Trump ‘considers plan to send hit squads to Mexico to kill cartel leaders’

Presumptive Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump is privately considering a plan to deploy American assassination squads to Mexico to take out drug cartel leaders if he is re-elected in November, according to a report.

Three sources familiar with the former president’s proposal told Rolling Stone that he has insisted that the American military has “tougher killers than they do” and is mulling a similar plot to that carried out when US forces killed ISIS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi back in 2019.

The deployment would be covert, the outlet reported, and would not rely on the Mexican government’s consent.

Just earlier this year, one source recalled the former president saying that the US government should create a “kill list of drug lords,” consisting of the most notorious heads of drug cartels that a special-ops team would be tasked with killing or capturing, Rolling Stone reported.

The Independent has reached out to Mr Trump’s spokesperson for comment.

This isn’t the first time that Mr Trump has discussed his plans for tackling Mexico’s gang violence.

In 2017, then-president Trump told then-Mexican President Enrique Peña Nieto in a phone call that he was prepared to send US troops to stop “bad hombres down there,” The Associated Press reported at the time. “You aren’t doing enough to stop them. I think your military is scared. Our military isn’t, so I just might send them down to take care of it.”

In 2020, Mr Trump also asked his then-Defense Secretary Mark Esper if it would be possible for the US to launch missiles into Mexico to “destroy the drug labs” and demolish the cartels — and keep the US’s involvement a secret, according to Mr Esper’s memoir A Sacred Oath.

Although Mr Trump’s plans to take out Mexico’s cartels have been discussed in private, Mr Trump has made his thoughts about Mexico — and the country’s citizens — very clear in public.

While running for the White House in 2015, Mr Trump accused Mexico of “not sending their best” to the US.

“They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists. And some, I assume, are good people,” he said.

During his administration, Mr Trump also ordered the building of a border wall along the US-Mexico border.

Now, as he campaigns for the White House again, the former president’s anti-immigrant rhetoric continues to ramp up.

At an Iowa rally in September, he told supporters that, if he wins the 2024 election, he will use “all resources needed to stop the invasion” at the US-Mexico border, “including moving thousands of troops currently stationed overseas”.

Mr Trump has also been accused of echoing Nazi rhetoric by saying that migrants are “poisoning the blood” of the country, referring to migrants as “animals,” and suggesting that some migrants are “not people”.

Immigration is shaping up to be a major issue in the 2024 presidential election, with Mr Trump and Republicans hitting out at President Joe Biden over his handling of the US-Mexico border. In March 2024, there were nearly 190,000 encounters at the US southern border.