Under Trump, CIA plots bigger role in drug cartel fight

The Central Intelligence Agency is poised to take a larger, more aggressive role under President Donald Trump in the battle against Mexican-based drug cartels, devising and evaluating plans to share more intelligence with regional governments, train local counternarcotics units and possibly conduct other covert actions, according to people familiar with the matter.

The expanded focus on cartels, which smuggle fentanyl and other narcotics into the United States, represents a new and potentially risky priority for the spy agency, which in recent years has made espionage against China, counterterrorism operations in the Middle East and Africa, and support for Ukraine after Russia’s 2022 invasion its main concerns.

CIA Director John Ratcliffe intends to shift agency resources to its counternarcotics mission and apply insights from its two decades of tracking, infiltrating and disrupting terrorist networks to fighting the cartels, said a person familiar with his plans who, like others, spoke on the condition of anonymity due to the subject’s sensitivity and because the approach isn’t finalized yet.

“Lessons learned in the counterterrorism realm are applicable to the counternarcotics mission and the counter-cartel mission,” this person said. “The full weight of those has not been brought to bear on this problem.”

A CIA spokesperson said in a statement that “countering drug cartels in Mexico and regionally is a priority for CIA as a part of the Trump Administration’s broader efforts to end the grave threat from narco-trafficking. Director Ratcliffe is determined to put CIA’s unique expertise to work against this multifaceted challenge.”

The emphasis will be on increased U.S. support to antidrug forces within Mexico and elsewhere in the hemisphere, people familiar with the emerging plan said. Less clear is whether armed U.S. personnel, either from the military’s Special Operations forces or the CIA, could be tasked with taking direct action against cartel leaders on Mexican soil, which former intelligence and military officials warn would spark a ferocious backlash and harm U.S.-Mexican relations, including counternarcotics cooperation.

“I don’t think people fully understand what that could mean,” said a former U.S. intelligence official who served in the region. “It’s one thing to do that in a lawless environment, like Yemen or Somalia or Afghanistan.”

The Pentagon has no such plans at the moment, a U.S. military official said.

The spy agency’s expanded role is one part of what Trump has promised will be a broad offensive against the cartels and illegal immigration. He has moved U.S. troops to the southern U.S. border and threatened tariffs on Mexico and Canada. The U.S. military has also significantly increased the number of airborne electronic surveillance flights, aimed at the cartels, along the U.S.-Mexico border.

Former U.S. intelligence, military and diplomatic officials said Trump’s more muscular approach is likely to alienate Mexico, which is bruised by a long history of U.S. intervention. Additional intelligence sharing and training will help, they said, but are unlikely to produce the rapid, visible results that Trump wants.

“You can’t go in with guns blazing,” said Daniel Gerstein, a retired U.S. Army colonel who served in Colombia and led an extensive study of more than two decades of counternarcotics work there for the Rand think tank, where he is a senior policy researcher. “I don’t see this as the kind of approach that’s going to be very successful.”

Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum, facing Trump’s tariff threat, said she would move 10,000 troops to the border. But she has insisted that Mexico will deal with Washington as an equal, not a subordinate.

Trump has falsely claimed that 300,000 Americans die annually from drugs entering the United States through Mexico. The true number is about 90,000, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and overdose deaths started declining in 2023.

Focusing on Latin America provides Ratcliffe an avenue to demonstrate that the CIA - which Trump has long distrusted - is attending to the president’s priorities of crime, drugs and migration, the former intelligence official said.

It remains unclear what other programs in the CIA’s classified budget may be cut to fund more work on narcotics, and two former U.S. officials said the trade-off could mean pulling back on other priorities, such as China. Ratcliffe, though, has said repeatedly that gathering intelligence on China is his No. 1 priority. And amid Trump’s wide-ranging reshaping of the federal government, the CIA chief has signaled he plans to trim the agency’s workforce, offering employees there a “deferred resignation” package. It is unclear how many CIA personnel will take the buyout.

The CIA has large stations in Mexico and Colombia, but it would need to expand its presence in other capitals and increase staffing at its Langley, Virginia, headquarters outside Washington, the former intelligence official said, adding, “Where are these bodies coming from?”

Trump in a Jan. 20 executive order tasked U.S. spy agencies under the Office of the Director of National Intelligence with helping Secretary of State Marco Rubio determine which Mexican cartels, and which groups in El Salvador and Venezuela, should be designated as foreign terrorist organizations. While Trump set a 14-day deadline for receiving the recommendations, no action has been announced. The White House referred questions to the State Department, which did not respond to a request for comment.

Trump toyed with the same idea during his first term after the killing in 2019 of nine U.S. citizens from a Mormon community in Mexico, but never acted on it. The threat of a terrorist designation served as a bargaining chip that helped American law enforcement leaders extract concessions from the Mexican government, said a former U.S. official, who warned that should Trump act on his threat now, it would be perceived as opening the door for unilateral U.S. action in Mexico, including military action.

