The United States is designating Venezuela’s Tren de Aragua, Mexico’s Sinaloa Cartel and six other drug trafficking groups with Latin American roots as “global terrorist” organisations, according to a federal notice Wednesday. The move by President Donald Trump’s administration is the latest step in his intensifying crackdown on gang members in the United States, and his efforts to remove undocumented or criminal immigrants from the country.

Trump signed an executive order on January 20, his first day back in the White House, creating a process for such a designation, saying that the cartels “constitute a national-security threat beyond that posed by traditional organized crime.”

The terrorist designation expands the US government’s ability to combat such groups.

Mexico fears that the United States will use the designation as an excuse to intervene in its territory against the cartels, as some Republican lawmakers have been calling for.

The groups targeted include the international crime gang MS-13, with roots in El Salvador, as well as Mexican syndicates the Gulf Cartel, the Jalisco New Generation Cartel, the Northeast Cartel, the New Michoacan Family and the United Cartel.

A public notice by Secretary of State Marco Rubio states that those organizations designated are “foreign persons that have committed or have attempted to commit… acts of terrorism that threaten the security of United States nationals or the national security, foreign policy, or economy of the United States.”

On his first day back in office last month, Trump declared a national emergency at the southern US border and vowed to deport “millions and millions” of migrants.

He has argued that the groups are funneling vast amounts of dangerous illicit drugs into the United States and are involved in extortion, migrant smuggling and other violent crime.

Trump made border security a centerpiece of his 2024 presidential campaign. He regularly used explosive language in branding Venezuelan migrants as violent criminals and accused countries of emptying their jails and sending murderers and others to the United States.

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