The Coming U.S.-Mexico Border War

Regardless of how the military dimension of the coming border conflict shapes out, this will be, ultimately, a “total” war.

U.S. troops monitor the border with Mexico.

One of the topics I don’t talk about much here on this blog is foreign policy. This is because one of my most steadfast beliefs is that what’s happening inside our country is always more important than what’s happening outside of it. The fact is, the United States faces few threats from the outside and so much of what the Regime in Washington concerns itself with around the world is of no consequence to our lives. If Ukraine lost its war with Russia today, our lives wouldn’t be any worse for the wear, though further involving ourselves in that conflict would greatly risk our national security.

So I guess you could say, I’m “America First.” In the original sense, not the Trumpian sense. But we’ll have the rest of our time together to talk about that.

Retired United States Army Col. Douglas Macgregor had this to say on Twitter a few weeks ago that drew a lot of attention:

Anyone who’s followed Macgregor closely for a long time knows he’s been saying this for years, well before the Overton window shifted in the public discourse during the Trump administration due to the 45th president making the situation at the southern border impossible to ignore. Macgregor has always been a radical, unorthodox thinker, but this is because he isn’t afraid to point out what ought to be very obvious facts to most. Despite having the reputation of being straight-shooters, the reality is that military officers are very much under pressure to tell their superiors, both in and out of uniform, what they want to hear, and will hide the truth or peddle outright falsehoods which are nonetheless Regime-approved in order to maintain their careers.

As you’ll see in this piece, however, nothing Macgregor said should be regarded as controversial. It’s all too obvious, actually.

The Mexican Drug War

Mexico isn’t the country most Americans think of when they hear the term “national security threat.” Maybe it’s a stretch, but there’s no question what happens in Mexico simply doesn’t stay in Mexico, to say nothing of the fact they’re a next-door neighbor. If your real-life next-door neighbor was dealing drugs, killing people, and abusing his family, all in his own home, do you not think that’d eventually become impossible to ignore, no matter how hard you tried?

Same with Mexico. It really shouldn’t, but it tends to shock Americans and offend both Mexicans over the border and Americans of Mexican descent when you point out the country has been engulfed in civil war since at least the mid-2000s. In reality, it’s being going on far longer, but the point is that Mexico is a war zone. It’s a far cry from the Russo-Ukrainian war or even the wars in the Middle East, yet it’s also been consistently one of the world’s bloodiest armed conflicts for years. Calculating war casualties is an inexact science, but best measurements suggest over 5,000 have been killed in the Mexican drug war in 2023, making it potentially the sixth-deadliest conflict of the year thus far. How many of you would’ve guessed that?

I mentioned drugs - it’s not the only thing fueling the conflict, but there’s no question it’s one of the biggest things fueling it. The history behind the Mexican drug war is too vast to cover here, but however it might’ve happened, the country’s many drug cartels are the primary belligerents in this fight. Cartels are, of course, criminal enterprises, so they have downstream effects that impact us down to the street level. Your local drug dealer who sells something stronger than marijuana? He’s likely just a few degrees removed from a cartel member or someone who has cartel connections. This shouldn’t be construed as thinking there are cartel members all around us - there aren’t, cartel members are smarter than to expose themselves like that - but it is to underscore how close the threat can be at places and times.

The Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) used to publish an annual National Drug Threat Assessment, but since the last one was published in 2020, there hasn’t been one since (I wonder if the Biden presidency has something to do with that?). In the 2020 report, the DEA illustrated the influence Mexican drug cartels had throughout the U.S.:

The report has been criticized in the past, by cartel operatives, ironically, for misrepresenting the true nature of the threat. However, we know Latin American gangs and criminal enterprises do have deep roots here, even in some of the most innocuous of places. Here’s a shocking story out of Alabama back in 2018:

A 13-year-old Huntsville girl is beheaded - after her cartel-connected grandmother was stabbed and left to die before her eyes.

In Birmingham the same week news of that horrific death was detailed by authorities, two cartel-connected meth dealers are sentenced to long federal prison terms.

Earlier in the year, a cartel-connected man claimed he had killed three dozen people, and planned a hit on an Alabama cop.

The connection? The Sinaloa Cartel, a Mexican drug gang with one of the largest U.S. footprints - including just about everything east of the Mississippi -- of all the cartels. Joaquin Archivaldo Guzman Loera - better known as El Chapo - led the Sinaloa cartel until his 2014 capture.

Huntsville was declared the second-best place to live in America by U.S. News & World Report this year, having occupied the top spot the year before. Does it still seem like a nice place to live?

