President Donald Trump allowed family members of one of the world’s most notorious drug-trafficking cartels to enter the United States, even as the president has promoted himself as tough on crime.
Mexico’s Security Secretary Omar García Harfuch has confirmed that 17 family members related to the heads of the Sinaloa Cartel were allowed into America.
“It is evident that his family is going to the U.S. because of a negotiation or an offer that the Department of Justice is giving him,” García Harfuch said in a radio interview.
Tuesday’s revelation that the Trump administration made this move came on the same day that the Department of Justice charged Sinaloa Cartel members with material support of terrorism, drug trafficking, and narco-terrorism.
Trump has claimed that stopping the spread of fentanyl in the U.S. is a top goal of his in regards to crime. But the Sinaloa Cartel is one of the world’s major traffickers of the substance, and Trump has apparently made a deal with them.
A truck burns on a street in Culiacan, Sinaloa state, in January 2023.
When he’s not reportedly letting in people affiliated with crime families, Trump is warmly welcoming the descendants of the racists who created South Africa’s apartheid regime.
Trump made an exception to his policy suspending refugee admissions, allowing 59 white Afrikaners to the United States on Monday. Trump and his team have lied and said the Afrikaners faced persecution from Black South Africans. The people Trump has welcomed have opposed the South African government’s policies to address how land was stolen from Black people during apartheid.
Trump’s deputy secretary of state, Christopher Landau, bragged that the white immigrants could “be assimilated easily into our country,” which stands in stark contrast to Trump’s opposition to migrants with Black and brown skin.
At the same time the immigration system is open to cartel family members and Afrikaners, it is being used to detain Americans.
Immigration and Customs Enforcement is holding 19-year-old Ximena Arias-Cristobal, a college student in Georgia. Arias-Cristobal, who is undocumented and has lived in America since she was 4, is being held after she was wrongly accused of making a traffic violation. Though the local police department has cleared her of all charges, ICE continues to detain her.
The young woman’s detention echoes Trump’s approach to rounding up migrant families and political dissenters, then holding them in custody.
Under Trump, a criminal connection does not appear to be a roadblock to getting across the border, nor is it a problem if you have the right color of skin and are associated with white-grievance politics. Everyone else, though, is out of luck.
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