Claudia Sheinbaum has threatened “significant legal measures” against the US in retaliation for domestic ICE operations.
By Kevin James
Almost no foreign policy victory is worth jeopardizing one’s domestic political standing. Yet policymakers face a paradox. It is far easier to act abroad than at home, even if one party controls the White House and Congress. Domestically, even presidents are not even able to enforce existing laws without running afoul of the apparent veto power wielded by any federal judge nursing a grievance because of her race or sex. A small minority in Congress can stymie even the most popular legislation, making even urgent problems almost impossible to solve.
At home, the so-called American Empire lacks an emperor. There is no clear sovereign and thus no one who can be held accountable. There is seemingly no way to challenge policies like mass immigration or H-1B visas, and little will to cut the flow of taxpayer dollars to left-wing NGOs that govern us more directly than any elected official. If America is to be saved, it must be saved from the top-down by exploiting the prerogatives of foreign policy in the domestic political struggle. The president and his congressional allies should take advantage of the powers policymakers enjoy in foreign policy and use them to marginalize enemies and consolidate power at home. Perhaps most importantly, enemies abroad must be linked to subversives at home. Luckily, this can easily be done, for many of America’s most dangerous domestic enemies are not really “leftists,” but nationalists and even revanchists for hostile foreign states. One of the most dangerous and harmful to Americans is our traditional rival for domination of North America, Mexico.
Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum recently said the United States suffer “significant legal measures” after a Mexican national attempted to ram an ICE agent, who killed him in self-defense.
Beyond this, the Mexican government is seeking criminal charges in the cases of 17 Mexicans who either died in ICE custody or during ICE operations. “Our goal is to go beyond diplomatic notes and the representations we made to the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights,” she said. “We cannot tolerate the mistreatment of our fellow citizens, our brothers and sisters, in the United States. So we are proposing further measures.”
Of course, such a statement essentially confirms the main charge made by American nationalists. These Mexicans are not American, do not want to be American, and are not even regarded by the Mexican government as American. Indeed, the Mexican government apparently does not even relinquish sovereignty over these Mexican nationals, a policy that has long preceded Claudia Sheinbaum. Former Mexican president Ernest Zedillo campaigned actively against Proposition 187 in California and told politicians in the United States that “you’re Mexicans – Mexicans who live north of the border” in 1995. The New York Times blandly remarked that this was part of an effort to “create an ethnic lobby with political influence similar to that of American Jews.”
In 2001, President Vicente Fox bragged to a conference in Spain that with help from Mexican consulates in the United States, “Mexicans who for various reasons have emigrated to the United States in general continue to keep their original language alive.” “[T]o continue speaking Spanish in the United States is to make a homeland,” said President Fox, arguing keeping its people speaking Spanish even in the United States makes each migrant “an important unifying element of their brothers and sisters abroad.” It is striking not only that President Fox emphasizes the “unity” of the Mexican nation beyond borders, but, like President Sheinbaum, suggests this is built on kinship and blood for they are “brothers and sisters.”
On May 12, 2023, President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador (AMLO) instructed “our countrymen in the United States, fellow Mexicans, Latin American countrymen, Hispanics, and also our American friends, that when it comes to voting, don’t vote for candidates like this [Louisiana] Senator [John] Kennedy,” whom he regarded as insufficiently supportive of Mexico. He framed this in explicitly nationalist terms:
But, well, tell our countrymen, Hispanics, our American friends, not to vote for people with this mentality, very arrogant, very offensive, very stupid. That whoever has a migrant grandparent, a migrant father or he has arrived in the United States as a migrant, cannot support these attitudes. Let them remember what the song by Rubén Blades says: ‘He who does not love his homeland does not love his mother’, he who does not respect his homeland does not respect his mother…
[T]here are 40 million Mexicans in the United States and the second Hispanic group is Puerto Ricans with five million; 40 million Mexicans, five million Puerto Ricans, four million Cuban brothers, but this is sometimes forgotten… [O]ut of every 100 elementary school students in the United States, 24 speak Spanish. So, it is not so that we are ignored and that we remain silent and, as I said, with our arms crossed. We are many and there will be more.
Given the recent catastrophic decision by the four women on the United States Supreme Court (plus John Roberts) that the U.S. Constitution guarantees birthright citizenship, it is especially noteworthy that the Mexican constitution allows Mexicans born abroad to retain Mexican citizenship. Article 30 says “Mexicans by birth” include: “Those born in a foreign country of Mexican parents; of a Mexican father and a foreign mother; or of a Mexican mother and an unknown father.”
These Mexicans abroad then have the opportunity to utilize Mexico’s extensive consular network in the United States, which habitually interferes in American politics and facilitates illegal immigration into the United States and directly interferes in domestic politics. Mexican consulates issue the matricula consular, an identification card that allows those who support illegals in the U.S. to claim that they now possess valid identification and should be allowed to access social services. In 2014, NPR reported that the Mexican government was paying for its citizens’ application officials for DACA to avoid deportation. Peter Schweizer argues in The Invisible Coup that in 2017, President Obrador argued for using consulates as migrant defense centers and that some Mexican consular workers were supporting anti-ICE protests in Los Angeles in 2025. He also alleged that the head of the Chicago consulate bragged, “We are joining forces with anti-Trump organizations to fight the Trump Administration.” Beyond that, he alleges that Mexican consulates are helping to actively organize anti-ICE protests and meeting with Democratic party officials to interfere in American elections.
