Trump orchestrated the Mexico cartel killing

The US military has supported Mexico’s bloody cartel raid with intelligence from a new joint cartel task force. This fits exactly into Donald Trump’s bid for hemispheric dominance. Or, as one writer has put it, the erratic president’s new strategy for a ‘homeland empire’.

The White House confirmed it backed the bloody raid which killed cartel boss Nemesio ‘El Mencho’ Oseguera Cervantes. Cervantes was killed by Mexican government forces on 22 February. He was head of the Jalisco New Generation Cartel (CJNG). The attack triggered a further wave of violence across the country.

White House spokesperson Karoline Leavitt said:

The United States provided intelligence support to the Mexican government in order to assist with an operation in Tapalpa, Jalisco, Mexico, in which Nemesio ‘El Mencho’ Oseguera Cervantes, an infamous drug lord and leader within the Jalisco New Generation Cartel, was eliminated.

But apart from this admission details are thin. However, it’s understood that the Department of War’s Arizona-based Joint Interagency Task Force-Counter Cartel (JIATF-CC) supported the operation with intelligence. JIATF-CC was founded by executive order in January 2025:

to coordinate all U.S. government resources deployed to or supporting the efforts in the [U.S. Northern Command] area of responsibility to identify, disrupt and dismantle cartel operations along the U.S.-Mexico border.”

Security website The Watch reported:

Approximately 10,000 active-duty troops were mobilized to bolster those efforts and provide intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance support to other U.S. agencies, including the Customs and Border Protection agency.

Like Trump’s internal immigration crackdown using paramilitary thugs, this is another merger of policing with warfighting.

Merging defence and law enforcement

The military and law enforcement are traditionally seen as separate. This is an oversimplification in the post-9/11 world, but under Trump that two have merged even more quickly.

Historian Nikhil Pal Singh warned in a recent piece for Equator:

familiar analytical frameworks which rely on the distinction between foreign and domestic realms, normality and legality, policing and war, cannot provide the ‘world picture’ we need to grasp what’s happening here.

Instead, Trump:

conflates immigrants, drugs and free trade as sources of weakness coming from outside, “poisoning the blood of our country”.

Trump has married:

the archaic geopolitics of a settler empire to the modern legal frameworks devised by his liberal predecessors.

Singh adds:

What distinguishes his latest regime is its effort to reimagine and remake the borders of American state power, collapsing the foreign and the domestic in a single domain of impunity: call it ‘Homeland Empire’.

Civilisational and supremacist

The Trump administration has laid this approach out in its own words in its National Security Strategy (NSS) published in November 2025. It speaks in supremacist, civilisational terms, reading as much like a Joe Rogan interview as a major policy document:

The era of mass migration must end. Border security is the primary element of national security.

The NSS wilfully conflates migration with drug trafficking, spying and more besides:

We must protect our country from invasion, not just from unchecked migration but from cross-border threats such as terrorism, drugs, espionage, and human trafficking.

A border controlled by the will of the American people as implemented by their government is fundamental to the survival of the United States as a sovereign republic.

Trump’s Caracas kidnap of Venezuelan leader Nicolas Maduro on 3 January figures here. US figures often conflated the war on drugs with the War on Terror in the build-up to the raid. The US even drew on decades-old rhetoric about Al Qaeda to justify its violence.

Trump’s Mexico threats

On his first day back in office in January 2025 Trump designated Mexican cartels as terror organisations. In November 2025, the US government said it was preparing CIA personnel and special forces troops to strike cartels inside Mexico.

Mexican president Claudia Sheinbaum said in November:

He (Trump) has suggested it on various occasions or he has said, ‘we offer you a United States military intervention in Mexico, whatever you need to fight the criminal groups.

But I have told him on every occasion that we can collaborate, that they can help us with information they have, but that we operate in our territory, that we do not accept any intervention by a foreign government.

It seems Mexico, already embattled over relationship with Cuba, has settled on intelligence sharing with the US.

Few will weep over the death of a cartel leader, least of all ordinary Mexicans. Some figures say 300,000 people have died in Mexico in cartel-linked killings since 2025. But Trump’s ongoing practice of merging policing and the military and using them against a range of vaguely defined regional and global enemies is a way of reshaping the US and the region according to his whims.

Featured image via the Canary