U.S. President Donald Trump’s negotiating team is demanding that all North American-made autos contain at least 50 per cent U.S. content, firing the opening salvo in a battle over the future of the pact governing continental trade.
American and Mexican negotiators hunkered down in Mexico City this week to start a review of the U.S.-Mexico-Canada Agreement, and the U.S. announced plans for two further rounds of bilateral talks that do not include Canada.
Chemicals used to make fentanyl are streaming into the Port of Vancouver on their way to drug labs run by Mexican cartels on Canadian soil, the head of the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration told senators in Washington, D.C., on Tuesday.
DEA administrator Terrance Cole said U.S. law enforcement officials are “very conscious” of fentanyl being manufactured in Canada for export across the border and there have been “significant seizures” of the drug in Canada over the past two months.
The Central Intelligence Agency vehemently denied reports of its participation in deadly operations against drug cartels in Mexico.
On Tuesday, CNN published a report alleging that the CIA had vastly expanded its operations in Mexico against drug cartels, including getting directly involved in assassinations of cartel figures. The most notable was its alleged facilitation of a car bombing on a busy Mexican highway that killed Francisco “El Payin” Beltran on March 28. CIA spokeswoman Liz Lyons denied the report in strong terms, accusing the outlet of endangering American lives.
A Mexican national living illegally in the United States has pleaded guilty to charges of bringing illegal immigrants across the border from Canada into the U.S., the U.S. Department of Justice says.
Edgar Sanchez-Solis, 24, pleaded guilty to one count of conspiracy to commit alien smuggling and five counts of alien smuggling for commercial advantage and private financial gain, the DOJ said in a press release on Thursday. He is scheduled to be sentenced on Sept. 10, and will face a penalty of between five and 15 years in prison.
Canada needs to act quickly to push back on a growing belief in Washington that it’s dragging its feet on trade talks, according to the Quebec government’s representative in those negotiations.
Louise Blais, who was appointed last month as Quebec’s envoy for the Canada-U.S.-Mexico Agreement review, said that “an impression has set in, in D.C. — for right or wrong — that Canada is looking elsewhere, and that we’re slow-walking this.”
The pimp sat on a plastic chair in a small room off a dark courtyard as the music from the town’s spring festival blared from outside. He was sweating. This was the first time he had told anyone what had happened here and he was nervous.
He started haltingly. Telling the story of Tenancingo, the small town that is a nerve centre of Mexico’s sex trafficking industry, is dangerous. The padrotes, or pimps, who who have been known to run the town for decades, making millions from selling women and girls across Mexico and the United States, could target anyone who speaks out.
The United States Justice Department has charged the governor of Mexico’s Sinaloa state and nine other officials for their alleged involvement with the Sinaloa Cartel, it announced on Wednesday.
The Justice Department claimed that Ruben Rocha Moya and others conspired with leaders of the Sinaloa Cartel to import massive quantities of narcotics into the US in exchange for political support and bribes.
The nine others include current and former Mexican officials, some of whom have been accused of having participated in the cartel’s campaign of violence.
More than two dozen members and associates of the Mexican mafia were arrested during an early morning crackdown in southern California, federal authorities said on Thursday.
The FBI and other federal and local agencies executed search and arrest warrants at locations mostly in Orange county, south of Los Angeles, according to the US attorney’s office.
A total of 43 people have been indicted on charges including murder, kidnapping, extortion, running an illegal gambling operation and drug trafficking, prosecutors said.
Two U.S. embassy officials who died in an automobile accident in northern Mexico as they returned from the scene of a counternarcotic operation worked for the Central Intelligence Agency as part of a significantly expanded role in battling narcotics trafficking in the Western Hemisphere, according to two people familiar with the matter.
The deadly car crash Sunday in the state of Chihuahua also took the lives of two Mexican officials and prompted Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum to say she would investigate whether the operation ran afoul of the country’s national security laws.
The CIA declined to comment.
An AI-generated video from the US embassy in Mexico encouraging migrants to “self-deport” has sparked disbelief and outrage online.
The video posted this week on official embassy social media accounts depicts a group of men wearing black caps and sporting tattoos performing a kind of traditional Mexican ballad known as a corrido.