These and other charges have led the State Department to investigate the operations of all Mexican consulates within the United States. It is especially ominous considering that Mexican deputy Geraldo Fernández Noroña said in 2023 said on the floor of the Mexican Congress that the territories won by America in the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo were “occupied territories.” He later became president of the Mexican Senate. Sanctions have been imposed on those with ties to the Russian government for far less.
The Mexican government’s support for illegal immigration seems like a classic case of “failure migration,” where the inability of a state to deliver safety, prosperity, or stability for its citizens actually boosts state power by allowing it to build a diaspora in a more successful state and expand its influence and resources. In 2024, Mexico received $67.64 billion in remittances, with the United States serving as the source for more than 96 percent of payments. Mexico is now the second largest recipient of remittances in the world, behind only India. While America exports money to Mexico, Mexico exports its poverty-stricken population and drugs, with both unwelcome products facilitated by cartels that enjoy more power than the Mexican government itself. President Trump has designated several cartels as foreign terrorist organizations. Unfortunately, President Sheinbaum may owe her position to support from the cartels, and has shown reluctance in confronting them. With cartels increasingly using drones along the American border, the Mexican government’s impotence or collaboration raises the prospect of not just a hostile state along America’s border, but a hostile narcostate.
In many ways, American law and government is ill-suited to the current security environment because it is premised upon the Westphalian model of sovereign nation states. In reality, power today flows from identity and demographic groups within and across different states are a more meaningful political reality than lines on a border. Yet President Trump can still use the impressive powers at his disposal both to confront the foreign threat from Mexico, and more importantly, crush the fifth column within.
President Trump has already broached the subject of using the American military within Mexico, which international media has sensationally called the use of force against an “ally.” Yet Mexico is no ally. It is a hostile state and one of the last holdouts against the pro-American tide sweeping Latin American, with victories in Venezuela, El Salvador, Colombia, Argentina, Ecuador and others fueling the growth of the “Shield of the Americas.” Mexico is the most critical country because of its population and proximity. The “shield” is useless unless Mexico is reformed, or, if necessary, deconstructed. Given Claudia Sheinbaum’s popularity, the latter may be the more pragmatic course.
The Trump Administration should undertake the following actions on the grounds of national security:
1. First, building off the precedent established by the Alien Enemies Act, Mexican nationals should be prioritized for deportation on the grounds that the Mexican government has continuing relationships with cartels that have been designated foreign terrorist organizations.
2. Second, deportations should be combined with aggressive seizures and taxations of remittances on the grounds that such funds could be enriching criminal or terrorist networks, a precedent already established when remittances via the Al-Barakat money transfer network in Somalia were seized.
3. Third, the consulate network within the United States should be shut down on the grounds that it is interfering in American domestic politics in a far more direct and nefarious way than any Russian influence operation.
4. Finally, direct military action against Mexican cartels should be used for the explicit purpose of forcing the Mexican government to pick a side, and, if they choose wrongly, securing key territory within Mexico itself, especially in Baja California.
Though these methods would obviously hinder illegal immigration, drug trafficking, and political subversion, the real target are enemies within the United States itself. If Mexico can be designed as a hostile state or at least a state subverted by terrorists, it allows the American government to shut down organizations, activist networks, and officials that have been working with the Mexican government to sabotage immigration law enforcement. More broadly, it creates a precedent to use the Alien Enemies Act more broadly to deport all Mexicans or denaturalize paperwork Americans of Mexican descent if they openly align with our southern neighbor in the case of a conflict. Americans are uncomfortable with dividing up our citizens explicitly on the grounds of race, at least for now. However, many will support expelling those who openly announce themselves as disloyal to the United States, especially if their property can be seized and redistributed to loyal citizens.
The powers of the presidency should be aggressively used not just to solve a foreign policy problem but to secure the homeland itself by expelling a hostile and foreign population explicitly exploited by an enemy state as a vector of influence. Ideally, we would not need to intervene outside our borders at all, but the enemy is already within. Our government is structured in such a way that fighting abroad is often necessary before we can reconstruct the political order within. The logic of the neoconservative foreign policy adventures in the Middle East should be turned on its head. We have to fight them over there, so we are allowed to use the legal and military tools to fight them (and expel them) from here.
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Wow! Great article and great writing.
The future for Americans and our country seems ominous. We have multiple massive diasporas or extremely wealthy diasporas that are backed by a foreign homeland. We have Israel and Mexico. We have India's PM openly speaking about using his diaspora to benefit his homeland modeled upon Israel. We have a rapidly growing Chinese diaspora that is filling the ruling class across the upper strata of society. We have Somalia doing the same.
So that is four diasporas already well established, (Israel, India, Mexico, Somalia), and China getting started. It is bleak to contemplate and very ominous. Thank you for such an articulate call to our ruling class to solve this problem.
Mexico is the key to America’s future. Far more dangerous than Iran. Victory over Mexico will also secure the oil and minerals in the northern Mexico. This will create a precedent we needed against the other enemy aliens.