick to speak out against any violence in Los Angeles. “The burning of patrol cars seems more an act of provocation than of resistance,” she said on Monday. “We should be clear: We condemn violence wherever it comes from.”
Ms. Sheinbaum has been a reliable partner to Washington since she took power last Oct. 1, putting pressure on drug cartels and their human smuggling networks and giving President Trump one of his few clear wins by helping reduce the flow of undocumented migrants and fentanyl heading north. She has helped ease bilateral tensions over trade and tariffs while, unlike other world leaders, managing to avoid personal confrontations with Mr. Trump.
The argument that Ms. Noem and Mr. Kirk are making is not only wrong, it’s also dangerous. It encourages the hawks in Washington who want to unleash unilateral military strikes against cartels in Mexican territory. Deploying drone strikes and Special Forces operations south of the border might appeal to Mr. Trump’s supporters but it would not defeat the cartels, which are sprawling criminal networks with many thousands of affiliates, including some in the United States. It could torpedo the relationship with Mexico, which is proud of its sovereignty, rendering it politically impossible for Ms. Sheinbaum to continue to cooperate with Washington. A fully combative relationship with Mexico, as commentators like Mr. Kirk are gunning for, would almost certainly worsen problems over trade and cartels and inflame additional protests in the United States, as well as in Mexico.
Many people in Mexico naturally sympathize with their compatriots facing arrest and deportation under the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown. And some politicians in Ms. Sheinbaum’s Morena party have been engaging in nationalist oratory since the protests broke out, pointing out that California used to be part of Mexico. But any serious rift is not likely to come from Mexico. It’s not in Mexico’s interests to encourage unrest in its chief trading partner, which shared with it $840 billion in cross-border trade last year. The nationalist sentiments fall far short of a serious political conversation about a “reconquista,” or reconquest, of California.
The number of people crossing the border from Mexico into the United States without documentation reached record numbers under President Joe Biden, with the Border Patrol reporting “encounters” with 2.5 million people in fiscal year 2023. The vast majority of these people were not from Mexico but from across Latin America and the world, with many fleeing violence and dictatorships to claim asylum. The numbers began going down in 2024, when Mr. Biden made it more difficult to claim asylum in the run-up to the election.
Since Mr. Trump took power, he has made it almost impossible to claim asylum on the border, and Mexico has also cracked down on human smuggling gangs and used its own National Guard to stop migrants heading north. Border Patrol encounters in April were down 94 percent compared with the same month in 2023, making it one of the few campaign issues that Mr. Trump can say he has solidly delivered on.
Ms. Sheinbaum has also cracked down on fentanyl trafficking this year, with Mexican security forces raiding stashes and arresting or fatally shooting cartel figures. The amount of fentanyl confiscated at the border plummeted by 67 percent between October and April; less being seized usually means less is being trafficked. Ms. Sheinbaum may have been responding to pressure from Mr. Trump, who began making threats over the issue as soon as he won the election in November, but she was delivering.
Mexico City has been demonstrably keen to work with Washington in other ways, too. In February the Mexican government took the unprecedented step of expelling 29 alleged top cartel figures from Mexican prisons into U.S. custody. The prisoners included Rafael Caro Quintero, whom the United States had wanted to try for decades over his alleged involvement in the torture and murder of the Drug Enforcement Administration agent Enrique (Kiki) Camarena. The suspects’ lawyers claimed the expulsion was illegal, but the Mexican attorney general cited a national security law.
Yes, Mexico suffers from entrenched corruption and could do more to clamp down on politicians and officials linked to drug traffickers. But this problem doesn’t stop at the border. Since the U.S. Department of Homeland Security was created in 2002, incorporating Customs and Border Protection, well over 100 C.B.P. agents and officers have been convicted of crimes, including working with drug traffickers and migrant smugglers.
Ms. Sheinbaum also has some fierce critics at home, too — a healthy sign in a functioning, if flawed, democracy. There are legitimate concerns about a judicial reform in which all federal and state judges will be elected, not appointed — a change that is likely to put more loyalists to the ruling Morena party on the bench. Its passage was backed by the president’s predecessor and mentor, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, and triggered mass protests. But for now Ms. Sheinbaum remains one of the world’s most popular presidents, with over 70 percent approval. She has proved to be a stable leader in a country facing many major challenges.
The Trump administration shouldn’t alienate that kind of good neighbor. Mr. Trump needs to listen to the saner voices on Mexico in his inner circle and keep working fruitfully with Ms. Sheinbaum. To follow the incendiary rhetoric and smash the relationship with a partner who has delivered so much would be the way of madness.
Ioan Grillo is a contributing Opinion writer who has covered gang violence and organized crime in Mexico and elsewhere in Latin America for two decades.
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