Florida Attorney General has pushed President Joe Biden — unsuccessfully — to declare fentanyl a “weapon of mass destruction,” even as Biden, during last week’s State of the Union speech, acknowledged the damage the drug is doing.
Now, Florida’s Republican attorney general wants Biden and Secretary of State Antony Blinken to designate Mexican drug cartels as foreign terrorist organizations (FTOs) under federal law.
Moody and 20 other state attorneys general see the cartels as more than simple, if ultraviolent, drug pushers.
“It’s evident that the Mexican drug cartels are terrorist organizations — they are trafficking deadly fentanyl directly across the border, and it is killing tens of thousands of Americans every year. They are also fueling extreme violence at the southwest border and beyond,” Moody said in a press release.
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“Sadly, the Biden administration has only emboldened the cartels to commit even more crimes on both sides of the border — through his unlawful immigration policies. So, today, I am demanding that Biden better equip the federal government to fight back by declaring the drug cartels foreign terrorist organizations.”
According to Moody’s office, declaring the cartels FTOs gives state and federal agencies the authority to freeze their assets, deny cartel members entry into the U.S., and seek stricter punishments during prosecutions.
In their letter, the attorneys general noted that the drug cartels threaten U.S. national security beyond simply selling fentanyl and other drugs.
Mexican drug lords have trained and equipped well-organized “armed forces” to protect their “reprehensible trade” from rivals and forces of the Mexican government.
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“The existence of such forces just across our southwestern land border, and the Mexican government’s inability to control them, pose a threat to our national security far greater than a typical drug-trafficking enterprise,” the letter stated.
This threat is intensified by the cartels’ connection to other FTOs like Hezbollah. “Our national security requires the federal government to disrupt this collaboration between cartels and terrorist groups,” they added.
Moody argued the Biden administration’s “unlawful” immigration policies have fomented “chaos” along the border.
“The president’s unlawful immigration policies embolden the cartels who are bringing in vast amounts of deadly fentanyl, as well as violence, into the country—putting American lives at risk,” Moody’s office said. “Cartel violence is escalating in both countries. The groups are assassinating rivals, killing Americans at the border, and engaging in an armed insurgency against the Mexican government. Last month, a cartel-style execution occurred in California that reportedly involved a Mexican drug cartel.”
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Moody’s office also recounted the many steps she’s taken to urge Biden to get the drug trade and the border chaos under control. They include:
- Urging Biden to classify fentanyl as a weapon of mass destruction, which was supported by a bipartisan group of attorneys general
- Taking Biden to court to force him to follow U.S. immigration. That lawsuit revealed as U.S. Border Patrol Chief Raul Ortiz said in a deposition, that Biden’s policies force the Border Patrol release “thousands” of likely inadmissible immigrants into America’s interior
- Calling for Biden to make the director for the Office of the National Drug Control Policy, known as the drug czar, a Cabinet-level post
- Filing a brief in the Supreme Court arguing that an executive-branch policy allowing foreign criminals to remain in the U.S. violates federal law
- Writing a letter to Biden ahead of his meeting with Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador to bring up the seriousness of the fentanyl crisis and demand accountability from Mexico for the drug entering the United States.
Joining Moody in signing the letter to Biden were the attorneys general of Alabama, Alaska, Arkansas, Georgia, Indiana, Iowa, Kentucky, Louisiana, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, New Hampshire, Ohio, Oklahoma, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, Virginia and West Virginia.
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