Trump, Tariffs, and Border Security

On Saturday, President Trump announced he’d be imposing 25 percent tariffs on Mexico and Canada to hold those countries “accountable to their promises of halting illegal immigration and stopping poisonous fentanyl and other drugs from flowing into our country”. On Monday, however, those tariffs were put on hold for 30 days after Ottawa and Mexico City offered concessions. Critics have scoffed that Trump got played, but these are pretty good deals for the United States, and for Canada and Mexico, too.

White House Fact Sheet

Technically, the “White House” made that Saturday tariff announcement, in a fact sheet captioned “President Donald J. Trump Imposes Tariffs on Imports from Canada, Mexico, and China”. As that title suggests, the president included 10 percent tariffs on Beijing as well.

Unlike instances in the recent past, however, when the current White House issues a pronouncement, you can be assured that it’s “President Donald J. Trump’s” own policy, and not an idea advanced by some nameless bureaucrat, working in the shadows of the Executive Office Building with an autopen.

To explain the rationale for those tariffs, that fact sheet begins: “ADDRESSING AN EMERGENCY SITUATION: The extraordinary threat posed by illegal aliens and drugs, including deadly fentanyl, constitutes a national emergency under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA)”.

The IEEPA, 50 U.S.C. § 1701, et sec., is an exceptional grant of power to the president. As the New York Times has explained, that act:

gives the president broad powers to regulate various financial transactions upon declaring a national emergency. Under the law, presidents can take a wide variety of economic actions “to deal with any unusual and extraordinary threat, which has its source in whole or substantial part outside the United States, to the national security, foreign policy or economy” of the country.

Interestingly, Congress passed the IEEPA in 1977 as part of its post-Watergate efforts to rein in executive authorities, in this instance by narrowing the even more expansive (at the time) “Trading with the Enemy Act” (TWEA) of 1917.

A 1973 Senate study identified four ongoing presidentially declared national emergencies then in effect under the TWEA: two declared respectively by President Nixon in March 1970 and August 1971; one declared by President Truman in December 1950 “during the Korean conflict”; and the earliest by President Franklin D. Roosevelt, five days after he took office in March 1933.

Consequently, the Senate study began: “Since March 9, 1933, the United States has been in a state of declared national emergency.” IEEPA ended all of them.

Fentanyl and Migrants

I’ve described on numerous occasions the connection between the entry of dangerous drugs — fentanyl in particular — and the migrant surge over the past four years, but here’s a quick recap.

CBP has five “enduring mission priorities”: countering terrorists and their weapons; facilitating lawful trade and protecting revenue; facilitating lawful travel to the United States; combatting “transnational crime”; and securing the border “against illegal entry, illicit activity or other threats”.

The latter two priorities require the agency to deter and disrupt both illegal drugs and illegal migrants from entering the country.

CBP disrupts drug smuggling at the borders in one of two ways: Drugs are either interdicted by CBP officers (CBPOs) in the agency’s Office of Field Operations (OFO) at the ports of entry; or are seized by agents in its U.S. Border Patrol (USBP) component along the border between the ports.

While looking for illegal drugs, CBPOs and USBP agents sometimes find illegal migrants, and vice versa, but as the flow of illegal migrants rises, the agency’s ability to detect, interdict, and seize drugs is diminished.

As I explained in August 2022:

The Border Patrol set a new annual record for migrant apprehensions at the U.S.-Mexico line in FY 2021 (1.659 million) but broke that record in just the first 10 months of FY 2022 (1.816 million).

Border Patrol agents at the Southwest border are so busy rounding up, transporting, processing, and caring for “give-ups” — aliens surrendering in the (reasonable) expectation that they will be released into the United States — that on parts of the border just 30 percent of agents are “on the line” stopping aliens who don’t want to be caught (“got-aways”) and drugs and other contraband from entering.

The final USBP apprehension total at the Southwest border for FY 2022 was a whopping 2.2-plus million — which remains an all-time record — but you get the point.

To make the challenges facing USBP worse, the cartels controlling narcotics smuggling at the U.S.-Mexico line work with human smugglers to draw USBP agents away from the line in order to move those drugs more easily and with a lower likelihood of seizure into the United States.

