The following is an excerpt from Blaze Media’s Capitol Hill Brief email newsletter:

In a win for conservatives who have been calling for the policy for months, President Donald Trump said that he will designate Mexican drug cartels as Foreign Terror Organizations (FTOs) under federal law in an interview released on Tuesday.

"I don't want to say what I'm going to do, but they will be designated," the president said in an interview with former Fox News host Bill O’Reilly. "I have been working on that for the last 90 days. You know, designation is not that easy, you have to go through a process, and we are well into that process.” The announcement was followed by a statement from the Mexican government seeking a meeting with Secretary of State Mike Pompeo “in order to discuss this very important issue for the bilateral agenda.”

The policy idea is not a new one. House Freedom Caucus members Chip Roy and Mark Green called on the administration to make the designation under section 219 of the Immigration and Nationality Act back in February, explaining that such a move would give U.S. authorities even more tools to take on the deadly criminal organizations, in addition to further stigmatizing them around the world.

In January, my colleague Daniel Horowitz made the case for FTO designation this way: “Imagine for a moment that groups of Islamic terrorists set up shop at our border, killed tens of thousands of Mexicans, mutilated bodies, controlled a flow of hundreds of thousands of illegal immigrants every year over our border, and flooded our country with drugs and gangs. … Now look at the reality. All of this is happening at our border and in our communities, with one exception. The perpetrators are not Islamic terrorists.”

“Unlike many in Washington wringing their hands about how this might somehow harm our efforts, President Trump is taking action,” Roy said in a Tuesday evening statement. “He recognizes what the excuse-makers of the swamp don’t, which is that designating cartels as terrorists is the step necessary to make Mexico stronger and to protect Americans and our border.”

Over 30,000 people will be killed there this year. There are powerful terrorist groups that are defeating government forces, beheading and torturing townsfolk, and controlling every form of human- and drug-smuggling over the border. This is not Syria and the Turkish border. I’m talking about Mexico and our own border.

It is truly astounding how so many of the self-described national security hawks like Mitt Romney, who believe we have blood on our hands for not having troops flung out in Syria during a civil war, never utter a word about the need to deploy troops more aggressively at our own border to combat the cartel terrorists.

The Mexican cartels are defeating the government in major cities. There are battles just south of us; they are shooting at our agents; they have operatives in every U.S. state spreading drugs and gang violence; and they are working with MS-13, which is more of a threat to our communities than anything going on in Syria. Thus, the stability of Mexico matters a lot more to us than the stability of Syria. If Romney, Rubio, and other establishment Republicans, along with Democrat leaders, feel we need several thousand troops at the Turkish border, they should support several hundred thousand troops at our own border, based on a commensurate measure of what actually affects our own security.

Yesterday, Mexican national guardsmen detained Ovidio Guzman López, the son of former Sinaloa Cartel head “El Chapo,” in the city of Culiacán. On Thursday afternoon, Sinaloa members dispatched a stronger force of soldiers and weapons than the Mexican government, and the government was forced to release him. They also released his brother, Ivan. This is a failed narco-state right on our border. The cartels are now officially more powerful than Mexico’s military, even when the government is actually trying to combat them. The government has now lost control of a city of 785,000 people.

What’s even more embarrassing is that this failed operation was done at the behest of our government, which had requested Guzman Lopez be extradited to the U.S. for trial, according to Mexico’s president. That is a black eye for our government and something that should concern Mitt Romney a lot more than Syria.

Here is who truly controls Mexico:

Jaeson Jones, retired captain for the Texas Department of Public Safety’s intel and counterterrorism division, has long been a proponent of taking a more aggressive stance against the cartels and believes this is a wake-up call. “Intense violence rocked Culiacan, Mexico, yesterday as government authorities captured leaders of Sinaloa Cartel,” said the cartel expert, who just took a trip to Mexico to meet with sources. “Only hours later, the president of Mexico would cower and show the world the Mexican government was not in charge of the safety of its country. For years, I have tried to convince our citizens and government how hyper-violent the Mexican cartels have become and why we must designate the Mexican cartels as foreign terrorist organizations. Yesterday, the world witnessed it; the question now is will the U.S. State Dept. still refuse to take action?”

The cartel members are also very heavily armed.

“We observed .50 cal belt-fed machine guns mounted in armored vehicles, Barrett .50 cal sniper rifles engaging Mexican authorities, convoys of armored vehicles being called into the city along with the use of hand grenades and 40 millimeter grenades,” observed Jones. “They also released prisoners, implemented roadblocks, and a day later, the city is still on fire. Yesterday’s events showed a president cower and a nation kneel. These are not just drug cartels any more.”

It’s truly shocking how nobody in either party in Congress who is ready to die on the hill of the Syrian civil war even utters a peep about the fall of our number one trading partner, which happens to be right on our own border.

You might think this is just a Mexican problem. The issue is that the increasing violence every month is going to impel a new wave of Mexican migration to our border. After steep declines in Mexican illegal immigration for the past decade while the Central Americans began coming, we are now coming full circle and witnessing the early stages of increased Mexican border migration, thanks to the cartel violence.

The Washington Post reports today that there is a new increase in Mexicans asking for asylum at our border. Mexican adults caught at the border have increased 25 percent since the end of July, even as the number of Central Americans has dropped sharply. “In recent weeks, thousands of Mexican adults and children have been camping out in queues at U.S. border crossings, sleeping in tents while awaiting a chance to apply for safe refuge.”

One agent who patrols in the Rio Grande Valley of Texas told me he is already seeing this new trend on the ground. “They are coming from Mexico with an ‘official document’ that has been notarized, which describes their harsh living conditions and threats to safety from the cartels,” said the agent, who spoke on condition of anonymity because he’s not authorized to speak to the media.

Again, it’s truly astounding how nobody in Congress, the State Department, or the DOD wants to view our own border as a national security problem because it’s not located in the Middle East. It seems like our military only exists for nonexistent borders of other groups around the world.