Morning Wire - Combatting Cartels to Secure Our Southern Border| 11.30.24

Episode Date: November 30, 2024

Congressman Dan Crenshaw outlines his vision for a comprehensive US-Mexico partnership to combat cartel violence and protect American communities. Get the facts first on Morning Wire. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

After years of destructive open border policies during the Biden-Harris administration, Congressman Dan Crenshaw has been tasked with combating the growing influence of Mexican cartels and the illegal flow of fentanyl at our southern border. We sat down with the Navy SEAL veteran to hear his plan to build a strong partnership with Mexico in order to dismantle the cartels and secure America's border. I'm Daily Wire, editor-in-chief John Bickley, with Georgia Howl. It's November 30th, and this is a Saturday edition of Morning Wire. joining us now to discuss this plan to secure our southern border and dismantle the Mexican drug cartels as Congressman Dan Crenshaw, Congressman, thank you so much for joining us.

So last year you were tapped by the Speaker to lead the task force to combat Mexican drug cartels. First, how were you chosen? Well, because this was on the heels of passing HR2, you know, our flagship border security bill. And I had the complaint to the Speaker that there was nothing in that bill that dealt with cartels. and that we had no real plan to deal with cartels from a legislative perspective. And that was the point I brought up to them in a demand I had that we either do add it to HR2 or figure something else out. And from that conversation came the idea of the task force where a task force can be many things in Congress, but it's usually a bipartisan group of members that use their time to research a very specific policy objective, in this case, cartels.

And that's all it started. And what recommendations are you making for U.S. policy to combat cartel influence both domestically and abroad going forward? Yeah, some of these things have already been done. Others still need to be accomplished, and a lot of it really depends on Mexico itself. That's one of the bigger lessons we've learned from all this research. To give the examples of things we've accomplished, well, reauthorizing FISA was a huge one. During that reauthorization, we not only made a lot of changes and reforms to FISA that would prevent another crossfire hurricane, which I know a lot of people are concerned about. But we also added some capabilities.

You might be surprised to hear that we actually tie our own hands behind her back from intelligence collection using FISA against entities like cartel affiliates and Chinese companies that make the precursors for fentanyl. We don't even allow it. We don't allow ourselves to collect on that. So we changed that with the FISA authorization. We basically added a fourth category to the three categories of collection that currently exists. in that fourth category would be anyone involved in creation of synthetic opioids. So as before, we couldn't even collect on a broker or a banker or a driver for the cartels. And we couldn't collect on a company in China, you know, willingly and creating precursors

and illegally labeling, shipping them to the U.S. and Mexico to make fentanyl that kills Americans. So now we can't. That was a pretty big deal. Now, what do we want to do? Well, there's a variety of things that are, frankly, low-hanging fruit. I mean, if you mislabel, for instance, air cargo purposefully, and you're actually caught, and so difficult enough to catch you, CBP as an entire task force dedicated to that in LA, it's only a $5,000 fine.

So, you know, this is barely even a scratch on the cartels or the company's facilitating them. So here's one quick law change is make that $5 million or something like that. Easy ones. Sometimes it's just about funding certain agencies like HSI that are doing very specific work on tracking the money flows that they're. cartels use. You know, they're underfunded. They don't have enough licenses bought for a specific program that tracks Bitcoin, for instance. Sometimes it's just as easy as giving them that extra money so that they can buy the extra licenses and hire the extra analysts. Looking at the bigger picture,

though, what you really need is a deal with Mexico. Mexico is not Colombia, but we do need to make the analogy because they're in very similar situations just in different timeframes. Mexico is in the same situation as Colombia was back in the 90s. Columbia was a near-failed state. You had the narco wars with the Menadeen cartel, and then the Calais cartel, which devolved into the guerrilla wars, which continued to this day, but to far lesser extent, far lesser extent. I know from personal experience because I went to high school in Columbia.

I was there during the height of the Civil War against the guerrillas, the FARC of the ELN. So the difference is the Colombians welcome American security cooperation in with open arms, and they always have. We have a very tight relationship with the Colombians. And as a result, you've seen a ton of improvement over the last 30 years, Mexico is always given America the stiff arm. And that dates back to memories from the 1840s

and from Mexican-American War. Right. While for us Americans, that history means nothing to us, it means a lot to them. At least they say it does politically. Now, you ask the average Mexican, I don't think it means all that much. You're average Mexican would welcome Navy SEALs

helping Mexican military special forces go after cartels. So what you really need is a plan Colombia, but a plan Mexico. And you can't do that. until the administration of Mexico actually agrees to it. So, you know, we started that conversation when we introduced the authorized use of military force against cartels. God, it's like years ago now at this point.

The idea being that, you know, we want to signal from Congress that we want to give the legal authority to the president to actually take this on with the U.S. military. Now, does he really even need the authority? I'm not really sure he does because we'd be operating alongside an ally, Mexico,

which the president is authority to help and to aid. You know, we already do in many ways. But we want to make that authority clearer and we want Mexico to ask for it. So there's a lot of things we could do from up here. And we have a list of legislative items. But in the end, what we're really hopeful about is the new administration of Mexico. They took power in October. And I believe they will be a lot more pragmatic in allowing us to help them rid their country.

