Canada, Cartels, And Trump’s Tariffs

President-elect Donald Trump bloodied Mexico and Canada with diplomatic buckshot earlier this week by writing that, on his first day in office, he’ll levy devastating 25% trade tariffs on those two U.S. neighbors if they fail to crack down on illegal immigration and drug trafficking.

Much public puzzlement has filled international media coverage over why Trump would single out Canada for punishment equal to that of the far guiltier Mexico. 

“To compare us to Mexico is the most insulting thing I’ve ever heard from our friends and closest allies, the United States of America,” Ontario Premier Doug Ford said. “I found his comments unfair. I found them insulting. It’s like a family member stabbing you right in the heart.” 

“We shouldn’t confuse the Mexican border with the Canadian border,” Canadian Industry Minister Francois-Philippe Champagne said.

But this narrative seems intended to deflect public acknowledgement of what the liberal progressive government of Justin Trudeau did in fact do to draw Trump’s tariff ire. In terms of immigration policy, the Canadian offenses are indeed much different from Mexico’s open super-highway mass migration wave-throughs during the Biden-Harris years. But Canada’s policies have , arguably, damaged U.S. national security and public safety interests in harmful ways that media outlets on both sides rarely report.

Canada’s Massive Legal Immigration Program As A U.S. National Security Threat 

Much of the damage arises from an historic Canadian legal immigrant importation program of unprecedented scope. Since the program’s 2021 implementation, the Great White North has imported some 1.5 million foreign national workers (400,000+ per year for a country of 38 million) from dozens of developing nations and hundreds of thousands of foreign students in 2023 alone – making it another record-breaking year.

Why are those programs a U.S. problem? Because a spiking number of foreign nationals are apparently abusing the Canadian programs as a lily pad from which to illegally enter the United States between northern border land ports of entry, among them proven threats to U.S. national security and public safety. 

Why this traffic leaking into the United States is a problem – even though the total numbers illegally entering from Canada are small relative to those crossing from Mexico – arises from the fact that many hail from Muslim-majority nations and have, Canadian media reports, fueled a spate of terrorism and anti-Semitic attacks throughout Canada. In addition, far too many of the Mexicans Canada has allowed in turned out to be cartel drug traffickers and killers.

These are the kinds of criminals crossing the U.S. northern border in increasing numbers due to Canadian policies — policies Canada could address if it wanted to.

Consider that U.S. Border Patrol apprehensions in the brush between U.S.-Canada land ports of entry jumped from 2,238 in 2022 to 23,721 in 2024, neatly coinciding with Trudeau’s mass legal immigration programs.

Among those crossing illegally from Canada, for instance, were 15,827 Indian nationals in 2023 and 2024, 8,367 Mexicans, and 3,833 from unspecified countries listed only as “Other” on the U.S. Customs and Border Protection’s public statistics website.

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A Border-Crossing Terror Plot Foiled

Concerns on both sides of the northern border have been simmering for some years as Canadians witness newcomers carrying out terror plots, actual attacks, and perhaps some of the record-breaking nearly 6,000 antisemitic incidents Canada has logged since the Israel-Hamas war broke out. 

What’s been happening in Canada was obvious to many.

“Canada has become a hotbed of radicalization, fanaticism, and jihadism,” wrote Casey Babb, Senior Fellow with the Macdonald-Laurier Institute in Newsweek shortly after the arrest. “As un-Canadian as it sounds, Canada has a terrorism crisis on its hands and that should worry the United States for a whole host of reasons.”

Concern would reach an apogee in October 2024, when a joint U.S.-Canadian counterterrorism operation thwarted a plot by a Pakistani student on a Canadian visa to illegally cross the northern border to conduct an October 2024 massacre of Jews in New York.

Muhammad Shahzeb Khan, a 20-year-old Pakistani citizen legally issued a Canadian student visa in June 2023, now stands accused in U.S. federal court of plotting an illegal-smuggler-assisted northern border crossing to carry out a mass shooting of Jews in New York City to celebrate with blood the October 7 anniversary of the Hamas massacre in Israel. Khan hoped it would go down in history as “the largest U.S. attack since 9/11.”

“We are going to nyc (sic) to slaughter them” with AR-style rifles and hunting knives “so we can slit their throats,” Khan told an undercover FBI agent he believed to be a co-conspirator, according to an agent complaint. “Even if we don’t attack an event we could rack up easily a lot of Jews.”