Incredulously, the reaction from law enforcement was essentially, “Don’t worry about it:”

But there is nothing, police insist, to panic about. The cartel has been in America for decades, smuggling meth and cocaine and other drugs. “The Sinaloa cartel has been around forever. It is probably the most pervasive and extensive-reaching cartel in the U.S.,” said Bret Hamilton, assistant special agent in charge for Alabama's Drug Enforcement Administration. “They control about one-fourth of the Mexican region, but when it comes to the U.S., their reach is huge.”

“Typically, their MO (method of operation) is to embed themselves in Mexican national communities, typically the immigrant community working on peach farms, chick plants, and other farm areas,” Hamilton said. “They’re basically hiding in plain sight.”

“They try to maintain a low profile,” he said. “They're not going to conduct any type of violence unless they've been double-crossed. If they’ve been double-crossed by one of their distributors or someone who has purchased dope from them, they’re going to take care of business. And, they're going to make a statement when they do it.”

To be fair, what’s being said is accurate - cartels, like most professional criminal enterprises, compartmentalize their activity well and effectively live on the fringes of civilization. They’re not your typical street criminal and they’re certainly not your smash-and-grabbers. However, what’s being said also seems like a concession that the problem has become too big and has gone on for so long, there’s really nothing that can be done about it except contain it. And how long can that be sustained? As Douglas Macgregor said, once we make a serious attempt at securing the border, it’ll threaten the cartels’ bottom line. The idea they’d close up shop and leave the country is ludicrous, since the U.S. is undoubtedly one of their biggest markets.

The far reach of the Mexican cartels really is the defining feature of the present-day drug epidemic. What was once a primarily urban phenomenon has become one that ravages rural areas and small towns far removed from the U.S.-Mexico border or even our metropolitan areas.

From Courier Journal in 2019:

Somewhere deep in Mexico's remote wilderness, the world’s most dangerous and wanted drug lord is hiding. If someone you love dies from an overdose tonight, he may very well be to blame.

He's called "El Mencho."

And though few Americans know his name, authorities promise they soon will.

Rubén "Nemesio" Oseguera Cervantes is the leader of Cártel Jalisco Nueva Generación, better known as CJNG. With a $10 million reward on his head, he’s on the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration’s Most Wanted list.

El Mencho’s powerful international syndicate is flooding the U.S. with thousands of kilos of methamphetamines, heroin, cocaine and fentanyl every year — despite being targeted repeatedly by undercover stings, busts and lengthy investigations.

The unending stream of narcotics has contributed to this country’s unprecedented addiction crisis, devastating families and killing more than 300,000 people since 2013.

More:

Brenda and Karl Cooley of Louisville certainly didn’t know his name when their son Adam overdosed on fentanyl in March 2017. Adam died midsentence while writing a thank-you note to a friend on the eve of entering a rehab facility.

Who was to blame? his anguished parents asked.

The answer, The Courier Journal found, kept pointing to CJNG.

"They’re killing the next generation, and one of them was my son," Brenda Cooley said.

Courier Journal reporters pieced together CJNG’s network, from the suburbs of Seattle, the beaches of Mississippi and South Carolina, California’s coastline, the mountains of Virginia, small farming towns in Iowa and Nebraska, and across the Bluegrass State, including in Louisville, Lexington and Paducah.

A cartel member even worked at Kentucky's famed Calumet Farm, home to eight Kentucky Derby and three Triple Crown winners.

Ciro Macias Martinez led a double life, working as a horse groomer by day and overseeing the flow of $30 million worth of drugs into Kentucky by night before being imprisoned in 2018 for meth trafficking and money laundering, federal records show.

If this isn’t a national security threat, I don’t know what is. Does North Korea harm everyday Americans the way the Mexican drug cartels do? Have North Korean, Chinese, or Russian operatives infiltrated the Middle American Heartland like this? Who should we really be worried about here?

Foreign Invasion

Then there’s the migrant crisis. Yes, it’s a crisis and I’m tired of people pretending it’s not. Like the drug epidemic, the migrant crisis has become so big, so out of control, the authorities have since taken on the mindset of managing the disaster instead of trying to fix the problem. Fixing the problem requires too many resources and, more important, a level of political will and public support that just doesn’t exist at the moment.

