Exclusive — Ohio Senate Candidate Bernie Moreno: Mexican Cartels Should Be Declared ‘Foreign Terrorist Organizations’

Ohio Republican Senate candidate Bernie Moreno believes the United States needs to declare Mexican drug cartels “foreign terrorist organizations and wipe them off of the face of the earth,” he told Sirius XM’s Breitbart News Saturday.

Moreno, a businessman seeking to win Ohio’s Republican Senate nomination and unseat Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-OH) next fall, joined the program Saturday morning and shared his views on immigration and border policy with Breitbart News Washington Bureau Chief Matthew Boyle. He dubbed the crisis at the border “an invasion” as Biden prepares to lift Title 42 on May 11.

“Well, we’ve seen it for the last 28 months of Biden… quite literally an invasion of our country, over five million people that have crossed our border illegally,” Moreno, originally from Colombia, said. “It’s completely insane. There’s not a nation on earth that would allow something like this; I think it’s treasonous of our leaders in Washington, DC, as we talked about last time…none of them are going to [get a] paycheck until this is solved. We need to keep Title 42 in place. We need to finish President Trump’s wall. We need to reinstall the stay-in-Mexico policy; we need to have the Mexican government re-surge their troops to the border. If you remember that 20,000 plus troops on the border that they were paying for that President Trump had arranged, Biden got rid of that, which was insane.”

Moreno then zoned in on the drug cartels, asserting that they actually control “American immigration policy.”

“We’ve handed our entire immigration policy over to the Mexican drug cartels. They determine who comes into America today,” he said. “Think about that, Matt, the Mexican drug cartels are in charge of who comes into America, not our elected leaders in Washington, DC. And by the way, speaking of the drug cartels, we need to do what is obvious, which is declare them foreign terrorist organizations and wipe them off the face of the earth.”

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Boyle later noted that Reps. Michael Waltz (R-FL) and Dan Crenshaw (R-TX) have introduced legislation that would authorize the use of military force against cartels. He pointed out that Walz compared what the legislation could accomplish to then-President Bill Clinton’s Plan Colombia initiative against cartels in Moreno’s native country and asked the candidate to weigh in with his unique perspective on the matter.

Moreno said the “Mexican drug cartels are exponentially more dangerous, more ruthless, and more wealthy” than their 20th-century counterparts in Colombia and emphasized that while Colombia is thousands of miles away, the United States shares 2000 miles of border with Mexico.

“It is absolutely the most serious national security threat we face is a powerful, weaponized-against-America drug cartel funded by China, by the way, and… killing more Americans than any other terrorist group. I’d actually say every terrorist group on earth… pales in comparison to the danger it poses America that the drug cartels do, and if we don’t get serious about that, what’s going to happen is they’re going to eventually end up controlling the Mexican government – basically pretty close right now. I’d say it’s right at a tipping point, and we need to get serious about it.”

He added that “We have leaders in Washington, DC, that just ignore it” while “They’re fine supporting Ukraine and going all over the world and figuring out where they can intervene in other nations.”