From the earliest days of his 2024 presidential campaign, Donald Trump made clear his intention to reverse the Biden administration’s border failures and to get control of the criminal operations that thrived during his predecessor’s tenure.
Amid news that a well-known Mexican cartel boss was arrested earlier this month, Director of National Intelligence (DNI) Tulsi Gabbard has stepped forward to praise the president and the “seriousness” with which he is taking the thorny challenge organizations such as the Sinaloa group represent, as the Daily Caller reports.
The DNI’s comments came during a Saturday interview on Fox News, when she left little doubt about her position on Trump’s commitment to curtailing cartel influence once and for all.
Gabbard referenced the Oct. 15 arrest of Leonardo Daniel “El Pato” Martinez Vera, a Sinaloa Cartel Plaza chief whose underlings had reportedly been involved in everything from kidnapping to murder.
The DNI was asked whether the apprehension of El Pato – an operation aided by her agency’s Counterterrorism Center -- is likely to send a strong warning shot to cartel leaders who were able to run rampant at the nation’s southern border during Biden’s time in office.
Gabbard declared in response, “Yes, it’s very significant,” adding that she wished she could reveal details of the operation itself, one which was orchestrated by agents currently working without pay “because of the Democrats’ government shutdown.”
She underscored the importance of Trump’s no-nonsense approach to battling the cartels, stating that “people are seeing President Trump is not messing around with this. If they try to resort to their own games of bribery and all of this other stuff, then they will be putting themselves in the target.”
From the first days of his second term in office, Trump made no secret of his plans to tackle the cartels, issuing an executive order on Jan. 20 designating cartels and other organizations as “foreign terrorist organizations and specially designated global terrorists.”
In doing so, the president declared that the “cartels functionally control, through a campaign of assassination, terror, rape, and brute force, nearly all illegal traffic across the southern border of the United States.”
The order went on to state that the activities of the cartels “threaten the safety of the American people, the security of the United States, and the stability of the international order in the Western Hemisphere.”
In furtherance of the presidential order, on Feb. 20, Secretary of State Marco Rubio announced the designation of a host of groups, including Tren de Aragua, MS-13, Cartel de Sinaloa, and more as “Foreign Terrorist Organizations” and “Specially Designated Global Terrorists.”
The designations, Rubio explained, “expose and isolate entities and individuals, denying them access to the U.S. financial system and the resources they need to carry out attacks,” and they also “can assist law enforcement actions of other U.S. agencies and governments.”
In the wake of El Pato’s arrest, Gabbard’s ODNI took a victory lap, stating in a press release, “We will not allow cartel gangs who target Americans to roam freely, whether in the U.S. or across the border in Mexico.”
The agency added, “Now, thanks to President Trump’s leadership, we are surging resources against cartels and gang leadership, disrupting their networks, and working alongside our Mexican partners to make communities safer and protect American lives,” not to mention undoing the damage Biden’s open-borders philosophy wrought for four straight years.