But a disaster it is. Look at all that happened in Border Patrol’s Tuscon Sector alone last week:

Source

After almost a year of being forced to accommodate the deluge of migrants shipped by the Republican governors of Florida and Texas (a move I initially criticized last year), even “sanctuary city” advocates like New York City Mayor Eric Adams were forced to confront reality in the bluntest manner possible:

https://twitter.com/EndWokeness/status/1699640666035294545

I don’t think the mayor is exaggerating here. Recently, the issue has become a massive rise in the number of unregistered motorbikes and flagrant lawlessness by migrants as they effectively establish a parallel society, free from rules and constraints other New Yorkers have to live by. Here, you see New York City police attempting to confiscate unregistered mopeds and running into resistance:

https://twitter.com/CatchUpFeed/status/1698792746675474626

Now that you’ve seen the impact illegal immigration has on the home front, let’s return to the border. By now, it ought to be clear the U.S.-Mexico border isn’t a nice place to be. How bad is it?

From the United Nations’ International Organization for Migration:

The International Organization for Migration (IOM) documented 686 deaths and disappearances of migrants on the US-Mexico border in 2022, making it the deadliest land route for migrants worldwide on record. 

The figure represents nearly half of the 1,457 migrant deaths and disappearances recorded throughout the Americas in 2022, the deadliest year on record since IOM’s Missing Migrants Project (MMP) began in 2014. 

The data comes from IOM’s MMP annual overview, which underscores the growing death toll and increasing risks that migrants face throughout the region. These figures represent the lowest estimates available as many more deaths are likely to go unrecorded due to lack of data from official sources.

There’s no question President Joe Biden’s administration is responsible for the acceleration of this ongoing crisis. In no way has the 46th president done anything to improve the situation; in fact, he and his administration seem bent on making it worse. In his review of Todd Bensman’s new book Overrun: How Joe Biden Unleashed the Greatest Border Crisis in U.S. History, retired diplomat Phillip Linderman provides an overview of how the people at the apex of our national leadership are very much driving mass illegal immigration:

Overrun lays out the outrageous (and impeachable) Biden orders that encouraged and accommodated millions of economic migrants in making false asylum claims, an act that is itself a federal offense. Bensman provides some of the best first-hand accounts in print of the infamous “migrant caravans” of tens of thousands surging to our frontier. The author observed how these so-called caravans, organized like military columns, used tactics of violent human surges to break through barriers and lines of security officers to make their way illegally into the United States. He writes of unprecedented human trafficking of children and women, spreading tragedy across the border and into the American heartland. 

Under Biden’s migrant surge, Bensman reports that authorities have already matched over 114 border jumpers with identities on the U.S. government terrorist watchlist; these were just the ones who were caught. Untold numbers of other serious criminals and national security suspects, the “got-aways,” have certainly entered the country. Biden’s policies have resulted in clusters of young Muslim men, from regions and countries such as Chechnya, Tajikistan, Afghanistan, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Yemen, and Somalia, regularly gathering on the U.S. border in Tijuana, where many undertake clandestine entries and successfully disappear.

If you ask me, Biden’s immigration policies (to the extent you can even call it that) alone disqualify him from re-election, but we won’t get into that. For now, the most important lesson to learn here is that, within the next 10-20 years, neither Russia, Iran, North Korea, nor even China will emerge as our greatest national security threat.

Exhausted yet? Overwhelmed? Is any of this news to you? I can get why it’s tiring. Let me leave you with one more piece of news, returning us to the Big Apple:

Venezuelan gangs have arrived in New York City. (Here’s a short clip. You don’t need a login – just X out of the part where it says that.)

Seriously, this is no joke. How NYPD reacted to the street stunts is unknown to me. Mind you, these stunts are a way to declare territory. “This is my street. I rule here”.

The only explanation I can find for these gangs spreading freely is this: there is a growing global threat disguised as political parties, offshore companies, and so on facades for members of organized crime. Crime, INC. This benefits from those activities, and clean the money they get.

The number of military-age males arriving in this country provides plenty of manpower to increase the level of violence here. The truth is, not all of these migrants are going to contribute anything to society. There simply isn’t enough gainful employment to go around, not enough housing, not enough public resources, etc. Unless overwhelming this country is the point, the people in charge will have no choice but to take the situation at the border more seriously. I doubt we’re going to see them implement anything remotely close to what’s required, but they’re going to have to at least try.

When they do, we’re going to see more violence. With more violence will come more forceful measures by the state, lest they want to completely lose control of the situation. With escalation will come more violence, meaning war, declared or not.

The Next Border War

What will this war look like? Are we going to invade Mexico, perhaps overthrow it’s government, and occupy the country? Perhaps annex it? I guess it’s all possible over the next 100 years, but in the next 10-20 years, I find it far more likely we’ll engage in a limited, low-intensity border war punctuated by relatively brief spikes of higher-intensity violence. Think of Israel’s wars against violent non-state actors like Hamas in Palestine and Hezbollah in Lebanon, except in our case, it’s the cartels who play the role of Hamas and Hezbollah.

