In December, WOLA examined what Donald Trump’s proposed policies on fentanyl and the U.S.-Mexico border might mean for Mexico, raising key questions about his approach to trade, migration, and drug enforcement. Now, nearly a month into his presidency, we are starting to see how these policies are taking shape—some developments aligning with expectations, others more unexpected. To better understand the implications of Trump’s early actions, we spoke with WOLA experts John Walsh and Stephanie Brewer. In this conversation, they break down the latest on Trump’s proposed tariffs, the evolving U.S.-Mexico relationship, and the broader impact of his administration’s stance on drugs and migration.
Q: What is the update on Trump’s tariffs on Mexico? How do fentanyl and migration play into the most recent developments?
Stephanie: At the end of 2024, you may recall that Trump announced his intention to impose 25% tariffs on Mexican goods and also Canadian goods. Those proposed tariffs were announced, supposedly as a measure to motivate those countries to stop the flow of illicit drugs across borders and stop undocumented migration.
There were many reasons to question whether the true intention was to implement these tariffs, because this type of tariff would have quite a negative impact on both sides of the border in terms of trade, and could trigger increased migration from Mexico to the United States, among other things. At that point in time, it looked like this tariff threat might have been less an announcement of true policy intentions and more of a threat designed to get attention and send a message of taking tough action and being a tough negotiator, to then announce a supposed victory, even if there was no real change of existing policy.
Fast forward to 2025. Trump now has taken office once again, he announces that he will in fact be imposing these tariffs through executive orders. Once again, they are announced in connection with the flow of illicit drugs, specifically fentanyl, in fact, alleging this time that the government of Mexico has an alliance with organized criminal organizations. Once again, there is a high-level phone call [with Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum], and as we’re speaking now today, on February 12, the tariffs have been avoided.
Officially, the decision is to postpone, basically for one month, the application of the tariffs. And the agreement that has been announced is that Mexico’s government will send an additional 10,000 National Guard troops to the U.S.- Mexico border. Those troops would be tasked to focus on illicit drug flows, particularly fentanyl, and they would also be participating in migration enforcement tasks.
John: Just to add that it’s unclear if this pause that was agreed upon is going to actually end with a decision to impose tariffs or another pause after one month. And for that matter, it’s unclear what would be the rationale for continuing the pause or going ahead with the 25% or some other level tariffs that Trump initially threatened.
Q: Trump has stated that Mexico is not doing enough in terms of counter narcotics and stopping migration. What was the state of cooperation between the U.S. and Mexico on these issues prior to Trump taking office? How do you see this cooperation changing in light of recent events like the tariffs as well as the pause on foreign aid?
Stephanie: Fentanyl cooperation has been a focus now for the last several years, coinciding, of course, with the crisis in overdose deaths in the United States. And certainly, the United States has been cooperating with foreign aid, with different types of training and collaboration between U.S. and Mexican officials, with a large focus, as has historically been the case, on counter narcotics efforts. Now, there is a lot to be said about the ineffectiveness of a model of cooperation that continues to be centered on the “war on drugs”. Fentanyl, as it’s currently produced and smuggled, is a product of the drug-war model, rather than something that can realistically be stopped with that model.
There was already pressure from the U.S. government for Mexico to prioritize fentanyl in its counter drug efforts. This was on the agenda of the bilateral discussion prior to these tariff threats. When it comes to migration enforcement, I would say the picture is even more extreme. The Mexican government has been carrying out a historic, sustained crackdown on migration. It is detaining record numbers of migrants in Mexico. It has increased many fold its average of monthly detentions, and it is especially during 2024 that we see a pattern where Mexican authorities are bussing large numbers of migrants from the north of Mexico back towards the south of Mexico, which largely sets them on this endless cycle of trying to migrate north through the country, which of course exposes them to violence and extortion again and again at every step of their journey.
