In its effort to end the nation’s illegal immigrant crisis and protect Americans, the Trump administration is preparing to designate South and Central American cartels as foreign terrorist organizations. The U.S. State Department is planning to classify six Mexico-based criminal cartels and two international gangs as foreign terrorist organizations on February 19, according to a report from Breitbart News. The decision follows an executive order issued January 20 by President Donald Trump on “Designating Cartels and Other Organizations as Foreign Terrorist Organizations and Specially Designated Global Terrorists.”

“International cartels constitute a national-security threat beyond that posed by traditional organized crime,” Trump’s executive order clarified. It continued, “The Cartels have engaged in a campaign of violence and terror throughout the Western Hemisphere that has not only destabilized countries with significant importance for our national interests but also flooded the United States with deadly drugs, violent criminals, and vicious gangs.”

Trump declared that cartel activities “threaten the safety of the American people, the security of the United States, and the stability of the international order in the Western Hemisphere. Their activities, proximity to, and incursions into the physical territory of the United States pose an unacceptable national security risk to the United States.” Therefore, the president said, “It is the policy of the United States to ensure the total elimination of these organizations’ presence in the United States and their ability to threaten the territory, safety, and security of the United States through their extraterritorial command-and-control structures, thereby protecting the American people and the territorial integrity of the United States.”

Here are the cartels and gangs that the U.S. is slated to classify as terrorist organizations:

Sinaloa Cartel

The Mexico-based Sinaloa Cartel was founded in 1987 in the Mexican state of Sinaloa. What began as a small criminal syndicate growing and selling marijuana in the 1960s burgeoned into one of the most expansive and violent criminal cartels in the late 1980s. When drug smuggler and Guadalajara Cartel founder Félix Gallardo was arrested, his lieutenant Joaquín Guzmán, better known as “El Chapo,” rose to take over the Sinaloa Cartel, which splintered from the Guadalajara Cartel. The Sinaloa-based group rapidly expanded its operations, emerging in the 1990s and 2000s as the chief source of drug trafficking into the U.S. The cartel engaged in violent conflict with other Mexican crime organizations, the Mexican government, and U.S. law enforcement agents, while simultaneously moving from smuggling marijuana to trafficking cocaine, heroin, methamphetamines, and, lately, fentanyl and MDMA, known as “molly.”

The Sinaloa Cartel is known for smuggling drugs across the border into Tucson and Phoenix in Arizona, often by use of underground tunnels, and then into Chicago, where smaller, U.S.-based gangs distribute the cartel’s narcotics across the country. Other distribution hubs include Atlanta and San Diego. In addition to being one of the world’s largest manufacturers and traffickers of cocaine, heroin, and fentanyl, the Sinaloa Cartel has become known for its violence. Cartel executions are often carried out by beheading victims or dissolving them in vats of acid. Sometimes, the cartel would film executions of rival gang members and post them online as warnings.

Jalisco New Generation Cartel

The Jalisco New Generation Cartel or Cártel de Jalisco Nueva Generación (CJNG) is known as one of the most violent criminal organizations in the world. Founded in the Mexican state of Jalisco in 2009 after the fall of the Milenio Cartel, CJNG expanded its existing smuggling networks from the west to the east coast of Mexico in a period of roughly six months, drastically increasing its operational capabilities even over significantly older and more established gangs and cartels. The organization’s narcotics traffic focuses on cocaine and methamphetamines, especially crystal meth.

Between 2018 and 2020, CJNG engaged in nearly 300 acts of gang-related violence, more than any other Mexican cartel in the same time period. Upon the organization’s founding, murders in Jalisco drastically increased, as did the discovery of mass graves of CJNG victims. The cartel is known for its aggressive violence and has special training programs for hitmen as well as its own “military” force. CJNG operatives are known for using drones armed with explosives and rocket-propelled grenades. New recruits are also known to eat their victims as part of their training.

CJNG is noted for its political influence, bribing and corrupting police officers and elected officials and, if that doesn’t work, using violence to intimidate or silence politicians. During Mexico’s 2018 election cycle, CJNG was reportedly responsible for the deaths of 130 political candidates in the space of one year.

Gulf Cartel

Possibly the oldest still-operating criminal cartel in Mexico, the Gulf Cartel is headquartered in Matamoros in the Mexican state of Tamaulipas, right across the border from Brownsville, Texas. Founded in the 1930s as an alcohol-smuggling gang during Prohibition in the U.S., the Gulf Cartel has expanded its operations over the past century to include not only drug trafficking but extortion, racketeering, kidnapping, and assassination. The Gulf Cartel smuggled heroin into the U.S. until the late 1970s, when it brokered a deal with Colombian cocaine dealers.

The Gulf Cartel is noted for its human trafficking operations, charging illegal immigrants exorbitant sums for use of their smuggling routes to enter the U.S. and, when immigrants cannot pay, either killing them or, in the case of women and children, forcing them into prostitution. It is believed that the Gulf Cartel dominates the human trafficking business over the U.S. border. The organization is also known for operating kidnapping rings, with over half of kidnappings in Mexico being attributed to the Gulf Cartel. Bribery is also a common practice for the Gulf Cartel, which has a storied history of paying off Mexican police and prosecutors as well as U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) and FBI agents as well as Texas National Guardsmen.

In the late 1990s, the Gulf Cartel began recruiting former Mexican Special Forces members to form its own paramilitary organization, Los Zetas, a well-trained group of killers dedicated to destroying rival cartel factions and carrying out elite assassinations. The move inspired the Sinaloa Cartel to form its own armed forces wing, Los Negros. In 2010, both Los Zetas and Los Negros split from their cartel foundations and became their own independent criminal organizations.