Is the military, in its current state, up for such a conflict? Maybe this is outside my ability to answer (perhaps it’s a question for Douglas Macgregor), but my personal assessment is that the military isn’t up for it.

Two decades of combat operations have exhausted the force. More important, the military is simply not focused on near threats, but far out ones. Their focus is currently on the threat Russia supposedly poses to Europe, the threat China poses to Taiwan and other American interests, as well as more regional threats like Iran and North Korea. In other words, the usual suspects. The reality is, none of these countries truly threaten America’s existence and way of life, but it’s just as reality that these are the threats those in charge of our national security are focused on.

The military has something of a built-in resistance to being utilized for missions related to domestic security, even as it participates in things like disaster relief and humanitarian assistance. Likewise, civilian leadership prefers not calling on the military to deal with domestic security issues, as it is politically sensitive to do so and can cost them elections and piss off the wrong people.

My sense is that under the existing political order, particularly while President Joe Biden is in office, the military will not be used to any major degree to secure the border nor fight the drug cartels, no matter how bad the situation gets. Likewise, the military would likely resist such orders to do so, citing it as a “distraction” from what it regards as the bigger task of facing off with China and Russia, as if protecting our borders isn’t important or somehow beneath them.

While I doubt any military leader, be it the Secretary of Defense, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, or an operational commander, would ever openly disobey an order from the commander-in-chief, the administrative state makes it possible to obey the overall order (i.e., deploy to the border), but disobey on the specifics. For example, when President Donald Trump deployed troops to the border in 2018, the Pentagon resisted requests by the administration to perform certain actions. Much of this was done on legal grounds, but it’s just as likely they refused because they didn’t want to do it:

It’s therefore possible the military pushed back on DHS’s two requests on solely legal grounds. But Dunn said it’s also possible the Pentagon just doesn’t want to involve itself too much in a mission it may not care for.

“The military historically has never really been enthusiastic about doing border policing,” he told me. “They have much bigger fish to fry.”

They have much bigger fish to fry. Hmm. According to whom? The president, the supreme commander of the armed forces? Or are they calling their own shots? It’s very possible the incident described above was a very clear case of military insubordination. We may never know for sure, but we also know how the military reacted two years later when President Trump raised the possibility of invoking the Insurrection Act and deploying active-duty military forces against rioters and looters, an episode I’ve written about at length in the past. Again, we’ll never know for sure, but my gut tells me the military could very well have disobeyed Trump had he given the order. You don’t go to the lengths they did - mobilizing retirees, shaping public opinion - unless your intent is to either force the president to choose differently or to disobey orders more “safely.”

Even if such orders were given and the military dutifully obeyed, what kind of performance could we expect out of our troops, anyway? The military has become increasingly politicized in recent years and politicized militaries are historically bad warfighters. This is because they focus less on fighting and more on staying on the right side of the political leadership. As an outsider, it’s difficult for me to say how much of an impact far-leftism (“Wokeness) and its flagship ideology of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) is having on the military, but it’s pretty obvious to me our military leadership seems fixated on it. Ultimately, the matter of the military’s politicization and the concurrent recruitment crisis are two separate issues, but when military leadership are that focused on picking the right side of the culture wars, this looks like a force totally distracted from its real job.

The thing is, and this is a gut feeling on my part, I don’t think the military leadership actually intends to fight a real war. Wars are messy things and require lots of work. This isn’t always the case, but military leaders, at least in the U.S., historically don’t advocate for war for that very reason. I think today’s military leadership wants to fight a war even less because not only is life much easier that way, they know the military can’t fight. Aside from maybe a small-scale air campaign, the military’s ability to wage large-scale, high-intensity conflict is sapped. I know I’ve explained this is likely not the kind of war we’d be fighting with Mexico in the foreseeable future, but a military that cannot fight the big fight is likely to have trouble fighting the smaller ones. It requires a level of professionalism difficult to achieve in our bureaucracy-saddled, risk-averse, and politicized armed forces.

Long story short, if the military ever was deployed the border in the numbers necessary to secure it, it’d probably show up without any clue what to do next. It’d need to re-learn protecting American territory the hard way, through trial and error. Initially, the military would attempt to keep a low profile, allowing law enforcement agencies like Border Patrol to take the lead. As the crisis persists and the violence escalates, the troops will have no choice but to get more deeply involved, especially if they begin taking casualties.

