This story was originally published by the WND News Center.

Attorneys general from multiple U.S. states has accused Joe Biden of providing “an anemic response” to the catastrophic destruction from Mexican drug cartels that are costing “hundreds of thousands of American lives each year.”

They are insisting that Biden start treating the crime organizations, including the Sinaloa Cartel, the Jalisco New Generation Cartel, and others, as “foreign terrorist organizations.”

“The cartels’ intense violence goes far beyond mere resistance to interference with their drug trafficking and now encompasses a general effort to intimidate rivals and expand their influence. This violence, which necessarily involves using firearms and explosives to kill security forces, plainly constitutes terrorist activity,” the letter, organized by Virginia AG Jason Miyares explained.

It also was signed by officials for Alabama, Alaska, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Indiana, Iowa, Kentucky, Louisiana, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, New Hampshire, Ohio, Oklahoma, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, and West Virginia.

A report in The Federalist described the letter demanding the FTO designation for drug dealers as “a bid to rectify the chaos caused by President Joe Biden’s open border policies.”

The letter also went to Secretary of State Antony Blinken.

The coalition insists the terrorist designation is needed so that state and federal law enforcement agencies would be given “increased powers to freeze cartel assets, deny entry to cartel members, and allow prosecutors to pursue tougher punishments against those who provide material support to the cartels.”

The letter explains, “Traditional counter-narcotics efforts are inadequate to address the threat posed by the Mexican drug cartels. Now that the cartels have made widespread use of assassinations and armed insurgency against the Mexican government, FTO designation is the only way to disrupt these increasingly violent cartel tactics and weaken their criminal enterprise.”

Blamed on the criminal organizations are many problems, including the devastating impact of fentanyl, which causes tens of thousands of deaths in just the last year.

“The threat these drug cartels pose is real and imminent – which is why this country must escalate its response,” Miyares said in a statement. “Law enforcement agencies need every tool available to fight against this public health and national security crisis, and designating these cartels as Foreign Terrorist Organizations would be an important first step in confronting the gravity of this dangerous crisis.”

The report said drug cartels aren’t new, but “the Biden administration’s open border policies have made it easier” to traffick drugs into the U.S.

“In June 2021, for instance, the administration announced it would end the Trump-era ‘Remain in Mexico’ policy, which required illegal border crossers seeking asylum to stay in the Latin American country until their court hearing. The administration has also sought to eliminate Title 42, a health policy that allows federal officials to expel illegal migrants with minimal processing,” the report said.

The result was predictable, hundreds of thousands of illegal aliens breaching America’s borders and entering.