In a bid to rectify the chaos caused by President Joe Biden’s open border policies, 21 Republican attorneys general are formally requesting the federal government designate Mexican drug cartels as terrorist organizations.
In a letter sent to Biden and U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken on Wednesday, the Republican coalition asked that “the Sinaloa Cartel, CJNG, and other similarly situated Mexican drug cartels be designated as Foreign Terrorist Organizations” under federal law so state and federal law enforcement agencies would be granted “increased powers to freeze cartel assets, deny entry to cartel members, and allow prosecutors to pursue tougher punishments against those who provide material support to the cartels.”
“Traditional counter-narcotics efforts are inadequate to address the threat posed by the Mexican drug cartels,” the document says. “Now that the cartels have made widespread use of assassinations and armed insurgency against the Mexican government, FTO designation is the only way to disrupt these increasingly violent cartel tactics and weaken their criminal enterprise.”
[WATCH: Cartel Country: The Untold Story Of America’s Black Market On The Border]
Throughout the letter, the signers, led by Virginia Attorney General Jason Miyares, also point to the alarming rise in American drug overdoses, particularly those caused by heavily trafficked synthetic opioids such as fentanyl. According to figures from the Drug Enforcement Administration, 66 percent of America’s more than 100,000 overdose deaths last fiscal year were related to synthetic opioids such as fentanyl. From Oct. 2021 to June 2022, U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) seized 8,425
