If there’s one thing that’s for certain, dealing with our southern neighbor is always a complicated mess.
My Daddy always used to quote an interview he heard years ago with then Mexican President Vicente Fox, explaining that the United States is Mexico’s ‘pressure relief valve.’ In other words, if Mexicans couldn’t flood over the border in hard economic or troubled social times nationally, their country would blow apart from the internal pressure. No Mexican government would ever be able to withstand the eruption.
The situation has only fallen deeper into Mexican dependency on access to the US as the decades have gone by. Especially when, during the past four years of the Biden administration, untold numbers of Mexican and other foreign nationals were allowed to flood across our porous southern border and spread like a contagion throughout many of the urban centers of the country.
The cartels, who for so long have controlled every facet of Mexican government through sheer strength of finances and overwhelming military might, have found themselves, thanks to the Biden years, wallowing in a cash bonanza beyond their wildest imaginations. The human smuggling, the unabated drug trafficking, the shakedowns – all of it exploded in value as the number of illegals heading into the US blew skyward.
It has been a four-year-long uninhibited bender for them.
The election of Donald Trump is upsetting their supremacy applecart, and what’s interesting is watching everyone trying to thread the needle. Trying to dance around the hats on the floor that are covering rattlesnakes.
For her part, Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum, as much a cartel tool as any Mexican president who wants to live to see the next sunrise is, has a twofold problem with Trump’s aggressive posture.
There’s his active anti-illegal stance and repatriation schemes, which are already in motion.
This is directly impacting Mexico’s bottom line, as those little illegal worker bees in the US, standing in the Post Office for money orders and sending their pesos back to Mexico twice a month. Remittances from the United States are 3-4% of the Mexican GDP, and they have been falling off dramatically since Trump initiated his programs.
Is United States President Donald Trump’s mass deportation agenda making Mexican immigrants in the U.S. scared to go out to send money home? Bank of Mexico (Banxico) data suggests it is.
Remittances sent to Mexico plummeted 12.1% annually in April, the largest year-over-year decline for any month since 2012.
Banxico reported on Monday that remittances totaled US $4.76 billion in April, down from $5.41 billion in the same month a year earlier. The 12.1% annual decline was the biggest year-over-year drop since September 2012.
In a post to X, Gabriela Siller, director of economic analysis at Banco Base, said that the decline was due to the “deterioration of the labor market in the United States and migrants’ fear of being deported,” which leads to them “avoid going out to work and/or send remittances.”
…The monetary transfers have represented 3%-4% of Mexico’s GDP in recent years.
According to the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a Washington D.C.-based think tank, remittances “form the largest single source of foreign income for Mexico, outstripping the income brought in by any other individual source, including foreign direct investment (FDI) from the United States, tourism, and net manufacturing exports.”
This has led Sheinbaum to voice some interesting opinions about US policy toward foreign workers as the head of a foreign country herself. She’s been working cheek by jowl with sanctuary cities like Los Angeles, pleading the illegal case, and having her ambassador and envoys available for anti-ICE assistance if needed.
But I found this answer from her at a press conference the other day particularly off-putting.
MEXICAN PRESIDENT: “Without the Mexicans who live in the United States, the United States would not be what it is. We do not agree with the ICE raids & the criminalization of migration.”pic.twitter.com/Nusc7rCijU
— Breaking911 (@Breaking911) August 11, 2025
As the older lady in the commercial says, a note to President Sheinbaum:
I would love to be a fly on the wall when Homan heard this.
Sheinbaum’s other problem is, of course, the cartels. On one hand, she has them as a 24/7 personal and political threat, and on the other, she has Donald Trump threatening them with all manner of death, destruction, and annihilation. Mexico, too, economically, if she gets in his way.
What to do, what to do?
So far, she’s chosen to defend her national sovereignty. A week ago, she publicly ruled out any Clear and Present Danger-type missile strikes on kingpin compounds or US military actions within Mexico.