As Rodney Scott — Biden’s first Border Patrol chief and Trump’s current nominee for CBP commissioner — described such operations in a September 2021 letter to Senate leadership:

[I]llegal entries are being scripted and controlled by Plaza Bosses that work directly for the transnational criminal organizations (TCO) to create controllable gaps in border security. These gaps are then exploited to easily smuggle contraband, criminals, or even potential terrorists into the U.S. at will. Even when [Border Patrol] detects the illegal entry, agents are spread so thin that they often lack the capability to make a timely interdiction.

Accordingly, to curb the flow of fentanyl into the United States, Trump wants Canada and Mexico to secure their respective borders with this country, not just to limit illicit incursions by drug smugglers but also by human smugglers and illegal migrants generally.

Canada

The role Mexican cartels play in the flow of illegal drugs to the United States is well-publicized, but a 43-page analysis prepared by the nonpartisan Congressional Research Service in June 2022, titled “Mexico: Organized Crime and Drug Trafficking Organizations”, lays it all out in detail.

As for illegal migration at the Southwest border, suffice it to say that between October 2021 and December 2024, approximately 17,000 USBP agents apprehended nearly six million illegal entrants there, even while more than a million others evaded apprehension to enter illegally.

But you may be wondering why Canada has drawn so much White House attention over drugs and illegal migration. I’ll take the second part first.

Traditionally, so few migrants entered illegally from Canada that CBP didn’t compile separate statistics on Northern border apprehensions.

The numbers have started to rise significantly in recent years, however, and the agency has started publishing apprehension figures.

In FY 2022, just over 2,000 Northern USBP agents apprehended 2,238 illegal migrants, a total that nearly quintupled to 10,021 in FY 2023 before more than doubling again, to 23,721 in FY 2024.

Many of those apprehensions involve migrants from just two countries — Mexico (4,868 apprehensions in FY 2023 and 3,499 in FY 2024) and India (1,630 apprehensions in FY 2023 and 14,197 in FY 2024).

Indians. In fact, do the math and you’ll see that the increase in Northern border apprehensions last fiscal year was driven almost exclusively by migrants from India.

It’s a long way from the Subcontinent to the Great White North, but a January 2022 incident in which four Indian nationals — a husband and wife and their two children — were found frozen to death near the border in Manitoba spurred an Indian government investigation of a smuggling ring running nationals of that country through Canada to the United States.

The BBC reported in November that because it is quicker for Indian nationals to obtain visitor visas in Canada, that nation “has become a more accessible entry point for Indians” coming illegally to the United States. If they make it in successfully, they join an estimated 725,000 other Indian nationals here without authorization.

Mexicans. And as my colleague Todd Bensman explained in March 2023:

The catalyst of mainly Mexican northern border crossings is a policy that Canada’s Prime Minister Justin Trudeau implemented on December 1, 2016. On that day, Trudeau rescinded the requirement that Mexicans seeking to travel to Canada obtain visas.

…

Now, Mexican nationals are using Trudeau’s visa-free visitor’s pass in escalating numbers to fly in and then cross south into America.

Visa-free travel to Canada led to a massive increase in Mexican asylum claims there — rising from 250 in 2016 to more than 25,000 in 2023. And as the figures above show, it also boosted the number of Mexican nationals crossing our Northern border.

To address that “exponential growth” in Canadian asylum claims and remove a “bilateral irritant” in U.S.-Canadian relations caused by a spike in Mexican migrants coming to this side of the border, the Trudeau government reimposed visa requirements for Mexican nationals in February 2024.

Drugs. That may explain the White House’s complaint about illegal migration at the Northern border, but what about the drugs?

A December Canadian Broadcasting Company (CBC) report quoted the Hudson Institute’s David Asher, who complained, “The money laundering that makes drug trafficking work is largely run out of Canada”, in particular, Toronto and Vancouver.

The outlet described Asher as a “top U.S. expert on criminal financing” who “led an anti-fentanyl task force under Trump”, so it’s not a surprise that the CBC was giving voice to his concerns.

Asher continued:

Canada has been a reluctant and a not particularly effective partner in this.

