The clarion call to “build the wall” is no longer enough. Each of the declared Republican candidates for president tell RealClearPolitics that Mexican drug cartels must be designated as foreign terrorist organizations. It is the newest populist orthodoxy, one that the Biden administration flatly rejects.
The context for the latest partisan divide was Friday’s kidnapping of four Americans in the Mexican border town of Matamoros. Two of them were murdered, the other two were rescued and are in a Texas hospital. The White House insisted this kind of designation is unnecessary while implying that their critics are grandstanding..
“Designating these cartels as [foreign terrorist organizations] would not grant us any additional authorities that we don’t really have at this time,” press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre told reporters Wednesday, adding that the United States already has “powerful sanctions authorities” and “we have not been afraid to use them.”