As the Justice Department pursues a historic racketeering indictment against drug cartels and gangs, President Donald Trump's National Security Advisor is suggesting such organizations could face military action and should be treated more like ISIS than the Cosa Nostra.

On Monday, the Justice Department, in a novel use of the Racketeer-Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act (RICO), targeted one such gang. That law was made famous for prosecutions of mafia leaders in the United States. Justice Department prosecutors charged 27 individuals associated with the violent Venezuelan international criminal organization Tren de Aragua and one of its offshoots for murders, sex trafficking, robberies, extortion, and drug dealing.

Trump’s National Security Advisor says the administration could go even further, claiming Tren de Aragua and other groups like it are more akin to the dangerous, jihadist terror group ISIS than organized crime.

"[These] groups aren't like the mafia, they're more like ISIS,” National Security Advisor Mike Waltz said in an interview on the Just the News, No Noise TV show. “They are combating the Mexican army in full-on-fire fights. They're shooting at aircraft.”

He explained, “They deserve all aspects of our national power to be used against them, to defend our sovereignty, to defend our borders, and that's why you've seen the Defense Department under Secretary Hegseth and Trump's leadership shift its assets to actually defend America.”

Since taking office earlier this year, President Trump ordered 10,000 active-duty troops to help secure the southern border and deployed two warships, military aircraft, and combat vehicles as tools to aid in operations. So far, the soldiers have helped border agents patrol the border and have carried out deportation flights of illegal migrants.

The military deployments, Waltz said, are part of “a much tougher approach on the cartels” and border security more generally. President Trump sees the southern border as one of the root causes of the drug trade and the origin of the violent criminal groups growing in, and terrorizing, American cities.

“Look, these cartels control whole swaths of Mexico and our southern border,” Waltz said. “That is completely unacceptable.”

Foreign Terrorist Organizations

But, President Trump’s designation of several criminal groups—including Mexican drug cartels and foreign gangs like Tren de Aragua—as Foreign Terrorist Organizations sets the stage for enhanced targeting of the groups with military forces or covert intelligence actions. This would go beyond the government’s usual methods of targeting cartels and gangs, which include criminal charges, Drug Enforcement Agency operations, and cooperative actions with Mexican law enforcement.

Before the inauguration earlier this year, then-President-elect Trump vowed that he would designate Mexico’s drug cartels as Foreign Terrorist Organizations under U.S. law, which gives the administration access to counterterrorism powers, like the ability to launch covert operations against the groups. Just one month after the inauguration, he fulfilled that promise, issuing an executive order establishing a process for how “international cartels” can be designated as terrorist groups.

The executive order says that these groups—which include the Mexican cartels and gangs like Tren de Aragua and the El Salvadoran MS-13—“constitute a national-security threat beyond that posed by traditional organized crime” because they cooperate or interact with “extra-hemispheric actors, from designated foreign-terror organizations to antagonistic foreign governments,” that they use tactics common in “insurgency and asymmetric warfare,” and infiltrate foreign governments in the Western Hemisphere.

Increased CIA presence

In addition to the troop deployments, the Central Intelligence Agency has expanded secret drone flights over Mexico with the approval of the Mexican government to collect intelligence on cartel operations. These overflights are critical tools for the U.S. to locate and monitor potential targets, such as cartel leaders, drug production centers, or weapons depots.

The increased presence of the CIA could also indicate that President Trump will pursue covert options against cartels and gangs without obtaining the Authorization for the Use of Military Force required to use the American military in Mexico. The CIA, which is governed under Title 50, can be deployed for covert actions at the president’s direction as long as the congressional intelligence committees are notified in advance.

Allies in Congress have moved to grant President Trump an authorization to use military force for the cartels, but historically the president favored using covert capabilities to target terrorists in the Middle East. In his first term, President Trump granted the CIA new authorities to conduct drone strikes against terrorist leaders, a task previously reserved for the Pentagon, as part of an effort to intensify the fight against ISIS. The CIA used this new authority shortly after, conducting a strike against al-Qaeda’s then-second-in-command Abu al-Khayr al-Masri in Syria.

The use of a foreign terrorist designation as a precursor to military action has precedent in the prior Trump administration. Just eight months before launching the strike that killed top Iranian general Qasem Soleimani, Trump designated his elite Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps-Quds Force a Foreign Terrorist Organization. The IRGC leader had planned attacks on American diplomats and soldiers across the Middle East and orchestrated a December 27, 2019 attack that wounded American service personnel in Iraq, the Department of Defense said.