…

We’ve been informing the Canadian government of this for years. We’ve had very little co-operation, frankly. And it’s time, I think, with Donald Trump’s threat of a tariff, that your prime minister and others take action.

Asher’s statements echo concerns in a November 2023 report from the International Coalition Against Illicit Economies (ICAIE) titled “The Growing Harms of Cross Border Illicit Trade Vectors and Threat Convergence to Canada’s National Security”. It noted:

Concerns have … focused on how Canada continues to be a thriving hub for nefarious criminal and terrorist networks. Recent headlines have spotlighted Mexican cartels not only exploiting Canada as a profitable market, but also as a convergence zone and operational criminal hub with Iranian, Chinese, and other extremely concerning threat networks. In November 2023, the head of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) for border security and fighting serious organized crime underscored that Canada is not just a significant producer of fentanyl, but that the country exports it along with other illicit goods. … Canada has become a safe zone for the world’s most notorious crime groups and threat networks that are harming Canada’s national security and imperiling the security of other nations.

CBC reported in August that, in response to COVID shutdowns that blocked commerce into the country, Canadian fentanyl traffickers shifted from importing the drug to producing it domestically. That may be why Canadian Border Services Agency (CSBA) seizures of the drug in 2023 were just a tenth of what they were in 2018.

Note, however, that it’s likely also why CBP seizures of fentanyl increased 20-fold between FY 2023 and FY 2024, from two pounds to 43 pounds. In the first three months of FY 2025, agents have already seized 10 pounds of fentanyl — roughly 226 million lethal doses.

Consequently, to stamp out fentanyl — and overdoses — in the United States, Trump needs help from both Mexico City and Ottawa.

The Deals

Critics complain that Trump did not receive much in exchange for backing off his tariff threats, but that understates the concessions he extracted.

Canada has agreed to appoint a new “fentanyl czar” who will serve as a liaison with U.S. authorities, to list the cartels as “terrorist entities”, and to place 10,000 “frontline personnel” — including 8,500 CSBA staffers and Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) and local and provincial cops — on the border.

Current Canadian Public Safety Minister David McGuinty has explained that the fentanyl czar will also work across Canadian departments to “integrate what is a whole of society challenge”.

He explained: “Fentanyl is a foreign affairs issue, it’s a law enforcement issue, it’s an intelligence issue, it’s a public health issue, it’s a tracing issue, in terms of the ingredients that end up being used in the production of fentanyl.” Thus, by agreeing to help the United States, Ottawa is helping itself, too.

In addition, the Canadian Armed Forces (CAF) will help the RCMP with logistical support and has shipped 50 drones to the Mounties and plans to send 20 more.

It should be noted that Opposition Leader Pierre Poilievre wants CAF to do more and has promised to send active-duty troops and military helicopters to the border if his Conservative party wins upcoming parliamentary elections.

Mexico City, for its part, has promised to deploy an additional 10,000 of its National Guard troops in exchange for a U.S. promise to crack down on weapons smuggling at the border. In the first three months of FY 2025, USBP agents seized 81 weapons at the Southwest border, and 362 others in FY 2024.

As Bensman has explained, Mexican troops who were deployed to interdict migrants headed north as part of a secret deal with the Biden administration played a major role in the decline in USBP Southwest border apprehensions last fiscal year, and are currently active providing security and flying third-country migrants they stopped in the southern Mexican state of Tabasco back home.

Mexico City could always pull those National Guard troops off the line and free up the smuggling routes to the Southwest border, but by promising to bolster the force, Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum is essentially conceding that the enforcement efforts will continue.

For some reason, most Americans fail to grasp that the transit of illegal third-country migrants is a bad thing for Mexico, because their smuggling fees line the pockets of the cartels and breed corruption. Mexico City didn’t want the Biden border crisis any more than most Americans did.

Border Patrol agents and CBP officers need help interdicting illegal migrants and drugs — fentanyl in particular — at the borders and the ports. Thanks to President Trump’s tariff threats, they’ll soon be getting it from Ottawa and Mexico City. That’s as good a deal for the Mexican and Canadian public as it is for Americans, in more ways than one.