“The corrido rings out loud in your homeland; return to your roots,” the AI performer sings. “You don’t need to go far to get ahead. Listen to what you say: Mexican power lies within you.”
Translation – The corrido sounds loud in your land. Return to your roots with #CBPHome: https://usembmx.com/CBPHome2026
Living in or migrating to the U.S. illegally is a crime. #NiLoIntentes #PowerMexicano
El corrido suena fuerte en tu tierra. Regresa a tus raíces con #CBPHome: https://t.co/hZZTihzv5m
Vivir o migrar a EE.UU. de forma ilegal es un delito. #NiLoIntentes #PowerMexicano – Video Generado con IA pic.twitter.com/xweaonyKHK— Embajada de EE.UU. en México (@USEmbassyMEX) March 25, 2026
CJNG — already implicated in Iranian-directed death threats against a Canadian politician — was the intended recipient of a $58 million arsenal that included surface-to-air missiles, DOJ alleges.
WASHINGTON — Federal prosecutors in Virginia have charged four men — a Bulgarian arms trafficker with ties to the notorious Russian weapons dealer Viktor Bout, and several African co-conspirators with connections to the governments of Uganda and Tanzania — with conspiring to supply the Cartel de Jalisco Nueva Generación with a $58 million military arsenal that included rocket launchers, surface-to-air missiles, anti-aircraft drones, and high-powered explosives the brokers boasted could bring down helicopters.
No one seems to know exactly how El Mencho was killed. We are told the feared leader of the Jalisco New Generation Cartel was captured by the Mexican army during a firefight in late February, and subsequently died of his wounds. Beyond that, there is very little information. Why are the Mexican and US governments being so secretive about his death?
El Mencho – real name Nemesio Oseguera Cervantes – was 59 when he died. He was Mexico’s most-wanted man; US authorities had offered a $15 million reward for information leading to his arrest. I decided I had to go to Jalisco, where El Mencho made his last stand, to look for answers. Most of Mexico’s airspace had been closed after his death, such was the level of unrest. Cars and buses were torched, gunmen set up roadblocks on Mexico’s highways and more than 70 people were killed in widespread retaliatory fighting. Three days after his death, I disembarked at Guadalajara International Airport on one of the first flights into the region.
A study tracks how the North American Free Trade Agreement and trade competition with Mexico led to earlier deaths for American factory workers.
The North American Free Trade Agreement, the deal that began integrating the Mexican economy with the United States and Canada in the 1990s, has been a politically charged topic for decades.
Centrist Democrats and Republicans supported the agreement as a way to strengthen the North American economy. But its legacy has been mixed. In some parts of the United States, the agreement shuttered factories and put people out of work as companies moved production to Mexico, where labor was cheaper. President Trump won over unions and other workers as a candidate by labeling NAFTA the “worst agreement ever” and promising to improve or scrap it.
A new paper adds to the understanding of NAFTA’s costs. In it, economists from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the University of Chicago found that American workers in communities that were more exposed to competition from Mexican imports saw a significant shortening of their life spans after the trade deal went into effect in 1994.
MEXICO CITY: Mexican drug cartels are increasingly calculated in their targeting decisions, often avoiding deliberately attacking American tourists and citizens out of concern it could prompt intensified U.S. retaliation, according to experts.
Following last month’s killing of Ruben “Nemesio” Oseguera Cervantes, known as “El Mencho,” the powerful leader of the Mexican Jalisco New Generation Cartel (CJNG) White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt joined “Fox & Friends” and had a warning for the drug gangs: “The Mexican drug cartels know not to lay a finger on a single American, or they will pay severe consequences under this president.”
🚨 BOOM! I love that President Trump said this straight to Latin American heads of state 🔥
“We'll put a missile through the cartel boss's LIVING room if you want!” 🇺🇸
— Eric Daugherty (@EricLDaugh) March 8, 2026
Canadians may need to brace themselves for violent Mexican drug cartels moving their operations north to escape the war on drugs in Mexico.
“There is a good, strong possibility of that,” former U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) agent Charles Noonan said in an interview.
“Manufacturing in Canada makes sense,” Noonan said. “In the next six months to a year, you could see a surge in the drug labs.”
