by Edward Ring
Trump’s urban crackdown isn’t just about crime—it’s a battle against foreign cartels, corrupted cities, and the billion-dollar criminal empires eroding America from within.
“We’re not going to lose our cities over this. This will go further. We’re starting very strongly with D.C., and we’re going to clean it up real quick.” — President Donald Trump, August 11, 2025
For nearly three months, National Guard troops have been deployed in cities across the U.S., including Washington, D.C., Los Angeles, Memphis, Chicago, and Portland. Despite near-universal opposition from the Democrat city leaders, the deployments will continue, and more cities are expected to follow.
There are obvious motivations for these deployments that go well beyond politics and well beyond the ongoing, alarming rates of violent crime and theft. Even the need to protect federal buildings and ICE officers does not fully explain the compelling reasons to surge federal law enforcement and the National Guard into American cities.
Behind unacceptable crime rates and coordinated rioting, there is now a much greater threat, one that is beyond the power of local or state law enforcement. America is being systematically corrupted by foreign crime organizations. These gangs not only have access to staggering profits from drugs and human trafficking, but they have also formed partnerships and gained access to the resources of hostile nations.
To understand how serious this problem has become, consider the financial resources these criminal organizations wield. According to the Department of Homeland Security, roughly $20 to $30 billion in cash from drug sales travels annually from the U.S. into Mexico. But drugs are not the only source of income for these organizations.
According to Border Patrol agents, for the last several years, as one of them put it in testimony to the U.S. House of Representatives Committee on Homeland Security in 2023, “nobody crosses without paying the cartels.” The Federation for American Immigration Reform estimates the average fee charged by cartel smugglers is $7,000 per migrant, and according to U.S. Customs and Border Patrol, an estimated 11 million people were smuggled into the U.S. over the Mexican border during the Biden Administration. If only half of those individuals paid smugglers’ fees, that would total nearly $40 billion.
It’s not easy to get an idea of how much money from drugs and human trafficking flows into the hands of criminals each year in America, since by definition these transactions are not subject to the publicly disclosed financial reporting required of large, legitimate corporations. A RAND study released in 2019 referenced research that estimated annual sales of illegal drugs in 2016 to total $150 billion.
Whatever the true number may be, it is clear that foreign criminal gangs now rake in hundreds of billions of dollars annually from Americans hooked on drugs and migrants desperate to come to America. Much of that revenue either stays in the U.S. or goes out and then comes back in. The FBI currently estimates that “around $300 billion is laundered in the country every year.”
It doesn’t take a lot of imagination to appreciate just how much power and influence can be bought with a budget on the scale of hundreds of billions of dollars per year. Drug cartels have used their wealth to tighten control over criminal enterprises across American cities. It would be naive to think these organizations, with that much money to throw around, have not managed to corrupt some American politicians and government officials. And how many legitimate American businesses are being acquired or intimidated by “investors” that have to park all those ill-gotten billions somewhere?
It isn’t just American cities that are vulnerable to the limitless cash and ruthless tactics of foreign drug gangs. They are establishing themselves everywhere in the country. Examples are plentiful and include the vast rural expanse of California’s far north, Montana, Oklahoma, and Indian reservations. Law enforcement in these remote regions cannot cope with criminal organizations that have access to resources exceeding the financial and military capacity of most nations. For all practical purposes, these gangs are quasi-state actors, with the rural hinterlands serving as their expansionist colonies. Their headquarters, where their power is most concentrated, lie in America’s cities.
Crime. Drugs. Lethal gangs with hundred-billion-dollar budgets. Antifa and other hardcore insurgent organizations. All of them aligned on the agenda of chaos. Is this a reality that major cities run by progressive ideologues can cope with on their own? Cities with politicians and elected prosecutors who either deny the existence of these threats or are naive enough to think that by ignoring them they will subside?
This brings us to genuine state actors, hostile to the United States, that are actively working to support these forces of chaos in order to undermine America’s internal stability and develop proxies. China, Russia, Iran, and Venezuela are particularly noteworthy in this regard, but there are others.
This is the broader context of the Trump crackdown in American cities. It is a growing threat that any journalist or politician, or anyone following the news, ought to understand. But instead, from every major news source, including PBS, ABC, CBS, NBC, CNN, the BBC, and the New York Times, this crackdown is being treated as an authoritarian coup. These news sources, to put it as charitably as possible, are delusional. And how many partisan urban politicians who pretend this crackdown is an attack on democracy are, in fact, bought off or intimidated by these hostile actors?
What the Trump administration is doing in American cities is part of a broad and urgent strategy that includes reestablishing control of U.S. borders, going after cartel activity outside the United States, restricting foreign ownership of farmland and land in proximity to strategic military bases, pushing back foreign influence in the Western Hemisphere, and tackling international money laundering. The only question now is whether it’s too late.
Edward Ring is a senior fellow of the Center for American Greatness. He is also the
director of water and energy policy for the California Policy Center,
which he co-founded in 2013 and served as its first president. Ring is
the author of Fixing California: Abundance, Pragmatism, Optimism (2021)
and The Abundance Choice: Our Fight for More Water in California (2022).
Source: https://amgreatness.com/2025/10/29/the-broader-reasons-for-trumps-urban-crackdown/
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