U.S. Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth won’t rule out military action in Mexico to prevent drugs from crossing America’s southern border amid the Trump administration’s renewed effort to crack down on transnational crime.
Speaking with Fox News on Friday night, the former network host said “all options will be on the table” after President Donald Trump signed an executive order designating “certain international cartels (the Cartels) and other organizations” as foreign terrorist organizations.
As Fox & Friends host Brian Kilmeade put it to Hegseth, “If they continue to fire at our border patrol, and if they continue to pour fentanyl into our country, as secretary of defense, are you permitted now to go after them in Mexico or wherever they are?”
Hegseth responded, “I don’t want to get ahead of the president, and I won’t. That’s ultimately going to be his decision, but let me be clear: all options will be on the table if we’re dealing with what are designated to be foreign terrorist organizations who are specifically targeting Americans on the border.”
He added, “We’re finally securing our border. We’ve been securing other people’s borders for a very long time. The military is orienting, shifting toward an understanding of homeland defense on our sovereign territorial border.”
Hegseth said that the U.S. military intends to pursue these goals “robustly,” and “should the cartels continue to pour people, gangs and drugs and violence into our country, we will take that on.”
He added, “Ultimately, we will hold nothing back to secure the American people.”
Trump’s “day one” executive order has called for the Pentagon to mobilize roughly 1,500 active-duty soldiers to further bolster Defense Department and border patrol officials already at the U.S.-Mexico border.
It is, however, unclear at this stage whether the Trump administration has any designs for an actual incursion into the nation’s southern neighbor, given the likely severe international blowback and extreme danger posed to U.S. civilians by any prospect of all-out violence in America’s borderlands.
Meanwhile, on Friday, the White House also pushed on with imposing tariffs of 25 percent on the flow of goods into the U.S. from Mexico and Canada—a move designed to further curtail cartel activity, but which economists have said threaten to seriously drive up the price of products coming in from abroad.
