As Donald Trump’s second-term administration was initially settling in, officials from the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) immediately began proposing military strikes in Mexico to take out cartel operations, which both the White House and the Pentagon balked at, according to news reports.
According to an exclusive report from the Washington Post’s Dan Lamothe and Ellen Nakashima, the proposal for military action was greeted with alarm at the White House out of fears it was jumping the gun. After Trump designated numerous Latin American cartels and criminal gangs as foreign terrorist organizations, DEA officials proposed using the military to help with their mission.
The Post is reporting, “The pushback on DEA’s advocacy, which has not been reported previously, illustrates the divisions that have arisen as the Trump administration has taken an aggressive posture toward combating what it says is a major adversary poisoning American citizens.”
Derek S. Maltz, who was the DEA’s acting administrator at the time told the Post, “My position was always to do it collaboratively and cooperatively with Mexico but at the end of the day America has to stand up for Americans first.”
The Post notes the proposal did not sit well with some administration officials, reporting, “The conversations were fairly conceptual and lacked a robust legal framework.”
One critic pointed out that, just because they had the terrorist designation, “They were drawing analogies to terror strikes, and that’s not the way it works.”
“It was not an authorization for the use of military force. Just because something is labeled a terrorist organization does not give you the authority to fire anything at them,” added another.
The DEA proposal prompted some officials at the Pentagon and other agencies to note there was no applicable congressional authorization on the books to use military force against drug cartels, people familiar with the matter said. Some of them also noted that U.S. citizens might be killed in the process, the people said,” the report added.
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