adminIn Culiacán and other parts of violent Sinaloa this year, ordinary Mexicans took to the streets wearing white and chanting for peace, openly begging for international help and even appealing to President Trump to take action against the cartels that have turned their towns into war zones. These are not political radicals — they are parents, shopkeepers, and workers who are fed up with extortion, murder, and trafficked fentanyl wrecking their communities.
President Trump has not been quiet about the crisis; his administration moved to label major cartels as foreign terrorist organizations and repeatedly floated the possibility of using stronger military and intelligence tools to hit cartel operations. Trump has publicly offered U.S. military assistance to Mexico and tied anti-fentanyl efforts to broader pressure campaigns, arguing these criminal networks are a national security threat to the United States.
Mexico’s president, Claudia Sheinbaum, has flatly rejected the notion of U.S. troops operating on Mexican soil, invoking sovereignty and warning against any perceived invasion. Her public refusal — while understandable as a political reflex in Mexico — leaves ordinary Mexicans in cartel-controlled areas feeling betrayed and abandoned by the very institutions meant to protect them.
Let’s be clear: when citizens are begging for help, ideology must take a back seat to security. Conservatives should loudly support those calls for action rather than wringing hands over diplomatic niceties while cartel bullets fly and fentanyl floods American streets. The people of Sinaloa are asking for relief; Washington should listen and give them concrete options, not sanctimonious lectures about sovereignty from leaders who fail to secure their own country.
Designating cartels as terrorist organizations was not a symbolic stunt — it gives law-enforcement and military planners more tools to disrupt global trafficking networks and to go after the financiers and suppliers that keep these cartels running. If the Mexican government will not use every tool available to dismantle these criminal empires, the United States must use economic, legal, and intelligence levers to choke off the flow of drugs and weapons.
President Sheinbaum’s posture reads as political theater when compared to the desperation on the ground; nationalism that protects criminals over citizens is not noble, it is cowardice. If Mexico refuses boots on the ground, then Washington should escalate tariffs, tighten cross-border enforcement, accelerate targeting of cartel finances, and support Mexican prosecutors and honest security forces who are actually willing to take the risk to restore order.
Hardworking Americans and freedom-loving Mexicans deserve leaders who will act, not leaders who posture for political applause while families pay with their lives. Conservatives should rally behind a policy that backs real security and stands with the victims of cartel violence, demanding results from both our own government and from Mexico’s so that communities north and south of the border can finally breathe again.