So once again, a lot needs to change with the current model of trying to manage migration through Mexico and towards the United States. But if we look just at the level of emphasis on this topic in the bilateral relationship, the level of U.S. pressure, the level of Mexico’s response, the level to which Mexico is already cooperating with the United States on this agenda, it seems like the least logical time to then say that it’s necessary to use this heavy tariff threat to obtain cooperation or obtain a further crackdown.
John: The question, as far as Trump is concerned, is what would be the benchmarks to assess in a period of as little as a month? Whether we’re going to go ahead with tariffs, or whether Trump would be just as happy to keep the threat of tariffs looming and to supposedly gauge progress as we go along, it does raise the question of who’s interpreting the outcome.
And these threats, even if they are just threats, have been taken very seriously because of the damage that they would do to the Canadian economy and to the Mexican economy, and even if the tariff wasn’t imposed, the tenor of the relationship changes. If cooperation ultimately needs to be part of the equation, and when dealing with sovereign countries, it’s hard to see how alienating your key partner governments with whom you share large borders is going to, in the long run, help achieve closer and better cooperation.
Q: How can we measure the success of this cooperation? What would need to change for tariffs to be avoided in the future?
John: This question of measuring success, we can take that in one of two ways. They’re not unrelated. One is, what is the ultimate policy goal here from from the perspective of a citizen who’s concerned with a gigantic problem like fentanyl overdose deaths, the toxic nature of our street drug supplies, and at the same time, rightly upset about the mayhem caused by organized crime in terms of violence and what it means for Mexicans? Those are long past being alarming problems. Those are nightmare level problems in both countries, so it’s right to be concerned about them as a basic public policy question.
So if we were concerned about these issues, what would reasonable metrics be? And what would be the reasonable solutions? What is happening with respect to overdoses and what does history tell us about our ability to “seal the borders” and diminish the flow of drugs? I think history tells us that it’s very difficult, if not impossible. So from an enforcement point of view, this is not a needle in a haystack. This is a million needles in 10 million moving haystacks.
Right about the time that Trump was issuing his tariff threats and about to impose them, a reporter asked a White House official, what’s the end game? And he said, Well, these [tariffs] will be removed once Americans stop dying from fentanyl. That just indicates to me that there is no end game quite yet for the White House. The fact is, finally and fortunately, fentanyl overdose deaths in the U.S. have begun to decline, according to preliminary data, for the first time in decades. What is behind that very hopeful sign, although incipient, is unclear. It certainly is a number of factors, but the Trump administration enters into its second term with that good news to build on, and now Trump is seeking credit for something that was already happening without any clear connection.
Stephanie: So, on this question of what needs to change to avoid the tariffs permanently, we don’t have any clarity. For right now, what’s grabbed the headlines, I think, has been this deployment of 10,000 National Guard troops to the Mexican side of the border. But it’s important to put that into context. Mexico has already been stationing tens of thousands of military personnel at its borders over the last several years. In fact, we saw this same script play out during the first Trump presidency in 2019 when in response to a tariff threat, Mexico agreed to deploy National Guard troops to its borders in migration control tasks. So yes, some additional troops are now arriving that were not there before, but it’s highly unclear why further militarization is expected to be a solution now when it hasn’t been a solution up until now.
And if there is a real change on the ground, it’s likely to be a negative one, because military deployment in migration control tasks brings a lot of human rights risks that we’ve seen play out. Furthermore, if Trump’s view is truly that the Mexican government is in an “alliance” with criminal organizations, then one could ask, why would deploying that government’s troops be expected to solve those problems? So we see a lot of contradictions and a lot more questions than answers on what concrete changes are being demanded or expected or could occur, but certainly we haven’t seen any radical shifts in policy yet.
Q: What concrete changes or goals do you see in the sphere of security and counter narcotics and in the bilateral relationship between Mexico and the U.S.?
Stephanie: Alarmingly, we see the deepening of a tried and failed strategy, which is a militarized drug war strategy, now with the added threat of U.S. military action in Mexico and the announced plans to designate Mexican criminal groups as terrorist organizations. These new actions would add in a new layer of risks and complications within and beyond the human rights realm.
