In August, however, the hard-liners began to win out, according to someone with knowledge of the Management’s internal deliberations. The shift seemed to mark a victory for Rubio. But the change didn’t reflect Rubio’s influence so much as the involvement of a new player in the policy fight: Stephen Miller,the President’s deputy chief of staff and the head of the White House Homeland Security Council. “Miller sided with Rubio not because of regime change,” the source told me. Rather, it was as Venezuela presented “an outlet for the belief that the President can just kill these guys” as part of an open-ended war on drugs and crime. “Stephen is a lot of the energy behind the bombings,” the source said. “He is owning the Western Hemisphere portfolio: immigration, security issues, and going after the cartels. He convenes working groups almost every day. He’s been very top-down with the Department of Defense about what he wants to see. Hegseth’s team just says ‘yes.’ They don’t push back. Miller got told no for similar stuff in the frist term.He doesn’t have people there to say ‘No, this isn’t an excellent idea’ anymore.”
For Miller, the military strikes help expand the President’s power, while also reinforcing the narrative of Venezuelan immigrants as “alien enemies.” As a former trump Administration official put it, “this just feels like the militarization of domestic policy. How do you stay in power? You create an ‘other.’ You say that we’re under attack.You create a casus belli. You blame the other for everything. This is happening while you have the deployment of National Guardsmen to cities. You’re getting people used to these kinds of actions. this is expanding the definition of the use of force.”
The implications of Trump’s use of the military, the former White House official said, are not lost on other Latin American countries, either. “If you’re Panama, you think this is about you. If you’re Colombia, you think it’s about you,” he told me. “You prove to the Mexicans that you’ll do what you say. the Brazilians thought this was about them. If you think it’s a signal, it is a signal.”
In Trump’s first term, he asked his advisers whether the U.S. could conduct military strikes against Mexico,based on the premise that the country was principally to blame for America’s drug problems. “They don’t have control of their own country,” Trump told Mark Esper, his previous Secretary of Defense. As Esper later wrote in a memoir, Trump had repeatedly asked if he could “shoot missiles into Mexico to destroy the drug labs,” and proposed that, if necessary, it could be done “quietly.” “No one would know it was us,” Trump reportedly said.
Trump was ultimately forced to relent after staunch opposition from the Department of Defense: the Mexican government was the U.S.’s largest trade partner and a muscular ally in limiting the spread of regional migration. By the start of 2023, though, the prospect of drastic action was becoming an increasingly mainstream position in the Republican Party. G.O.P. lawmakers in the House introduced, but failed to pass, an authorization for the use of military force against cartels, and they argued that the federal government should designate them as foreign terrorist organizations. Adding tren de Aragua to this particular cause was a by-product.