By Todd Bensman on November 7, 2024

AUSTIN, Texas — In a New York Post column this week, I revised my earlier dark warnings that Mexico would likely unleash hundreds of thousands of migrants yearning to cross the U.S. Southwest border before Donald Trump could win a second term, take office, and dam the whole border up.

I wrote in the Post that there’s now pretty good reason for more optimism that Mexico’s new leftist president, Claudia Sheinbaum, may instead intervene and block the first migrant caravans at least 5,000 strong that set out from deep southern Mexico on Election Day morning and are still moving this way to test her will to intercede.

Remember that Mexico has been holding back the human tide since last December, when President Joe Biden struck a backroom deal with Mexico City to alleviate the ruinous political spectacle of a badly congested southern border for the coming 2024 political campaign season. For 10 months straight, the deal has had 32,500 Mexican troops and even more federales round up tens of thousands of intending border-crossers from the country’s north and ship them by force to a militarized blockade in its southern states.

Within a month, the number of illegal crossings fell by half and kept declining. Mexican media call the endeavor “Operation Carousel”.

But now that the election is over and Mexico’s end of the bargain is supposedly fulfilled, will Sheinbaum maintain or dismantle Operation Carousel for a Donald Trump America as the new caravans test her resolve in the coming weeks?

The odds have just tilted in favor of Mexican keeping up its efforts, I wrote in the Post, because at his last campaign rally Monday night, Donald Trump warned Sheinbaum that he would inflict harsh economic pain if she let immigrants reach the U.S. Southwest Border.

“I’m going to inform [Mexico’s president] on day one or sooner that if they don’t stop this onslaught of criminals and drugs coming into our country, I’m going to immediately impose a 25 percent tariff on everything they send into the United States of America,” Trump declared at his Raleigh, N.C., rally on Monday.

“If that doesn’t work,” he added. “I’ll make it 50, and if that doesn’t work, I’ll make it 75. Then I’ll make it 100.”

But America and Trump should beware of a well-worn Mexican stealth scheme I’ve long called out as “ant operations”, which have enabled Mexico to allow mass illegal immigration in a manner that greatly reduces its visibility and provides plausible deniability that Mexico did anything that could trigger Trump reprisals.

No less at stake in this fresh northward moving caravan challenge is whether Sheinbaum will release hundreds of thousands more pooled up in southern Mexico — with thousands more a day crossing into Mexico from Guatemala, shut them down under Trump’s tariff threat … or do ant operations to clear her country out at U.S. expense and deny it before and after Trump takes office.

What They Are

Drug trafficking cartels have long used the ant operations tactic by having just a few traffickers move small amounts of illegal drugs along many different routes over many different border crossings so that the authorities on both sides don’t readily detect the vast totality of the volume.

In the mass migration context, however, Mexico has plagiarized the tactic. The government coordinates many smaller groups of migrants — rather than giant camera-loving caravans — to move high volumes of people over many different border crossings that are not readily noticed.

As a protégé of former President Andres Manuel Lopez-Obrador (AMLO), Sheinbaum would most definitely recall that her old boss suffered Trump’s first tariff threat back in 2019.

That was when Trump, facing a brief but intense surge of family units at the southern border, threatened progressive trade tariffs on Mexican exports that would reach 28 percent if AMLO did not deploy military to shut down his own southern border with Guatemala and hem in immigrants behind 50 militarized roadblocks leading out of the country’s southern region.

AMLO did as he was told to avoid economic ruination for his country.

But once Biden entered office in 2021, he swept Trump’s tariff threat stick from the bilateral table and, politely asking AMLO to keep the operation going, switched to carrots — meaning, cash.

The historic mass migration of millions that followed, while AMLO kept up a mere appearance of blockade operations from the Trump-era, stands as evidence of ant operation duplicity on a vast scale.

To clear the unbearable crowds from its southern provinces, as I first began reporting in 2022 from southern Mexico, the Mexicans issue passes to migrants in the south that required transit to a dozen different designated northern states. Government-provided buses would distribute small unnoticed groups across the northern Mexican states, after which they would trickle in everywhere along the U.S. border, no one the wiser except to border nerds like me.

A First Test of Sheinbaum Close at Hand

Will Sheinbaum heed Trump’s tariff threat now or later?

On Wednesday, she’s struck a somewhat defiant note while acknowledging having heard Trump’s tariff threat, suggesting other leaders won’t tell her what to do as president.

“We are a free, independent, sovereign country,” she said at a news conference, adding that “There will be good relations with the United States. I am convinced of this.”

But Trump and anyone else worried about a mad transition-period rush on the American southern border — or after Trump takes office and insists on Operation Carousel’s permanence — should know that Sheinbaum’s decision is not simply a binary keep-or-dismantle it.

There’s a third option: ant operations.

Topics: Mexico, Migrant Caravans