Going back to the example of Israel, I think this war will become an enduring conflict, one that spans at least a generation or two. For the most part, this conflict will take place at the border, our only exposure to the war being crime, drugs, and the illegal immigrants where we live. But occasionally, hostilities will spike for one reason or another, resulting in hot, but short mini-wars. For example, Israel’s conflict with Gaza is mostly low-intensity in nature, punctuated by high-intensity wars lasting anywhere from a week to several weeks every some years. In 2008, Israel fought a war with Gaza for three weeks, followed by a one-week war in 2012, followed by a one-month war in 2014, then the most recent short war coming in 2021, with all sorts of clashes and skirmishes in between.

The cartels are at least as well-armed as groups like Hamas and Hezbollah, so they’re more than capable of putting up a fight, even against our military. In 2013, the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments (CBSA), nobody’s idea of a “fringe” research institute, published a report predicting a crisis with Mexico around our present time and compared the military threat posed by the cartels as similar to that posed by Hezbollah. The idea that the cartels are a legitimate national security threat shouldn’t be viewed as controversial; a think-tank with deep ties to the federal government and multiple presidential administrations was making this fact-based argument years before the much-derided Donald Trump ever did.

Total War

Regardless of how the military dimension of the coming border conflict shapes out, this will be, ultimately, a “total” war. I don’t mean a total war in the sense of how we fought the world wars, but “total” in the sense of how it’ll impact and involve every level of society. From the soldier, Border Patrolman, and Customs agent at the border, to the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) agent at our airports, to the local policeman, every element of our national security apparatus will inevitably need to get involved to deal with the threat from Mexico.

It’ll involve us too, the citizenry. We’ve been living with illegal immigration for our whole lives and it may not have affected us too badly so far, that’ll likely change in the next generation. You’re already seeing those changes and their effects in places like New York City. What seemed like mere “cultural enrichment” is a total upending of our society and way of life. Your lifestyle may need to adapt to this new reality and you may find yourself moving as demographic and quality-of-life changes make things difficult for you and your family. You may need to think longer and harder about hiring that unlicensed contractor who might do good work, but is in the country illegally. Your sympathy for them as humans may end up being displaced by the cost of illegal immigration, which is, in the long run, always going to be more than whatever cost savings cheap, disposable labor bring you today.

It might be difficult to imagine now, but we can see that future from here. Stay ahead of the game and make up your mind while it’s still safe to do so.

Lots To Think About

This has been a long piece, but the truth is, I’m still only scratching the surface. I haven’t even gotten into the internal situation in Mexico, which, admittedly, is beyond my scope. My objective is to argue that the border conflict is something that’ll impact us in our daily lives, thus making it worthwhile to care about it. For all the interest Ukraine piques, that war isn’t one that affects us the same way. Yet, which conflict gets more coverage? Why doesn’t the Regime want us worried about the situation at the border? Think long and hard about it. If you don’t think it’s worth your worry, just remember - it’s been little over a century since we fought a border war with Mexico. Mexico isn’t Iraq, but it’s not at peace either. As long as it’s not at peace, the threat of renewed conflict will be ever-present.

What are your thoughts? What’s the impact of illegal immigration where you live? Do you think the military or any part of the apparatus responsible for protecting us is up for this burgeoning conflict? Let’s discuss in the comments.

UPDATE: Reader “Yakubian Ape” shares his thoughts:

This is one of the reasons I left Texas. Texas, on paper, is doing great, but as someone who lived their the bulk of my life, I've seen the strain the border issues have put on it, are continuing to put on it, and are slowly eroding the quality of life across the board in ways that can't be quantified or accounted for on graphs and papers (or, more accurately, no one ones to admit they do). If things continue to heat up along the border - and they will, as you pointed out - I have a bad feeling Texas will be ground zero for a lot of the bloodshed and violence, and it will seep into the heartland of the state and reach places that people previously thought were safe.

I’ll add the U.S. military has a strong presence in Texas. Fort Bliss, home of the famous 1st Armored Division, sits in El Paso a short drive away from the border, with the notorious Ciudad Juarez on the other side. I can imagine troops stationed at Fort Bliss having to man positions on the border, maybe take some fire, and then come back home to their on-base quarters or to some other form of housing they call home. This is reality for many around the world, including the aforementioned Israelis.

At worst, you could see fire being exchanged between the two cities, again. The potential for major bloodshed is all already there.

Max Remington writes about armed conflict and prepping. Follow him on Twitter at @AgentMax90.

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