His was among the record-breaking 400,000 foreign student visas Canada issued in 2023.

That alarming new terrorism prosecution in New York State should have been enough to renew Trump’s interest in turning diplomatic pressure onto Canadian Prime Minister Trudeau’s mass legal immigration policies and border security on its side.

But terrorists cannot be the only concern.

Mexican Cartel Killers And Traffickers In Canada Crossing Too

The incoming Trump administration will need to force resolution of another issue regarding U.S. public safety concerns dating back to an especially damaging 2016 Trudeau move that did great harm until it was addressed just recently.. Trudeau rescinded 2009 visa requirements on Mexican citizens and against the advice of his own government. Mexican criminals would abuse the policy to fly in at will and bedevil both Canadian and northern American cities.

That all began in early 2017. A sustained surge was underway of Mexican nationals who, unable to easily cross the southern border under Trump 1.0, were flying over the United States into Canada. They would claim Canadian asylum and cross southward over the less tended northern U.S. border.

Among them were the predicted Mexican cartel operatives.

Leaked Canada Border Services Agency intelligence reports said Mexican “drug smugglers, human smugglers, recruiters, money launders and foot soldiers” were turning up in greater numbers than ever before. The cartels went to work building human smuggling networks to move other Mexicans south over the American border, just as they did all along the southern border.

In July 2017, Global News quoted the intelligence reports saying the ultra-violent Sinaloa cartel had turned up in Canada to “facilitate travel to Canada by Mexicans with criminal records.” Others identified included La Familia Michoacana, Jalisco New Generation, and Los Zetas.

For instance, whereas the reports said 37 Mexicans linked to organized criminal groups had entered between 2012 and 2015, 65 involved in “serious crimes” were identified midway through just 2017, compared to 28 in 2015. By May 2019, at least 400 Mexican criminals connected to drug trafficking, including sicario hitmen, were plying their trades in Canada, at least half of them in Quebec, according to a May 24, 2019, report in the Toronto Sun and other Canadian media outlets. 

All had entered through the Trudeau visa loophole for Mexicans.

By the end of 2019, Canada saw a 1,400% spike in the number of bogus Mexican refugee claims, the vast majority naturally rejected, and of associated detentions.

Canada Finally About To Face The Music

Only in February 2024 did the Americans pressure the Canadians to finally reimpose some visa restrictions on Mexicans — though not all. Now, only Mexicans who already hold a U.S. visa or old Canadian one can travel visa-free, while most other Mexicans with neither will have to apply for a Canadian one.

The damage is already done, but there’s always a chance Trudeau could revert to visa-free once again.

From January to mid-October 2022, for instance, 7,698 Mexican asylum seekers took direct flights from Mexico City to Montreal, according to a November 2022 Canadian Press story.

The paper quoted officials at nonprofit refugee assistance groups attesting that most fly to Canada because they found out Trudeau’s visa-free policy also got them government financial assistance while awaiting their mostly denied asylum applications.

In their October 2021 book, “The Wolfpack: The Millennial Mobsters Who Brought Chaos and the Cartels to the Canadian Underworld,” journalists Peter Edwards and Luis Najera established that the Sinaloa Cartel now has a foothold across eastern Canada, with “solid control of cocaine shipments in and out of Canada.” The Arellano Felix group has its foothold in Vancouver and in the state of Alberta.

The Zetas are in Canada “involved with temporary migrant workers.”

Asked in 2023 if Canada’s importance to Mexican organized crime had increased “in recent years,” co-author Luis Najera answered: “I would say it has increased since criminal cells moved up north to settle and expand operations here. It is also strategic to have groups operating north of the U.S. border, close to key places such as Chicago and New York, and without the scrutiny of the DEA and rival groups.”

Canada is not Mexico but its policies pose consequences for the United States.

Any normal U.S. administration would put Canada on the hook for adjusting its policies and more robustly guarding its supposedly treasured neighboring ally, the United States, from harm. If punishing trade tariffs finally focus Canada’s attention on those policy-driven harms, let them last until Canada fixes what it recklessly broke.

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Todd Bensman is a Senior National Security Fellow, Center for Immigration Studies and a two-time National Press Club award winner. He is a graduate of the University of Missouri School of Journalism and a 23-year veteran newspaper reporter. He is the author of “America’s Covert Border War,” and “Overrun: How Joe Biden Unleashed the Greatest Border Crisis in U.S. History.”

The views expressed in this piece are those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of The Daily Wire.