Cártel del Noreste

A splinter group from Los Zetas formed in 2014, the Cártel del Noreste (CDN) has become a powerful criminal force in its own right. Unlike most of its rival cartels, CDN’s chief focus is not drug trafficking but kidnapping, human trafficking and extortion, and carjacking, although the criminal organization does still traffic drugs and operate several prostitution rings. CDN is noted for controlling the Mexican city of Nuevo Laredo and its members are known to be excessively violent. In 2017, CDN lieutenant Pablo César reportedly executed five prosecutors with the Tamaulipas Attorney General’s Office. He evaded arrest until 2020.

Earlier this month, Mexican authorities arrested another CDN lieutenant, Ricardo “Mando R” Gonzalez Sauceda, who had several arrest warrants for violently attacking police officers in Nuevo León, as well as for kidnapping and extortion. Gonzalez Sauceda was known for running a group of CDN enforcers nicknamed “Los Chukis,” named after the sadistic horror movie character Chucky.

La Familia Michoacana

Known colloquially as “the Family,” La Familia Michoacana is another splinter group that formed as Los Zetas began to decline in power. Once allied with the Gulf Cartel, La Familia traffics almost exclusively in methamphetamines, which it produces in hidden laboratories in the southwest of Mexico.

It is believed that La Familia originated as a coalition of vigilantes who protected the Mexican state of Michoacán. However, what is known is that La Familia was once the paramilitary arm of the Gulf Cartel in the 1990s. La Familia had close ties to both the Gulf Cartel and Los Zetas until 2006, when it established itself an independent drug manufacturer and trafficker.

La Familia’s former leader, Nazario Moreno González, nicknamed El Más Loco or “The Craziest One,” introduced a sort of religious aspect into the organization, carrying a “bible” of his own sayings and writings and referring to executions and assassinations that he and La Familia carried out as “divine justice.” Moreno González was an admirer of the book “Wild at Heart” by Christian author John Eldredge and made the book required reading for members of his cartel. La Familia’s members are prohibited from using drugs themselves and the organization claims not to operate in human trafficking or exploitation of women and children.

Despite the cartel’s supposed “family values,” La Familia is known for using torture and murder to maintain control over Michoacán. In one instance in 2006, La Familia tossed severed heads onto the dance floor at a nightclub, warning the public against the cartel’s “divine judgement.” In 2009, after a La Familia operative was arrested by Mexican Federal Police, cartel members kidnapped, tortured, and murdered 12 Federal Police agents, displaying their bodies in public with a written dare to the police: “Come for another.” La Familia is believed to essentially run the state government in Michoacán, including police chiefs, mayors, and legislators.

Cárteles Unidos

The history of Cárteles Unidos, also known as La Resistencia, is a complicated one. Originally, as the name suggests, Cárteles Unidos was the result of an alliance among several Mexican cartels, a sort of paramilitary force formed to confront the rapidly expanding and well-trained Los Zetas. The La Resistencia gang was founded by the Sinaloa Cartel when Los Zetas began encroaching on the older cartel’s territory. Soon, the Gulf Cartel, La Familia Michoacana, and a group known as the Knights Templar Cartel joined forces with the Sinaloa Cartel to create Cárteles Unidos, which operated as an enforcement arm for the cartels against Los Zetas.

Although many of the cartels which originally formed Cárteles Unidos have either withdrawn from the coalition or have formed various alliances against each other, it is possible that Cárteles Unidos has established itself as its own paramilitary drug trafficking organization.

MS-13

Founded in Los Angeles in the 1980s, Mara Salvatrucha (MS-13) is one of the best-known and most violent international criminal gangs. MS-13 began its existence as a gang to protect Salvadoran immigrants in California from rival gangs. In the early 1990s, many of the original MS-13 gang members were deported to El Salvador, where the gang developed a stronghold. Originally, the founding members of MS-13 were Satanists and, according to Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele, that Satanic streak still exists today, with MS-13 rituals including the murder of infants.

The MS-13 gang is known for its excessively violent crimes, with an emphasis on the murders of women and children. Children are also forced into the gang, being forcibly recruited while walking to or from school, home, or even church. MS-13 favors the machete as a weapon and will often target rival gang members and their families. It is suspected that certain MS-13 cells require new members to commit a murder as part of their initiation.

The gang has an international presence, with footholds in Mexico, Honduras, Guatemala, Colombia, Peru, Egypt, and even France and Australia, as well as El Salvador and the U.S. MS-13 is estimated to have between 30,000 and 50,000 members globally, with as many as 10,000 in the U.S., although the numbers have likely grown over the years. According to U.S. law enforcement officials, MS-13 cells in Los Angeles, Atlanta, Dallas, New York City, and Washington, D.C. have been coordinating their criminal operations with each other over the past decade.

Bukele has achieved success in combatting MS-13 in El Salvador, after the country’s supreme court declared the gang a terrorist organization and allowed the president to conduct mass arrests. At least 80,000 gang members are currently imprisoned in El Salvador.

Tren de Aragua

The international gang Tren de Aragua (TDA) was founded in Venezuela in 2009 or 2010 and has, since then, expanded across the Western hemisphere, with footholds in Colombia, Brazil, Peru, Ecuador, Bolivia, Panama, Costa Rica, Chile, Mexico, Trinidad and Tobago, and the U.S. The group is known for human trafficking, as well as arms smuggling, drug trafficking, kidnapping, and murder.

TDA gained a foothold in the U.S. in the early 2020s, during the illegal immigration crisis facilitated by the Biden administration. The FBI confirmed in 2024 that the gang had developed a strong presence in the U.S. In Chicago and New York City, TDA members have committed crimes including murder and drug dealing and reportedly not only live in migrant shelters but recruit new members there. In Aurora, Colorado, just outside Denver, TDA members violently took over a series of apartment complexes, demanding rent and protection fees from residents.