President Claudia Sheinbaum of Mexico rejected the use of U.S. military forces in her country on Friday, responding to news that President Trump had directed the Pentagon to target drug cartels that the United States considers terrorist organizations.
“The United States is not going to come to Mexico with the military. We cooperate, we collaborate, but there is not going to be an invasion. That is ruled out, absolutely ruled out,” she said, adding that she would read the order. “It is not part of any agreement, far from it. When it has been brought up, we have always said no.”
It remains unclear what plans the Pentagon is drawing up for possible action, and the order raises a range of legal questions. It is also unclear what notice the Mexican government had: Although Ms. Sheinbaum said U.S. officials had told her and her team that the directive “was coming,” three people familiar with the matter said Mexican officials had been blindsided.
Depending on what the United States does, Mexico could pull back its cooperation on issues like security and migration, those people said. They spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive internal deliberations.
Then yesterday, in what had to be a conciliatory gesture, Mexico handed over 26 ‘high-ranking’ cartel figures for prosecution and trial here in the US.
Mexico needed pressure to do the job!
Today, Mexico, extradited, 26 violent, criminals, and leaders of criminal cells, and cartel organizations to the United States of America.
On that list, is one of the most dangerous criminals that Mexico has seen on this last 20 years. He… pic.twitter.com/kOo9UejZUU
— Oscar Ramirez – Real America’s Voice correspondent (@OscarRamirezTJ) August 13, 2025
…On that list, is one of the most dangerous criminals that Mexico has seen on this last 20 years. He was recently arrested in Tijuana, and he is responsible for the enormous distribution of fentanyl through the parts of California, and other states. Also, he is responsible for numerous abductions, and mass graves towards women and trafficking of extra continental migrants to the United States.
His name is Pablo Edwin Huerta Nuño(El Flaquito) he was recently arrested in the city of Tijuana and immediately transported to the highest security level prison in the city of Mexico.
This accomplishment goes to the secretary of security and Citizen protection of Mexico Omar Garcia Harfuch that in my eyes, he is doing an incredible job in our country, trying to fight the narco government that is now in place…
Were they approved sacrificial lambs to call the dogs off?
And does it work?
Or has Sheinbaum kicked one of the hats trying to dance around it as the music got too fast?
A really anti-Trump Politico article about the war on the cartels did have some interesting points about how they are already adapting, for all the venom that whatever Trump is doing will make the situation worse.
…Some also expressed frustration that the U.S. crackdown appears so focused on Mexican entities as opposed to Americans who help the cartels. That provides an incentive for cartels to strengthen collaborations with U.S.-based criminal networks.
Former U.S. law enforcement officials told me that’s likely to change; there’s already at least one court case involving a terror-designated cartel that has ensnared some Americans. (The terrorism labels, in theory, can mean that a drug user who buys product traced to the cartels could face terror-related charges, but it’s unlikely prosecutors will go after such low-level offenders.)
The cartels are good at adapting — they already are doing so, from what analysts told me.
They are changing the way they ship their products to reduce detection. They can expand their presence in markets well beyond the United States. They can switch to harder to detect drugs lesser-known than fentanyl, deaths from which appear to be going down in the U.S. They can expand their work in other criminal enterprises, such as fuel theft.
The former Mexican security official, who retains contacts inside the government here, said many cartel figures don’t fear capture and extradition to the U.S. It might be extra attractive if they can get into the U.S. federal witness protection program, even if it means ratting out former colleagues. It’s all viewed as an acceptable price to pay for an otherwise financially lucrative life.
As the former official explained to me, “It’s a very toxic dynamic.”
‘Fuel theft’ – there’s one I hadn’t heard of before.
Whatever the next step, what Trump is doing – removing cartel foot soldiers here, forcing cartels into ‘adapting’ – means they’re on their back foot, and Sheinbaum is forced to watch where she puts her feet next. All the while, he’s advancing.
It’s good battlefield strategy.
