Sheinbaum defends transfer of Mexican cartel members amid efforts to appease Trump

Original article by Thomas Graham in Mexico City

Mexico’s President Claudia Sheinbaum has defended the latest transfer of 37 Mexican cartel operatives to the US as a “sovereign decision”, as her government strives to alleviate pressure from the Trump administration to do more against drug-trafficking groups.

It was the third such flight in the year since Donald Trump returned to the White House, but analysts warn that while it remains an effective pressure valve, the returns may be diminishing.

“I think they will have to find other solutions, and the issue of [Mexican] politicians connected to criminal networks is going to have ever more weight,” said Rodrigo Peña, a security expert. “There will be more pressure on the president to confront these networks.”

Since Trump returned to White House he has repeatedly stated that Mexico is “run by cartels”, demanding Sheinbaum do more to take them on, under the looming threat of unilateral action.

That threat weighs heavier than ever since the US military extracted Nicolás Maduro from Venezuela at the start of the year, and amid ongoing strikes on alleged drug-trafficking boats in the Pacific and Caribbean.

Since then, the US government has reportedly redoubled its push for the US military to be involved in joint operations on Mexican soil to dismantle laboratories making fentanyl, the potent synthetic opioid behind the US overdose crisis.

But the prospect of US boots on the ground in Mexico is a sensitive issue given the history of US interventions in the country, and Sheinbaum has repeatedly rejected the offer as a matter of sovereignty.

Sheinbaum has instead offered another planeload of cartel operatives plucked from Mexican prisons, including high-level figures from the Cartel Jalisco Nueva Generación and Cartel del Noreste, two of the country’s powerful organised crime groups.

They also included Pedro Inzunza Noriega, a fentanyl trafficker who in May 2025 was the first person to be charged with narco-terrorism by the US Department of Justice.

Experts in Mexico have questioned the legal grounds for the flights, which are being conducted outside the usual extradition process.

But Omar García Harfuch, Mexico’s security minister, wrote on X that the people were “high impact criminals” who “represented a real threat to the country’s security”

In theory, the 92 cartel figures sent so far are a potential trove for US law enforcement agencies that want to build cases, said Peña.

“But I think the security policy of the Trump administration is so aggressive, so unilateral, so war-like, than they are less focused on intelligence work and more on other kinds of pressure – like what we saw in the Caribbean,” he added.

The cost of unilateral action in Mexico would be far higher for the US than it was in Venezuela, given the political turmoil it would provoke in Mexico and the near trillion-dollar annual trade relationship the two countries share.

But the US-Mexico-Canada free trade deal that binds the three countries is being renegotiated – and the trade and security agendas have become entangled.

“The security agenda is no longer separate from trade negotiations – and that could completely pollute or derail those negotiations,” said Diego Marroquín Bitar at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a thinktank in Washington DC.

To stave off the threat of tariffs, the Mexican government has already helped the Trump administration with another aspect of its security agenda – the US-Mexico border – by suppressing the number of migrants arriving there and receiving deportees.

“But that’s not enough for this administration: they expect more,” said Marroquín. “I think what they want is for the Mexican government to go after politicians: people in power who are associated with these [drug-trafficking] organisations. And the question is: ‘Is Sheinbaum willing to go after them?’ Because some of these people are going to be from her own party.”