• United States
• Christina Lu

January 21, 2025, 5:15 PM View Comments ()

U.S. President Donald Trump unleashed a raft of executive orders targeting immigration and border security on his first day in office, laying the groundwork for what he has promised will be “the largest deportation effort in American history.”

In addition to declaring a national emergency at the U.S. southern border and calling for the end of birthright citizenship, a 14th Amendment right—igniting a sweeping legal battle—the returning U.S. leader also issued an executive order that designates drug cartels as foreign terrorist organizations (FTOs) and specially designated global terrorists.

“The Cartels have engaged in a campaign of violence and terror throughout the Western Hemisphere that has not only destabilized countries with significant importance for our national interests but also flooded the United States with deadly drugs, violent criminals, and vicious gangs,” the order said, adding that they “pose an unacceptable national security risk to the United States.” Secretary of State Marco Rubio and other officials have 14 days to make their recommendations, the order added.

Trump previously floated designating cartels as FTOs during his first presidency, although he ultimately backed off the idea. Cartels already face U.S. economic sanctions. But with an FTO designation, Washington would also be able to penalize any entity that “knowingly provides material support or resources” to the cartels in question—potentially impacting migrants, farms, U.S. gun dealers, and more. 

In a press briefing on Tuesday, Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum stressed the country’s sovereignty and noted the importance of having a “cool head.” “We all want to fight the drug cartels,” she said. The United States “in their territory, us in our territory.”

To understand the broader implications of Trump’s FTO executive order, Foreign Policy spoke with Vanda Felbab-Brown, the director of the Initiative on Nonstate Armed Actors at the Brookings Institution. The following interview has been edited for length and clarity. 

Foreign Policy: Trump has signed an executive order saying the United States will designate drug cartels as foreign terrorist organizations. Is this a big deal? 

Vanda Felbab-Brown: Yes, it’s a very big deal. It has vast implications for both the operations against the cartels and very many issues beyond—because along with the designations, the material support clauses kick in, and they are enormously capacious and allow prosecutorial action in a vast set of domains, including with respect to migration. 

It also has implications for trade and economic activity across the border and beyond. Any entity that engages [with or] provides any kind of material support to the cartels anywhere in the world is in violation of U.S. laws, can be sanctioned and denied access to the U.S. banking system, and can face very significant prison and financial penalties. 

And it’s not enough to say: “We did not know that we were selling alcohol to cartel members.” It’s not enough to resort to duress clauses. The presumption of due diligence, the burden of due diligence, is on the entity that’s engaging with the cartels. 

FP: So this extends far beyond the cartels, economically. 

VFB: Absolutely. So, if you think of what’s happening in Mexico, very many businesses pay extortion fees to the cartels. They would be in violation of U.S. laws.

And so the U.S. prosecution could choose to go after any Mexican entity that trades in the U.S., or sells in the U.S., and also pays money to the cartels. But it could similarly go after U.S. entities. 

So imagine a scenario where a Mexican company is paying extortion fees to the cartels. Could be, say, an avocado producer is paying extortion fees to the cartels, and then they are exporting to the U.S. The U.S. can go after them for material support clauses, but it could also go after the supermarkets in the U.S. that are buying those avocados. 

Most likely the supermarkets would say, “Look, we didn’t know that our Mexican supplier is paying extortion fees.” But this could have hampering effects on trade or on economic integration because of the legal uncertainty that this introduces and the vast punishments that come with that designation. 

[It’s unclear to me] how much the Trump team has thought through those economic implications. It’s also quite possible that the Trump team is not particularly bothered that this could reduce trade across the border. After all, here is President Trump announcing that the 25 percent tariffs on Mexico and Canada will kick in by Feb. 1, which is a revolutionary move undoing four decades of North American integration. So they might be very bothered about the economic implications, or they might just assume that they are not going to move to that prosecutorial action. But the capaciousness of the material support clauses is immense. 

