Florida Rep. Mike Waltz (R) and Texas Rep. Dan Crenshaw (R) have collaborated to sponsor a bill that would authorize the use of Military force against Mexican cartels.
Both Republicans have now penned legislation that would provide the Authorization for Use of Military Force (AUMF) against Mexican cartels. According to a press release from Rep. Waltz, the legislation would allow the use “against Mexican cartels for trafficking lethal fentanyl and other related activities that have caused destabilization in the Western Hemisphere.
Reps. Waltz and Crenshaw, both former members of the U.S. Special Forces, have stressed that Mexican cartels are involved in a war with the United States, and “in the last year alone, over 100,000 Americans died from drug overdose, primarily from fentanyl-related exposure.”
In a statement, Waltz championed the effort, expressing that “the situation at our southern border has become untenable for our law enforcement personnel largely due to the activities spurred by the heavily armed and well-financed Sinola and Jalisco cartels.”
Stressing the need “to go on offense,” Waltz assured that this is the right way forward because “not only are these paramilitary transnational criminal organizations responsible for killing an unprecedented number of Americans, but are actively undermining our sovereignty by destabilizing our border and waging war against U.S. law enforcement and the Mexican military.”
Crenshaw echoed in Waltz’s remarks, affirming that “the cartels are at war with us – poisoning almost 80,000 Americans with fentanyl ever year, creating a crisis at our border, and turning Mexico into a failed narco-state.”
Because of this, Crenshaw argued that the “legislation will put us on a war footing against the cartels by authorizing the use of military force against them.”
“We cannot continue to allow heavily armed and deadly cartels to destabilize Mexico and import people and drugs into the United States,” he said, urging the US to treat “them like ISIS – because that is who they are.”
