Trump ‘considers plan to send hit squads to Mexico to kill cartel leaders’

Presumptive Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump is privately considering a plan to deploy American assassination squads to Mexico to take out drug cartel leaders if he is re-elected in November, according to a report.

Three sources familiar with the former president’s proposal told Rolling Stone that he has insisted that the American military has “tougher killers than they do” and is mulling a similar plot to that carried out when US forces killed ISIS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi back in 2019.

The deployment would be covert, the outlet reported, and would not rely on the Mexican government’s consent.

Just earlier this year, one source recalled the former president saying that the US government should create a “kill list of drug lords,” consisting of the most notorious heads of drug cartels that a special-ops team would be tasked with killing or capturing, Rolling Stone reported.

Rolling Stone’s report expands upon Mr Trump’s 2024 policy proposals, dubbed “Agenda47”.

That proposal includes an “action plan to destroy the drug cartels” in the form of a bulleted list.

One bullet states that Mr Trump would order the US Department of Defense “to make appropriate use of special forces, cyber warfare, and other covert and overt actions to inflict maximum damage on cartel leadership, infrastructure, and operations.”

Mr Trump’s campaign website also says his administration would make it the “official policy” of the US to “take down the drug cartels just as we took down ISIS.”

The former president also said in a campaign video about this agenda item: “Either we will get the full cooperation of other governments to stop this menace—or we will expose every bribe, every kickback, every payoff, and every bit of corruption