President Joe Biden agrees to deploy reserve troops at US-Mexico border

US President Joe Biden released an executive order allowing active duty reserve troops as needed to fight international drug trafficking, reported RT news. The US president has given the green light to Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Secretary of Homeland Security Alejandro Mayorkas to deploy active duty reserve troops to the US-Mexican border as needed. This order has been passed in order to combat the illegal drug trade. “The authorities that have been invoked will ensure the Department of Defense can properly sustain its support of the Department of Homeland Security concerning international drug trafficking along the Southwest Border,” wrote Biden in a message to Congress accompanying the order.

US president: deploy troops to the US - Mexico border

According to RT News, the step approved by Biden has come in response to the White House’s declaration of a national emergency in December 2021 regarding International drug trafficking. He has blamed “drug cartels, transnational criminal organisations, and their facilitators” for bringing “illicit drugs and precursor chemicals” and “drug-related violence” into American communities. Further, he has also imposed sanctions on senior cartel figures, as per the news media outlet. Moreover, a huge number of Republicans including Ex-US President Donald Trump have urged for a military solution to the cartel problem. Last Month, a group of 20  Republican congressmen presented a bill that would designate the Gulf Cartel, Cartel de Noreste, Cartel de Sinaloa, and Cartel de Jalisco Nueva Generacion as “foreign terrorist organisations".

A similar kind of bill from the Senate would be labelling nine such organisations as terrorists and operation would be conducted to dismantle them. Previously, the Biden administration received a petition to identify cartels as terrorist organisations by the solicitors general of 21 US states. According to Mexico's President Andres Manuel Lopes Obrador, more than thousands of Americans die each year from the fentanyl crisis, which has been brought on by societal flaws north of the border and Chinese fentanyl being shipped to North America. Further, he has lambasted the  US Drug Enforcement Agency for infiltrating the Sinaloa cartel without his government’s knowledge and warned: "Such actions put Mexican and American lives in danger."