Mexico Strikes: DEA attacking drug cartels?

Are you looking for a crazy story to read? One that will make you sit back and say, “No way, Jose.”

Check out a story published by The Washington Post last Friday, Sept. 19, which carried this headline: “DEA faced pushback at White House, Pentagon after urging Mexico strikes.”

The story is behind a paywall but well worth the price — $2 for the article or $1 per week for a monthly subscription. The story, however, has also been archived online, and with a little bit of searching, it can be uncovered and read free of charge. Since quality journalism, the bedrock of any democracy, is necessary, though, please subscribe.

A Crazy Idea

Here is the lede (or lead) paragraph, written by Dan Lamothe and Ellen Nakashima:

“Drug Enforcement Administration officials advocated for a series of military strikes in Mexico earlier this year, alarming some in the White House and Pentagon and presaging the fraught debate underway in Washington over the legality of this month’s deadly attacks on alleged drug traffickers in the Caribbean Sea, people familiar with the matter said.”

No. Afraid so. The Mexico invasion didn’t happen, thankfully, but just the fact that someone at the DEA is entertaining such a hare-brained idea is cause for concern to any thinking Texan, American with a brain.

As if our working relations with Mexico aren’t already tenuous. Let’s just cross the border without its permission and “take out” some drug-cartel labs.

The top dog at the DEA at the time, shortly after Trump’s inauguration, Derek S. Maltz, told The Washington Post that he is “totally in favor….of hitting the production labs and command control leaders in Mexico.”

Maltz was a career DEA agent before he retired in 2014 and entered the private sector (government pension plus a new paycheck).

Since July, the DEA has been led by its new administrator, Terrance C. Cole, 56, who worked for the fed agency before retiring in 2020 and moving into the private sector. As such, the DEA said it would not comment on what might or might not have been said by Cole’s predecessor, Derek Maltz.

According to the Post story, the idea of attacking Mexican drug cartels on foreign soil, without Mexico’s permission, came not long after the president designated numerous Latin American-based drug cartels and criminal organizations as “foreign terrorist organizations.”

Thanks to that, several DEA officials reportedly came up with the bright idea of killing cartel leaders on Mexican soil while also attacking its infrastructure, according to unnamed sources not authorized to share details of such sensitive intel (Source: Washington Post).

“Get out the polygraphs machines, damn it, so we can find out who’s leaking this info.”

That executive order (naming the cartels “foreign terrorist organizations”) gave the U.S. more latitude into how the country deals with alleged drug traffickers, which we saw recently when we blew up three alleged drug-cartel boats: Sept. 2, 15th, and last Friday, the 19th, in the Caribbean, most off the coast of Venezuela.

In international waters, without boarding them, we now just blow them sky high, with no "hi" or "bye."

On Truth Social, the president wrote:

“Intelligence confirmed the vessel was trafficking illicit narcotics and was transiting along a known narcotrafficking passage enroute to poison Americans.”

Reminiscent of “Weapons of Mass Destruction” rhetoric, only on a different level.

Ka-boom.

As pointed out in The Washington Post story published last Friday:

“Mr. Trump has claimed that he can…treat drug smuggling as an attack on the United States and, as a matter of national self-defense, lawfully order the military to summarily kill drug-running suspects as if they were combatants on a battlefield.”

Last Monday, the president suggested his administration was preparing to take military action against cartels that move illicit drugs over land as well. He did not identify specific groups or prospective locations, saying only, ‘We’re going to be stopping them the same way we stopped the boats.’ 

Source: X.Com/Truth Social

The Secret Order

Executive orders aside, apparently two months ago, the president signed a still-secret order that directed our military to begin using lethal force against alleged foreign terrorist organizations in the Caribbean, while moving a large amount of naval firepower into the region (Source: Washington Post).

“Where’s dad? He went out fishing five hours ago.”

One of the president’s main critics, California Democrat Senator Adam Schiff, wrote in a statement following last Friday’s lethal attack:

“Blowing up boats in the Caribbean without any legal authority risks dragging the United States into another war, and provoking attacks against American citizens.” (Source: The NY Times – 9/19/25)

Apparently looking to up the ante, the president circulated a draft bill in Congress last week that would provide “sweeping legal authorization to Mr. Trump to use military force against people, groups and nations (including Mexico, presumably) he deems linked to narcoterrorism.” (Source: NYTimes.)

It’s certainly not funny, but the Times story added this bit of irony when discussing the “draft bill,” considering how the president seems to be in total control of the U.S. Congress, both chambers:

“It is not clear whether it (the draft bill) could pass the Republican-controlled Congress.”

Seriously?

Granted, the vice president has proven to be the tie breaker on several bills, but has President Donald Trump failed to get any of his bills passed by Congress?

Don’t think so.

Last but not least, how would it make any sense for the U.S., under the guise of the DEA, to illegally cross Mexico’s border in search of drug cartels, when the cartel leaders and gunmen, not to mention women, can so easily blend into the civilian population?

More importantly, to what degree would such a move damage our relations with a country so important to this nation’s economic prosperity?

For her part, Mexico President Claudia Sheinbaum, who seems far smarter and more forthright than her two predecessors, has repeatedly called for the U.S. to work with her government and respect its sovereignty, while proposing a constitutional amendment that would make it crystal clear that no outside interference from the U.S. would be allowed.

She did this while her administration deployed approximately 10,000 Mexican soldiers to the border region to bolster security in what seems to be a good-faith effort to stop the flow of drugs into the U.S.

Question is: Can she and her administration stop Trump from doing the unthinkable? Crossing into Mexico to try and track down so-called foreign terrorist organizations?

One can only hope.