Trump has repeatedly proposed direct U.S. military action on Mexican soil, such as sending special forces into Mexico. He’s also spoken of missiles, or we could think of drone strikes, these types of actions. And parallel to that, so far, what he is moving forward is this proposal to designate certain international criminal organizations, making reference to Mexican cartels, as foreign terrorist organizations.
In the case of foreign terrorist organization designations, one of the most salient effects would be to trigger a legal framework in the United States centered on the concept of criminalizing “material support” to terrorist organizations, and that could open up the risk of prosecutions, as well as immigration consequences, for people on both sides of the border who have somehow found themselves obligated to pay organized crime. For instance, an example at the forefront of our minds would be asylum seekers who are essentially forced to pay smugglers to try to get to the United States to request asylum, or any range of other people in Mexico who to survive day to day or operate their businesses find themselves extorted by organized crime. U.S. citizens, U.S. entities, companies, and organizations could also find themselves either caught up in this net, or at the very least, censoring themselves or being unable to operate for fear of running afoul of this legal framework that comes with the FTO designations.
On the prospect of U.S. military action in Mexico, especially if it’s unilateral, especially if it occurs without the Mexican government’s consent, then we could be looking at absolutely
unprecedented and disastrous impacts across the entire bilateral relationship. I mean, we would be talking about launching military attacks on the soil of our neighboring country
What should be the focus of bilateral cooperation if the goal on the Mexican side is to reduce violence and to reduce the power of these organized criminal groups? Well, the reason that organized criminal groups are able to operate with the level of power and influence that they do in Mexico is not for lack of military intervention. It’s rather because of different types of relationships that range from tolerance to outright collusion between criminal actors and state actors in Mexico. It’s because of overwhelming levels of impunity.
Another aspect is the flow of high powered firearms, very largely from the United States into Mexico and into the hands of these cartels. So those would be much more logical areas to tackle, and there has been cooperation between U.S. and Mexican agencies on these issues. But to the extent that your northern neighbor is threatening to deploy military actions in your territory, and is threatening you with cycles of tariffs that could have devastating economic impacts, it is illogical to expect there to be any room for trust and the space for fruitful institutional collaboration, or institutional strengthening, or cooperation against these networks of corruption.
John: The Foreign Terrorist Organization designation possibility, if not probability, alongside of the threats of unilateral U.S. military action, and the use of the term “invasion” in many of executive orders and language from members of his administration, I think, is to prepare public opinion to be supportive of big risks that might be taken in the name of repelling an invasion that threatens our sovereignty. It creates the language that would mesh legally with authorizations for treating the phenomenon literally as invasions that require and justify and underpin the use of actual military force, whether it be assignment of active duty forces within the United States, or even in this case, thinking about overseas operations with or without consent of Mexico or another country. So I think that’s also seems to be built into the strategy, both with respect to the discourse around immigration, but also about fentanyl.
We also need to recognize that we’re dealing with the failure and the counterproductive impacts of enforcing a prohibition regime. Global commodity drug markets haven’t shrunk or disappeared as was intended 60 years ago, they’ve actually grown and become more and more lucrative and profitable for those who supply them, which are by definition, people who operate outside of the law. Through the prohibition model, we hand the power to people who operate outside of the law to shape these illicit markets. Prohibition also creates an enormous markup in price, and those are the profits that enrich them and empower them to be such corrupting forces.
Unless we start to ask the right questions, we’re going to continue to be either deceived by the failure of a drug war that can’t possibly deliver on what we’re asking law enforcement to do, or we’re going to buy into it and we’re going to double down on all the failures of the past, which have killed, literally killed through violence and premature death, millions of people and blighted lives all over the planet for decades. If that’s our model and we’re going to continue to tweak that model and expect anything different, I think we’re in for a rude, rude shock.