Robert S. Litt, former general counsel for the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, said a foreign terrorist designation could allow U.S. authorities to engage in the kind of surveillance ordinarily aimed at foreign powers and their agents. But a criminal wiretap can be conducted under existing authorities and does not require such a designation, he said.

Litt said existing U.S. law also permits covert action against cartels as a counternarcotics matter, pending a presidential finding that such an action is important to U.S. national security. But a foreign terrorist designation might enable covert action against cartels under any existing findings, he said.

The CIA has a long, secretive role in the fight against narcotics trafficking in Mexico. For years, it has worked closely and quietly with the Mexican army to go after drug lords.

While Mexico’s cooperation with the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration has fractured in recent years, particularly since the 2020 arrest in California of former Mexican defense minister Salvador Cienfuegos on drug charges, the Mexican government has continued working with the CIA, according to former U.S. and Mexico officials.

Even before Trump took office, U.S. intelligence agencies began devoting greater attention to the fentanyl trade, as U.S. deaths from the synthetic opioid spiked. Ratcliffe’s predecessor as CIA director, William J. Burns, told Congress in 2023 that the United States had shared intelligence with Mexican authorities that led to “some very successful action against the Sinaloa cartel.”

Crucial information about the flow of fentanyl precursor chemicals, cartels’ financial networks and drug production sites, Burns said, was gleaned from an electronic surveillance program known as Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. Last year, lawmakers endorsed an amendment to legislation reauthorizing FISA that adds international narcotics trafficking to the definition of “foreign intelligence information,” allowing targeted surveillance of non-U. S. citizens abroad. Rep. Dan Crenshaw (R-Texas), who sponsored the amendment, said it would allow the U.S. government to “target the affiliates of cartels, such as bankers, accountants, and others who help operate their business.”

Trump and some of his allies, including director of national intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, have in the past called for repealing Section 702 over its impacts on Americans’ privacy. Gabbard, during her confirmation hearing, said her views had changed.

Rep. Joaquin Castro (D-Texas) a member of the House Intelligence Committee, said intelligence - including intelligence partnerships with foreign allies - is important in shutting down drug cartels. “To date, the Trump administration’s actions have been counterproductive to those goals,” he said.

“This administration has not put forward a credible plan to counter cartel violence or protect American citizens from transnational crime. Instead, Trump’s strategy has mostly consisted of bombastic threats to invade Mexico, impose punishing tariffs on U.S.-Mexico trade, or designate cartels as foreign terrorist organizations,” Castro said.

Trump has advocated a more muscular approach to drug trafficking than his predecessors and at one point in his first term proposed launching missiles at Mexican drug labs, according to his former defense secretary Mark T. Esper. During the 2024 campaign, he declared “it will be the policy of the United States to take down the cartels, just as we took down ISIS, and the ISIS caliphate,” referring to the Islamic State militant group.

Former U.S. officials said there are important differences between the “war on terrorism” and Trump’s war on the cartels.

For instance, the United States trained and equipped “vetted” local forces in Afghanistan. But there - unlike in Mexico - the U.S. military and its proxies controlled swaths of territory. Even so, creating trusted local security units took years and significant funding.

“I don’t think Trump is searching for things that can be done slowly and methodically,” the former intelligence official said.

William Brownfield, a former U.S. ambassador to Colombia and head of the State Department’s international narcotics bureau, said the United States previously trained and screened Mexican counternarcotics units under a 2007-2021 security cooperation agreement called the Merida Initiative. Those units were responsible for capturing Joaquin “Chapo” Guzman, a leader of the Sinaloa cartel, he said.

“That worked for a while. Is it going to work now, with Sheinbaum? I don’t know,” said Brownfield, now at the Woodrow Wilson Center.

“Mexico, it’s a hard nut to crack,” in part because of the country’s “visceral reaction” - based on history - to any U.S. military or law enforcement presence on its soil, Brownfield said. “There’s absolutely no way you can do this without provoking” residual anger that dates to the Mexican American war.

The increased focus on intelligence collection and sharing is also reflected in Trump’s picks for diplomatic posts. His nominee for ambassador to Mexico, Ron Johnson, spent more than two decades at the CIA before he served as ambassador to El Salvador in Trump’s first term.

Gerstein, the Rand researcher, said intelligence is a critical part of counternarcotics work. The United States shared copious intelligence with Colombian authorities on the locations of coca fields and rebel groups, he said.

But Gerstein said drug interdiction and eradication must be paired with “soft power” approaches like economic development and institution building to be successful. “You’ve got to do all four of those” simultaneously, he said.