Trump vows to fight drug cartels 'like ISIS'

Former President Donald Trump, now a candidate for president in 2024, said on Thursday that his policy in a second term would be to wage war on drug cartels, fighting them like he did ISIS when he was president.

In a new video released Thursday, Trump said:

Biden’s open border policies are a deadly betrayal of our nation. When I am president, it will be the policy of the United States to take down the cartels, just as we took down ISIS and the ISIS caliphate, and just as — unlike the situation we’re in today, we had a very, very strong border, the strongest border, in fact, in the history of our country, and drugs were at a low of 45 years. There’s been nothing like what we did, just two years ago.

Trump said he would use a naval blockade to keep cartel ships out, and would also use U.S. Special Forces against them, declaring them foreign terrorist organizations. He would also demand cooperation from other countries in the region.

Cartels not only smuggle deadly fentanyl and other drugs into the country to traffic and sell them in the U.S., but they also control the movement of illegal immigrants across the border by charging families to escort members into the U.S. and making the migrants work for them in the U.S. to pay off that debt.

President Joe Biden has not done anything to fight the cartels since becoming president, and fentanyl overdose deaths are up significantly in the last two years. with a record 110,236 deaths in the latest 12-month period.

It seems likely that Trump's plan will be popular with most Americans and may help to fix some of the problems Biden has caused if Trump can get re-elected.