Former President Donald Trump is reportedly toying with the idea of deploying covert American Special Forces units into Mexico to disrupt cartel operations and assassinate gang leaders if he is reelected for a second term, sources close to Trump told Rolling Stone.

According to the three unnamed sources, the former president has voiced multiple ideas about addressing the fentanyl crisis and the unchecked flow of illegal immigrants across the southern border. These suggestions have ranged from bombings and military deployments to covert assassinations and drone strikes—all to be conducted with or without approval from the Mexican government.

Per Rolling Stone:

The former president has not presented specific details in public about these plans — for example, how many U.S. troops he’d be willing to send into sovereign Mexican territory. But, the three sources tell Rolling Stone, in conversations with close MAGA allies, including at least one Republican lawmaker, Trump has privately endorsed the idea of covertly deploying — with or without the Mexican government’s consent — special-ops units that would be tasked with, among other missions, assassinating the leaders and top enforcers of Mexico’s powerful and most notorious drug cartels.

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Trump is further reported to have remarked that the US has “tougher killers than they do,” questioning why this method has not been tried before. He is also said to have likened the strikes against Mexico to the killing of ISIS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi in 2019, and he suggested keeping a “kill list of drug lords” for the US to assassinate.

Rumors that the former president was considering this strategy during his first term circulated just after he left office, with former Defense Secretary Mark Esper alleging that Trump had even wanted to “bomb the cartels’ drug labs, and then potentially pin the strikes on another country.”

To the horror of the left-leaning outlet, what was once a “fringe notion” during Trump’s first term has since been floated to multiple Trump allies, including a Republican lawmaker, and has been met with significant approval.

As Rolling Stone points out, Trump has campaigned on a pledge to “make appropriate use of Special Forces, cyber warfare, and other overt and covert actions to inflict maximum damage on cartel leadership, infrastructure, and operations.” A Reuters/Ipsos poll asking the electorate about the subject last year found that 52 percent of respondents support military action against cartels, although that number decreases when approval from the Mexican government is not considered.

Related: Mexican Pres. Lopez Obrador Demands $20 Billion, Lifted Sanctions to Stop Illegal Immigration

In his first term, Trump put heavy pressure on his Mexican counterparts to crack down on the “bad hombres” running drug smuggling operations and human trafficking rings at the southern border. Following the election of President Joe Biden, the border crisis ballooned to unprecedented proportions, likely explaining, at least in part, the surge of Republican support for Trump’s extreme solution.

In recent months, GOP think tanks like the Center for Renewing America and the America First Policy Institute have released policy papers calling for intervention in Mexico, as have lawmakers like senators Lindsey Grahm (R-SC) and John Kennedy (R-LA). During his presidential campaign earlier this year, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis promised to deploy Special Forces to Mexico “on Day One.”

However, the suggestion provoked a fierce reaction from Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador, who denounced it as “an offense to the people of Mexico.”

“We are not going to permit any foreign government to intervene in our territory, much less that a government’s armed forces intervene,” he said last March.


Connor Walcott is a staff writer for Valuetainment.com. Follow Connor on X and look for him on VT’s “The Unusual Suspects.”

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