Mexico on Fire: El Mencho’s Death, the Asylum Question, and the Money Nobody Wants to Follow

The Day Mexico Stood Still

On Sunday, the Jalisco New Generation Cartel unleashed a wave of violence across Mexico, setting vehicles ablaze, blocking roads, and turning Guadalajara — Mexico’s second-largest city — into a ghost town after the Mexican Army killed its powerful leader, Nemesio Rubén Oseguera Cervantes, known as “El Mencho.” NBC News

El Mencho wasn’t just another cartel boss. He was arguably the most powerful drug lord in the Western Hemisphere still operating as a free man. He founded the Jalisco New Generation Cartel around 2009 and rapidly expanded it, using online recruitment and diversifying income streams through fuel theft, extortion, timeshare scams, and other rackets. The DEA considers the Jalisco cartel to be as powerful as the Sinaloa Cartel, with a presence in all 50 U.S. states. Al Jazeera The U.S. had a $15 million bounty on his head. Mexico’s President Claudia Sheinbaum had been under enormous pressure from the Trump administration to prove her government was serious about cartels. El Mencho was her answer.

The answer triggered chaos.

Cartel members erected more than 250 roadblocks across 20 of Mexico’s 32 states. Airlines including Southwest, Alaska, United, Delta, Air Canada, WestJet, and Porter canceled flights. Puerto Vallarta’s international airport suspended all international operations and most domestic flights. Wikipedia American tourists found themselves sheltering in hotel rooms watching fires burn from their balconies.

The U.S. State Department’s 24/7 crisis hotline fielded hundreds of calls from Americans trapped in Mexico, issuing shelter-in-place advisories covering tourist hotspots including Cancún, Cozumel, and Puerto Vallarta. CNN

“The fear that remains in society is overwhelming,” one resident of Zitacuaro, Michoacán told Al Jazeera. “That’s when you realise the immense power these organisations have, because they can collapse a city in a matter of minutes.” Al Jazeera

And here’s what nobody in Washington is saying loudly enough: this is probably just the beginning.

We’ve Seen This Movie Before — and It Doesn’t End Well

President Sheinbaum has actually been on record criticizing the kingpin strategy — the approach of targeting and eliminating top cartel leaders — precisely because of what historically follows. She has warned against a strategy that takes out cartel leaders only to trigger explosions of violence as cartels fracture. NPR And yet, squeezed by Trump administration threats of tariffs and unilateral military action if Mexico didn’t show results on fentanyl, she made exactly that play.

History is not encouraging here. When El Chapo was captured, it sparked a bloody civil war between Sinaloa factions. More than 1,800 people were killed in Sinaloa alone after a cartel kingpin was detained in July 2024, triggering brutal infighting between rival factions. Human Rights Watch Now with El Mencho gone and no clear successor, analysts are warning of the same scenario on an even larger scale.

As one security analyst explained: “If his stepson cannot do it, you’ve got four, five, six commanders all with the money, the power, and the men to create their own criminal fiefdoms.” Al Jazeera

Experts have warned bluntly that the operation could result in “more public murders,” with one analyst stating: “For the last year, the Mexican state has managed to bring down homicides. I suspect this killing will reverse that trend.” Al Jazeera

That’s not pessimism. That’s pattern recognition.

The Real Question: Will Americans Be Watching a Wave of Asylum Seekers?

Mexico was already in deep trouble before El Mencho drew his last breath. The country’s official 2024 homicide rate stood at more than 25 per 100,000 inhabitants — one of the highest in the world. Human Rights Watch Cartel wars had torn through Sinaloa, Guerrero, Michoacán, and Jalisco, and ordinary citizens — farmers, teachers, shop owners, families — were caught directly in the crossfire.

Now, with the CJNG potentially fragmenting into warring regional factions, the violence that was concentrated in specific corridors could spread into communities that previously had some degree of insulation. And here’s what makes this moment fundamentally different from every prior wave of border migration: we are no longer talking primarily about Central Americans passing through Mexico to reach the United States. We are increasingly talking about Mexicans themselves deciding they have run out of options at home.

