President Donald Trump has ordered the Pentagon to prepare options for the possible use of US military force against drug cartels designated as terrorist organizations, two US officials confirmed to ABC News on Friday.
An official said that any possible use of US military assets is not imminent.
It is not clear exactly what authorization will allow and what military operations would be considered as potential options that the US army has been authorized to prepare. Surely there will be questions about the legality of such operations.
The New York Times was the first to inform That Trump had signed a directive ordering the Pentagon to prepare military options against the posters.
The Pentagon sent all the questions to the White House.
President Donald Trump speaks, while making an announcement about the economy, in the Oval Office of the White House in Washington, on August 7, 2025.
Mark Schiefelbein/AP
When comments were requested, the White House spokeswoman, Anna Kelly, told ABC News that “the main priority of President Trump is to protect the homeland, so he took the bold step to designate several posters and gangs as foreign terrorist organizations.”
In February, the Trump Administration appointed Tren de Aragua, the Sinaloa, MS-13 and other drug cartels as global terrorist organizations after an executive order signed by Trump in January.
Appearing in EWTN on Thursday, Secretary of State Marco Rubio said that the designation allows the administration to use several media against the posters that it described as armed as terrorists or armies that control the territory.
“I don’t know if your behavior has yet changed, but your behavior will have to change in one way or another,” Rubio said in an interview when asked if the terrorist designation had changed the behavior of the posters. “But it allows us to attack now what they are operating and use other elements of American power, intelligence agencies, the Department of Defense, whatever … to point to these groups if we have the opportunity to do it.”
“We have to start treating them as armed terrorist organizations, not simply drug trafficking organizations,” Rubio continued. “Drug trafficking is the type of terrorism they are doing.”
This is a development story. Consult the updates again.