It was effectively the most powerful terrorist insurgency in the world. And I mean that wholeheartedly compared to ISIS or al-Qaeda. They're by far the most powerful. They're integrated into every level of government. They have every weapon they can imagine. They have all the money possible. They are really, really powerful. And the Mexico needs our help to defeat them.

So you're hopeful that Mexico's regime will be more amenable to this. And then I assume that you have more confidence that a Trump administration will be more effective at this than the Biden administration. Yeah, I have a lot more confidence. I mean, like, Biden didn't try to stop anything. You know, our agencies across the board from the FBI to CMP to HSI to the CIA, to the CIA. have done everything they can. And I'm not going to say that Biden ever tried to stop them. But rhetorically, Biden never talks about this.

He's never talked about the cartels or the ruling fentanyl test. And you know why? Because there's an obvious nexus from the cartels to the border, which is a touchy issue for Democrats. Trump doesn't have this problem. So Trump can easily say that he wants to go up to car. He has said it. He's put Tom Holman and former director of ICE, as his borders are.

And what is he even talking about constantly in cartels? So, yeah, there's a ton of political appetite to make this happen. And so it's our job in Congress to make it happen. The task force is a small way to do that. I'm formally calling on us to create a select committee to actually combat the problem. Because when you're looking at legislation, here's a quick lesson in civics. We have all of these different committees of jurisdiction. It's a lot more complicated than you think.

Even the simplest of bills can have three committees of jurisdiction. So it takes a long time to get things done. A select committee solves that problem. We did the same thing with the select committee on child. That's how you get a difficult bill like the TikTok ban through it. So a select committee, I think, is the right avenue to do what we need to do, do what we said we would do, and help Trump fulfill his promises. Now, many talk about the cartels operations in Mexico,

but we're hearing a little bit more now about their operation and the extent of it here in the U.S. What do we know there? How extensively are they operating on U.S. soil? It's a great question, and it kind of depends on you define operating. Now, are there card carrying Sinaloa members just on U.S. soil? it doesn't really work that way. They're not that stupid. The way it does work is this entire business has become very much a market.

And in any market, there are people who do certain things and specialize in certain things. You're not going to see Sinaloa members as the drug dealers on the streets of whatever city you're living in. You're going to see local gang members who grew up there on the streets, who have made deals with cartels and who take their shipments from the cartels. The cartels are ultimately facilitators. and they hire whatever facilitator they need in whatever area they need. So the answer to your question is kind of yes and no. They have very deep ties because they're the bosses of these people operating in any location in the U.S. But a lot of the traffickers coming across are probably U.S. citizens.

So it's a mix of both. But on the other hand, you know, I can point you to a million of my friends who, my own property on the southern border and they have, you know, they have night cameras up because they're looking for game and, you know, hogs and things like that. But for once in a while, what they see is a bunch of people in military uniforms be trolling across. These are the types who want to get away from CBP, not turn themselves in. And you really got to wonder what they're doing. Those are the gotaways we talked about.

We're talking about the border. There's almost 2 million gotaways under the Biden administration. And if you're trying to get away from Border Patrol, there's something really wrong because we all know what Biden's policies are. Most people have an incentive to actually just turn themselves into Border Patrol because they know they'll be let loose and paroled. They'll get a free ticket anywhere. So if you're actually trying to evade border patrol, you're trafficking something, you have weapons, you're a criminal, there's something different about you. But that's the truth. So it's the answer to your question.

It's complicated. It's a mix of both. For you personally, with your work on this, what's your next steps in the coming weeks and months? Well, I want to convince the speaker that we need a select committee because of jurisdictional issues. So that streamlines our ability to actually get some legislation done. Second of all, it actually gives us some staff. I've been working on this cartel fast force. It's just me.

It's literally just me. I had one DEA agent tasked, and then it's just me and my staff. It's just not enough. I'm on two other committees. I have a one-year-old. And I've still done a dozen trips across the U.S. to try and figure out what we're doing first against the cartels and then figure out what needs to be done.

We've actually managed to do quite a bit with no resources. Imagine what we can do with just some resources, which is what a select committee gives you. Final question. This is not about Mexican cartels per se, but it is about gang-religious. activity here in the U.S. Trende-Aaragua is all over the news for very good reason. The latest is that they're operating in at least 16 states. What do we know about what they're doing and what actions are we taking to crack down on

them? Well, we know probably not enough. This is obviously hit the news really recently and come to everybody's attention very recently happening under our nose. And this is a little bit out of my expertise. What I deal with is Sinaloa, the Felisco cartels, Mexican-affiliated cartels. Obviously, there's these gags. affiliated with cartels? Probably. I mean, again, it's like, it's like I said,

criminals look for other criminals to work together with. That's how all of this works. Everybody owns a different part of the system. The Colombians producing cocaine in Columbia aren't Sinaloa, but a Sinaloa operative has a meeting with them a meeting with them every once in a while. They give them a call. They put it in orders. Take a business. So, you know, they're a Fortune 500 company, but they're also an insurgency. And every, all of these elements are part of that insurgency. And, you know, I don't know how to answer a question on exactly because that's really a question for the FBI that we're still looking into on how much they understand this threat and what we're doing about it. But it's, it is top of the list,

top of the mind for the FBI and then a law enforcement in particular. I do know that. Well, Congressman, thank you so much for joining us. Appreciate you guys. Yeah. Thanks for, thanks for doing this. That was Texas Congressman Dan Crenshaw, and this has been a Saturday edition of Morning Wire.