Abbott Demands Biden Drug War Escalation
after Staying Quiet on Cartels Under Trump

Capitol Inside
April 16, 2021

Governor Greg Abbott wants President Joe Biden to crack down on Mexican cartels by ramping up the U.S. war on drugs that spawned and fueled the black market that's made them rich and powerful.

Abbott demanded in a letter to President Joe Biden and Vice-President Kamala Harris on Thursday that they instruct the Department of Justice to designate the major cartels that operate south of the Texas border as foreign terrorist groups in a move that would make it easier to freeze their assets.

"Securing the border and defending our nation from foreign threats is the federal government's responsibility," the Republican governor explained in the communique to the nation's top two leaders. "The sooner they get it done, the sooner America can secure the border and protect Americans from these deadly cartels."

Abbott advised the Democratic duo that they should follow his lead in the wake of his launching last month of Operation Lone Star in a move that's designed to curb the smuggling of illegal narcotics and people across the border from the south. Abbott said the state initiative had already culminated in the arrest of 800 suspected traffickers and seizures that needed 3,800 pounds of marijuana, 19 pounds of cocaine and almost 50 firearms.

The governor offered no explanation, however, in the letter of admonition on why he never requested foreign terrorist designations for Mexican drug lords when Republican Donald Trump had been the president before his ousting at the polls last fall.

Abbott has been the Biden administration's most vociferous critic on a migrant surge at the border here this year. The governor had remained mum, however, on a heavy influx of immigrants during Trump's stint in the white House.

The timing of the Texas governor's call for an immediate capitulation by the Biden White House was ironic on multiple fronts. Abbott made the pitch for official foreign terrorist declarations for Mexican drug lords about the same time that Texas House Republicans were voting to allow anti-government militants to carry guns without a state permit regardless of whether they've been designated as domestic terrorists by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security.

The Republicans in the Legislature's lower chamber teamed up in a 72-61 vote to kill an amendment to a gun rights expansion measure that would have prohibited militant extremists who the DHS has classified as domestic terrorists from having guns in cars and boats in Texas.

GOP State Reps. Angie Chen Button of Garland and Walter "Four" Price of Amarillo were the only Republicans who sided with the Democrats in the vote on the amendment that targeted hate groups like the Proud Boys. the Oath Keepers and others that helped planned the Trump mob attack.

Abbott's marathon silence on the Mexican drug war for four years under Trump may have all but destroyed his credibility as a Biden critic and unsolicited adviser on cartels and most other subjects. Abbott's recent actions give the impression that he isn't familiar with the economics and history of the war on drugs that he's trying to pressure Biden into reviving with the application of the foreign terror label to cartels in Mexico under a federal provision known as Section 219. The governor also made a case for using the Federal Narcotics Kingpin Designation Act to have drug dealer assets frozen in banks in the U.S.

Cartels have terrorized parts of northern Mexico on or near the Texas border since the federal government there declared war on them 15 years ago. The U.S. has failed to put a dent in the Mexican drug dealing business despite spending more than an estimated $50 billion a year fighting narcotics across the globe.

With the demand in the U.S. always on the rise, the federal government has made the Mexican drug business dramatically more lucrative by increasing the risks that come with providing the supply. The U.S. war on drugs was conceived by Republican Richard Nixon when he was the president in 1971.

The Texas governor could probably do himself a favor by reading Desperados - a book that that journalist Elaine Shannon published in the early 1990s as the most highly-acclaimed dissection of the U.S. war on drugs and how it became the biggest boondoggle in history.