Former Navy SEAL officer and now-Rep. Dan Crenshaw (R-TX) is leading a group of hand-selected House Republicans in creating a fail-proof strategy to take down, even kill, the Mexican drug cartel members behind America's fentanyl crisis.
Crenshaw, who represents Houston's Woodlands area, knows the end goal is to come up with comprehensive legislation that leads to taking the transnational criminal organizations down, but his path there is a challenging one.
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"I'm going into this with an open mind because we have to be bipartisan, and we have to actually get the facts straight and see what will work best, and maybe it's my solution, maybe it's not," Crenshaw said in an interview with the Washington Examiner. "I'm not interested in just passing a bill out of the House. I'm interested in actually passing law. So we're doing our best to include Democrats."
House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) tapped Crenshaw in July to oversee the task force after the two reached an agreement that if the congressman voted for the House’s border security bill, H.R. 2, he could lead the panel. Crenshaw had opposed the bill because he believed it did not go far enough on the cartels who are behind the burgeoning border crisis, as well as the No.1 cause of death in Americans ages 18 to 45: fentanyl.
The task force begins its travel abroad next week with a trip to Colombia to see how the South American nation eliminated much of its drug cartel problem in the 1980s and 1990s.
"They’re 30 years ahead of where Mexico is, theoretically," he said and added that there are big lessons to be learned in how Colombia overcame its cartel problem and ways to implement similar actions against those in Mexico, particularly the Sinaloa cartel and Jalisco New Generation Cartel.
In early November, the task force will visit Mexico, where Crenshaw hopes to meet with Mexican President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, but much could go wrong between now and then, particularly given the political fights that GOP presidential candidates are waging over the issue. Drug cartels were a hot topic during this week's Republican presidential debate.
"I encourage my colleagues and people running for president to make sure that the goal is to actually kill the cartel members and not to just increase their visibility and raise money," Crenshaw said. "Some candidates, like Nikki Haley, others, are pretty well-read people, right? They would go about this the right way and talk about it the right way."
Discussing how to tackle the Mexican cartels and keeping it a major issue in the election could backfire for the country's end-all goal of eliminating them.
"There is a point where your rhetoric can actually be counterproductive. A lot of people do not understand Latin American culture, and they certainly don't understand how the Mexicans operate," he said. "There's some finesse that has to happen there."
Crenshaw has led a charge in the House with his own cartel-focused legislation but said he has, at times, been misunderstood, and it was those kinds of misunderstandings that threaten to ruin the task force's work before the real work has even begun.
"I've been accused of all this crap by the president of Mexico himself, wrongly accused that I'm calling for unilateral action. Now look, if [the cartels] got so bad and [the] Mexicans just refused to work with us, you can't take that kind of option off the table. But our first step in all of this is a much more serious military cooperation with the Mexican Armed Forces," Crenshaw said. "We have to be very clear about that because the Mexican politicians will take our words and twist them and use it for political gain. And then they won't go after the cartels the way we need them to."
Earlier this year, Crenshaw debuted a bill to stomp out fentanyl production and smuggling by Mexican criminal organizations. The Declaring War on the Cartels Act of 2023 was formulated to appeal to both Democrats and Republicans.
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It would drastically expand the U.S. government's ability to go after cross-border organized crime rings, known as cartels, but it would stop short of declaring them terrorist organizations, which further-right conservatives have pushed for because it could make Mexicans eligible to make refugee or asylum claims.
Crenshaw anticipates completing the task force’s report later this year or in early 2024. Recommendations would then be transformed into legislation. Members on the task force have purposely been pulled from relevant committees across the House and will play a leading role in winning support from Democrats.