Republicans are increasingly calling on Biden to use the military to strike at Mexican drug lords.
Former Defense Secretary Mark Esper startled the political class, especially those on the left, when claimed last year that President Donald Trump wanted to bomb Mexican drug cartels.
Now, Sen. Lindsey Graham wants that to be a reality — and he’s not alone.
The South Carolina Republican, according to The Epoch Times, seeks to lay the “groundwork to use U.S. military force against Mexican drug cartels and foreign terrorist organizations.”
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Graham floated the idea in an interview with Fox News Monday. His comments came in the wake of the kidnapping of four Americans in the Mexican border town of Matamoros. Two of the U.S. citizens were later killed.
Fentanyl flowing across the border has also been a public safety and public health nightmare, contributing to tens of thousands of overdose deaths each year in the recent past.
Graham actually cited Trump in airing his plan.
The Biden administration “has done nothing about it,” Graham told Fox News of the sieve-like border.
“I’d do what Trump did,” Graham added. “I’d put Mexico on notice — if you continue to give a safe haven to fentanyl drug dealers, then you are an enemy of the United States.”
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“I would tell Mexican government, ‘If you don’t clean up your act, we’re going to clean it up for you,’” he said.
Epoch Times also reported that Graham cited a recent op-ed by former Trump attorney general Bill Barr, who also advocated using military force against the Mexican drug lords.
“America can no longer tolerate narco-terrorist cartels. Operating from havens in Mexico, their production of deadly drugs on an industrial scale is flooding our country with this poison. The time is long past to deal with this outrage decisively,” Barr wrote.
He said the cartels ought to be viewed as national security threats, and noted that GOP Reps. Dan Crenshaw of Texas and Michael Waltz of Florida, a former Navy SEAL and a former Green Beret, respectively, have filed a resolution empowering Biden to launch strikes against the cartels.
“Real progress requires aggressively attacking the drug supply at its source,” Barr added. “Under international law, a government has a duty to ensure that lawless groups don’t use its territory to carry out predations against its neighbors. If a government is unwilling or unable to do so, then the country being harmed has the right to take direct action to eliminate the threat, with or without the host country’s approval.”
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As The Free Press reported last September, Florida Rep. Matt Gaetz also called for aggressive action against Mexican drug pushers. In a Twitter post that circulated his comments blaming the tidal wave of drugs coming across the border on our inability to strengthen our defenses there, Gaetz added, “Bomb Sinaloa. Not kidding.”
On Tuesday, White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said Biden is taking the violence across the border “very seriously,” but she declined to say what Biden would do about it, other than continue to impose sanctions.
“I’m just not going to get into the military and how it’s being used,” she told reporters.
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