President Donald Trump vowed on Saturday that cartel members operating in the United States would be “hunted down” and removed from the country. Speaking at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC), Trump referred to cartel members as “savage monsters” and pledged that his administration would aggressively pursue and expel them from the U.S.
“Their members and leaders in the United States will be hunted down – I’m talking about MS-13, they’re hunting them down. We removed tens of thousands MS-13, Tren de Aragua – rooted out, arrested, and expelled from our soil like the savage monsters that they are,” Trump said.
Criminal gangs from south of the U.S. border have expanded their influence in the United States in recent years. The rise of Venezuela’s Tren de Aragua coincided with an unprecedented illegal immigration surge during the Biden administration. On Thursday, the Department of State officially designated eight international criminal gangs, including MS-13 and Tren de Aragua, as foreign terrorist organizations and specially designated global terrorists.
“The intent of designating these cartels and transnational organizations as terrorists is to protect our nation, the American people, and our hemisphere. That means stopping the campaigns of violence and terror by these vicious groups both in the United States and internationally. These designations provide law enforcement additional tools to stop these groups,” Secretary of State Marco Rubio said in a statement.
The designation fulfilled a long-standing goal of Trump, who first sought to classify cartels as terrorist organizations during his initial term. Along with MS-13 and Tren de Aragua, the State Department also designated the following cartels as foreign terrorist organizations: the Sinaloa Cartel, Jalisco New Generation Cartel, Cartel of the Northeast, La Nueva Familia Michoacana, Gulf Cartel, and Cárteles Unidos.
The designations originated from an order by President Trump in January to categorize such organizations as terror groups. “The Cartels’ activities threaten the safety of the American people, the security of the United States, and the stability of the international order in the Western Hemisphere,” the order says. “Their activities, proximity to, and incursions into the physical territory of the United States pose an unacceptable national security risk to the United States.”
