The United States-Mexico border is in its most secure condition in living memory. Illegal border crossings are at historic lows unseen for decades. But an increasingly powerful Mexican drug cartel poses a growing challenge to U.S. national security and Mexico’s sovereignty. The group in question, the Jalisco New Generation Cartel, or CJNG, is gradually destabilizing several Mexican states and displacing other cartels that previously exerted prime influence over Mexican politics.

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As the Washington Examiner reported in June, “The CJNG makes tens of billions of dollars every year by exporting drugs north. But it also makes hundreds of millions of dollars by skimming and selling oil from Mexico’s corrupt state-owned oil producer, Pemex. … It already has a significant U.S. logistics network, operational presence, and close relationships with various U.S.-based organized crime groups. The [Drug Enforcement Administration] says the group has a particularly strong presence in Los Angeles, New York, Chicago, Houston, and Atlanta.”

The CJNG’s threat has only grown in the past two months. But even as the organization’s threat to U.S. national security is increasing, which the Trump administration appears determined to counter via CIA covert action, the crime gang’s threat to the stability and sovereignty of Mexico is also surging. President Claudia Sheinbaum is finding it increasingly difficult to hide this reality from the Mexican people.

In May, two senior officials from the Mexico City mayor’s office were assassinated in a brazen attack in the capital. Three months later, authorities have not yet identified who was behind the attack, which fosters the Mexican public’s sense that criminal entities can operate with effective impunity.

Further emphasizing that perception, Mexican politics is currently engulfed in a major scandal over the CJNG’s links to a former senior security official in the state of Tabasco. It is commonly presumed that the CJNG has links to a national senator who was previously Tabasco’s governor. This is weakening Sheinbaum by emphasizing the strong links between powerful cartels and the upper echelons of her governing Morena party, including former President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador’s brother. The scandal bespeaks a political culture in which corruption and power are enmeshed with cartel criminality. The rot goes right to the top. It is one of the world’s prime examples — there are several others — of nation states losing their sovereignty to well-organized crime gangs that have people in high places to do their bidding.

In June 2024, during Obrador’s presidency, Sen. John Kennedy (R-LA) engaged in a telling exchange with then-FBI Director Christopher Wray. Kennedy asked, “If you took the major Mexican drug cartels … and turned them upside down and shook them, President Lopez Obrador would fall out of their pockets, wouldn’t he?” Wray responded, “I don’t know that I can comment on a specific individual’s corruption other than through cases that we bring, but I understand the point that you’re making, for sure.”

There is no way that an FBI director would respond in that fashion, implicitly impugning the character of the leader of a major U.S. foreign partner, if there was no substantial evidence pointing to that leader’s corruption. Several U.S. government sources have told the Washington Examiner that Obrador and his inner circle were viewed as especially close to the Sinaloa cartel.

Today, however, it is the CJNG that is in the ascendancy. It is empowered by its wealth, its ferocious appetite for violence, and its budding alliance with a faction of the previously supreme Sinaloa cartel. Following the U.S. deportations of Sinaloa cartel leader El Chapo, his deputy El Mayo, and two of El Chapo’s sons, the CJNG has allied with El Chapo’s remaining son to contest El Mayo’s followers for control over Sinaloa’s territory and supply routes.

The ensuing Sinaloa cartel civil war has wreaked havoc that Sheinbaum has either been unable or unwilling to address. The pressure on Sheinbaum’s government is further reflected by the complaints from state and local officials that it is failing to support their efforts to root out corruption in the security forces. In the absence of any meaningful government response, the CJNG has escalated its aggression. This has included increasing attacks on children. When it launched a violent offensive in the central Mexican state of Michoacan, for example, residents complained that only local police officers responded, even though a military base was near one of the attacks.

The CJNG is now so powerful that it should be considered a multinational corporate powerhouse and a sort of dark government within Mexico. As cartel expert Victor Manuel Sanchez Valdes notes, “In their international expansion, they have established transnational supply chains, for example, they receive cocaine from Colombia, Peru or Bolivia, chemical precursors to manufacture synthetic drugs from China and India, weapons from the United States and Romania and they launder their assets through the financial systems of the United Arab Emirates or Belize.”

The power of the cartels presents officials with a stark and lopsided binary choice between receiving stacks of cash in bribes year after year or a hail of bullets to eliminate them. This is broadly understood in Mexico. It takes great courage to be a law-abiding police officer, soldier, or politician in today’s Mexico. Those who stand up to the cartels know it is not just they who are likely to be killed but also members of their families.

At the same time, Sheinbaum faces President Donald Trump’s insistent demands that unless her government takes a much tougher approach against the cartels, he will authorize direct U.S. action against them. Adding to Sheinbaum’s concern is that Mexican politicians and security officials take it as a given that the U.S. knows which of them are on the cartel payroll and could publicize that unless the central government takes effective action to regain its authority. Knowing which Mexican officials have been bought and intimidated into working for the cartels gives the DEA and CIA leverage in recruiting well-placed informants south of the border. 

It is a grave U.S. national security concern, as well as a dire dispensation for Mexico’s people, that the nation’s sovereignty is being subsumed beneath the authority of highly organized criminal organizations. State authority is dissolving in a solution of easy cash and mortal danger. Cartels have the money, munitions, and motive to ensure it is they and not the voters of Mexico who set national policy.

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That cartel power, both dangled over Mexican heads and exerted against Mexican institutions, means any government in Mexico City will be extraordinarily nervous about taking the kind of robust action that the nation needs and the U.S. demands. The bloodletting is already terrible, but the cartels can and will resort to far worse violence if they believe their stranglehold over illicit wealth and power is threatened. If it deems it necessary, the CJNG will also target Americans for attack. After all, the practice of violence is how the CJNG got where it is today. It and the other cartels view violence not as a necessary evil but as the obviously effective means to greater power.

Turmoil in our neighboring state south of the U.S. border will almost certainly get worse before it begins to get better.

Tom Rogan is an online editor and foreign policy writer for the Washington Examiner.