It also has implications for migration. The vast majority of migrants who come to the U.S. across the U.S.-Mexico border at some point have to pay fees to the cartels, whether this is for smuggling or ransom because they’re being kidnapped, held hostage, and their families have to pay ransom. 

But the moment they do it, they are violating material support clauses and hence can be denied asylum in the U.S. And, yes, there is the possibility of arguing duress, but the duress exception is quite flimsy and has often not been adequate in U.S. courts. 

So, by declaring the cartels FTOs, the Trump administration has created a tool by which they can deny asylum for the vast majority of applicants seeking asylum or other kinds of legal status, as long as they can document that the money to the cartels has been paid.

Now, that’s not easy for U.S. prosecution to document, but it is really a very powerful tool. I should also say that it also has big implications for U.S. government assistance, where the U.S. has to really become doubly diligent in making sure that no U.S. money ends up in the hands of the cartels, which is very difficult. And it’s not just money—the material support can be a cup of coffee, a glass of water, a pencil, a toy. 

In every large city, Mexican cartels operate, and they extort people—they force people to do things. The U.S. now has to be extremely careful that any money that it spends does not end up in the hands of the cartels, which is almost impossible to do. So this has a big dampening effect on any kind of U.S. assistance. 

And then there is, of course, the military aspect, where the relationship between the FTO designation and the possibility of military action is not straightforward. 

The FTO designation doesn’t automatically guarantee or imply military action, but it makes it more likely. So, as long as the military action—drone strike, airstrike, special operations forces—is limited in duration, nature, and scope, the president can do it without prior authorization or declaration of the U.S. Congress. 

In the absence of a military strike, the FTO designation now allows much greater engagement of the U.S. military, such as in terms of intelligence gathering.

FP: Is the goal of this kind of designation to isolate the cartels economically? Is that the aim here? 

VFB: Well, who knows? In terms of the sanction capacity and not being able to access U.S. financial assistance, that already was in place in the absence of the designation.

Obviously, the cartels want their money, but you don’t really have any larger sanctioning capacity against the cartels directly. What you have is much larger sanctioning capacities against anyone engaging with them. 

But how is the U.S. going to enforce it? How are you going to be enforcing that people who live under the gun of the cartels are not paying money to them? 

In the first Trump administration, [Trump] badly wanted the FTO designation. Ultimately, they pulled back from it because the Mexican government was strongly opposed and Trump had established enough of a relationship with [former Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador] that López Obrador was halting the flows of migrants to the U.S. border. They were concerned that this would alienate López Obrador, and so they did not designate.

The current Mexican government is still definitely opposed to the designation, but Trump went ahead and did it. 

FP: From your research, should drug cartels be seen or treated as foreign terrorist organizations? Would you say that’s an accurate depiction or designation? 

VFB: If one thinks about the legal justification, I think it’s possible. But one needs to think about what this means in terms of policy, and more often than not, the policy gets really tangled up in knots by that designation. 

It does give some important authorities to the U.S., but how is the U.S. going to exercise this authority? What is going to be accomplished out of reducing trade with Mexico? Also, given the enormity of extortion, how are you going to pick your prosecution targets? 

This has significant implications for the conduct of U.S. policy and often just ties up U.S. policy in knots. 

Now, the one most important thing that I would say the U.S. government can get out of it is to cajole the Mexican government into serious security cooperation and serious actions against the cartels. 

During the López Obrador years—during the Biden administration and Trump administration—we saw essentially a complete halting of Mexico’s law enforcement action against the cartels. The policy would be left with sporadic hits against high-value targets to placate the U.S., but they did little to disrupt the cartels’ operation. And meanwhile, we saw the cartels tremendously expanding power over territories, institutions, and people in Mexico. 

Now the fact that [Trump has] designated them as FTOs is a big shot across the bow of the Mexican government. And I think that you have a possibility to get seriously tough with the Mexican government and bargain and that there is a resurrection of [the kind of] cooperation that took place during the Merida Initiative. 

So I could envision how the FTO designation, the possibility of unilateral military strikes, and the threat of the economic tariffs can be used for that kind of bargaining.