Mexico Transfers Dozens of Cartel Operatives to U.S. Custody

The handover of so many significant cartel figures was one of the most important efforts by Mexico in the modern history of the drug war to send traffickers to face charges in U.S. courts.

Author

Matt Davis
February 28, 2025

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This morning’s paper amid our child’s wooden letters on the rug in the living room.

Today’s story by Alan Feuer focuses on a new collaboration between the U.S. and Mexican governments over drug cartels. Yesterday, Mexico sent nearly 30 top cartel operatives to the U.S., some of whom we’ve been trying to bring to justice for more than 40 years:

“The handover of so many significant cartel figures to the United States at once was one of the most important efforts by Mexico in the modern history of the drug war to send traffickers to face charges in American federal courts.”

The move is characterized as a “win” for president Donald Trump and I can’t say I disagree with that.

“Among those being flown to the United States was Rafael Caro Quintero, a founding member of the Sinaloa drug cartel, who was convicted in Mexico of masterminding the 1985 murder of Enrique Camarena, an agent with the Drug Enforcement Administration, Attorney General Pam Bondi said in a statement. Getting hold of Mr. Caro Quintero has for decades been all but an obsession among officials at the drug agency.”

This story is accompanied by another story on page four, also reported by Alan Feuer, who’s been busy, about a high-level split amongst Trump’s officials about how best to fight the cartels in Mexico. Some Trump officials are keen to collaborate with Mexico. Others are urging “cross-border action by the U.S. military.”

The Trump administration has been engaged in a “heated debate”, the Times reports, about how hard to go in pushing the Mexican government to deal with the cartels, “which have for years wreaked bloody violence in Mexico and smuggled untold amounts of illegal drugs into the United States.”

On Monday, Trump told reporters that drugs are “killing hundreds of thousands of people”, although statistics do show that U.S. overdose deaths have dropped recently according to public health officials. But as we know, Trump does tend to double down on lies, especially when they support his foreign policy ambitions.

The piece quotes objective sources saying this is a step forward in the fight against cartels:

“‘This is an unbelievably important moment and marks a true turning point,’ said Ray Donovan, the former chief of operations for the D.E.A. ‘This shows President Sheinbaum’s willingness to work with us to target and dismantle the criminal organizations that have impacted the United States and Mexico for generations.”

We’ll see. I’m a huge fan of the 2015 film Sicario, which stars Josh Brolin as a rogue CIA operative and Emily Blunt as a lawyer trying to rein in his efforts to go further than he perhaps should to rein in the cartels. The movie portrays the international politics at stake in these struggles, and also the personal toll on the people involved in fighting them, particularly through Benicio del Toro’s portrayal of a man whose family has been killed at the hands of the cartels. The bloodshed involved is beyond most of our comprehension.

I’m also aware, as I read the story, that for Trump’s administration, it helps to portray Mexico as the source of criminal drug gangs, because that helps in its general desire to stoke racism and anti-immigrant sentiment more generally. The vast majority of people who immigrate to the U.S. from Central America do so for economic reasons and have nothing to do with cartels, and it’s important to keep that in mind when discussing these stories.

The second piece by Mr. Feuer gets into some of these complexities. Going too hard against the cartels, it reports, “could shut down the broader cooperation with Mexican forces on one of Trump’s signature policy priorities: stopping migrants from reaching the Southern U. S. border.”

Mexico has pushed back on growing U.S. calls for a military solution to the cartels, particularly after the State Department designated six of the cartels as terrorist organizations last month. Mexico aims for “coordination or cooperation, never invasion or subordination,” President Sheinbaum reportedly said last month.

Meanwhile the CIA has “stepped up secret drone flights over the country,” without authorization, which were revealed by the New York Times. Ms. Sheinbaum responded by saying “sovereignty is not negotiable, that is a basic principle.”

And yet it doesn’t seem to be one that the U.S. is intent on respecting, of late, in particular, by trying to change the name of the Gulf of Mexico to the Gulf of America!

“But if the United States pushes Mexico too far, it may reverse decades of cooperation between the two nations, analysts and former diplomats have warned. Even before Mr. Trump was re-elected, ties between the United States and Mexico over the issue of drug cartels were already strained.

This summer, Mexican officials were outraged by what they believed to be direct American involvement in the kidnapping of one of the country’s most powerful drug lords, Ismael Zambada García, who was forcibly flown across the border where he was arrested by U.S. federal agents near El Paso. Despite U.S. assertions that the abduction was carried out by one of El Chapo’s sons without any American assistance on the ground, Mexican officials demanded the Justice Department provide more answers.”

This is a story that challenges my politics. I absolutely agree that in theory the U.S. shouldn’t be interfering in Mexico’s affairs. On the other hand it’s evident that Mexico hasn’t handled its cartel issues well over decades, and I do support stronger efforts by the U.S. to help deal with the challenges at play.

Many of us, I think, would prefer to look the other way rather than face the complexities that are brought up by stories like these. I don’t think that by putting Mexico on blast, Trump is necessarily undermining our efforts to do that. In many ways he is sending a message that he’s prepared to go further than previous administrations and I can’t help but thinking that whether I like him, agree with his approach, or even agree that it’ll help secure a better outcome, he is certainly prepared to walk into the arena and fight. Begrudgingly, I’ll admit to admiring that, even if it does sort of make me hate myself a little.

What do you think? Please talk to your friends and family about the news!

Matt Davis lives in Manhattan with his wife and kid.