The UN Refugee Agency noted that Mexico’s own asylum commission received nearly 80,000 applications in 2024, with estimates suggesting the number would be even higher in 2025. Human Rights Watch When Mexicans are filing asylum claims inside their own country, that tells you something profound about how bad things have gotten. When a cartel can shut down 20 states in a single afternoon in retaliation for one military operation, the psychological threshold for leaving drops considerably.

Desperation has a way of overriding risk calculation. People don’t weigh asylum law against cartel violence and rationally choose to stay. They run.

Does the United States Actually Have to Accept Them?

This is where a lot of Americans get confused, and where the honest answer is genuinely complicated.

Under international law — specifically the 1951 UN Refugee Convention and the principle of non-refoulement — the United States cannot legally return someone to a country where they face a credible, genuine threat of persecution or death. That obligation is real and it is binding under treaties the United States has signed.

But the Trump administration has leaned hard into the considerable latitude it has in how it processes those claims. On January 20, 2025, President Trump issued a proclamation suspending the entry of unauthorized migrants at the southwest border, including nearly all asylum seekers, and reinstated the Migrant Protection Protocols — the “Remain in Mexico” policy — requiring asylum seekers to wait in Mexico while their cases are heard. Wikipedia

In practical terms, this means a family fleeing cartel violence in Jalisco could be sent back to wait in the very country that is burning. That is not a technicality. That is the policy.

And it gets worse. Executive Order 14157 designated several Mexican drug cartels as Foreign Terrorist Organizations. Individuals fleeing cartel violence now face a harsh paradox: any contact with these organizations, even under duress or coercion, may trigger automatic immigration bars under the material support provisions of the Immigration and Nationality Act. Lawsb

Think about what that means for a farmer in Michoacán who paid cartel extortion — at gunpoint — to keep his family alive, and who now wants to seek asylum in the United States. Under current policy, he may be legally disqualified as having “materially supported” a terrorist organization. The victim becomes the suspect. The person who had no choice becomes inadmissible. It is a paradox so cruel that immigration attorneys across the country are fighting it in federal courts right now.

What About Deportations?

El Mencho’s killing complicates the deportation picture significantly, and in ways that will play out in courtrooms for months.

Mexico had already received nearly 39,000 immigrants deported from the U.S. by April 2025, including 33,000 Mexicans, and humanitarian groups expressed serious concern about the risks faced by deportees due to criminal violence. Human Rights Watch Now imagine being deported into the middle of a CJNG power struggle — into Jalisco, Michoacán, or Guanajuato — in the weeks and months following El Mencho’s death.

The legal standard for deportation requires that the person not be returned to a place where they face imminent persecution or death. As cartel territorial violence intensifies and fractures, deportation orders to high-violence regions will face increasing legal scrutiny and more frequent injunctions from federal courts that are already skeptical of the administration’s approach. A February 2026 review of court records found that federal courts had already ruled in over 4,400 cases that ICE under the Trump administration detained immigrants illegally. Wikipedia

Immigration policy of the second Trump administration – WikipediaDonald Trump was inaugurated for his second term as president on January 20, 2025, with one of his key campaign …

Add a cartel civil war spreading across 20 states and the legal pressure on the deportation machine gets dramatically heavier.

Now For the Crazy Hypothetical That Isn’t So Crazy

Here’s where this story takes a turn that most mainstream outlets won’t take, but that any serious investigative journalist — or intelligence analyst — should be asking.

What if the conditions generating this crisis aren’t entirely organic? What if some of the money sustaining the turmoil, the legal battles, the advocacy infrastructure, and the political narratives around it are being deliberately directed by actors who have a strategic interest in keeping the border in permanent crisis?

That sounds extreme. But before you dismiss it, consider the architecture that would make it possible — because that architecture already exists. We don’t need to invent anything. We just need to ask whether it’s being used.

Who Would Actually Want Mexico Destabilized?

Adversarial nation-states. Russia and China have both demonstrated, in various theaters around the world, a willingness to exploit civil unrest in countries strategically important to the United States. A destabilized Mexico is a massive distraction for Washington, strains U.S. military and law enforcement resources, and generates the kind of domestic political conflict over immigration that has proven extraordinarily effective at dividing American society. You don’t need boots on the ground when you can fund chaos and watch a democracy argue itself into paralysis.

Cartel-adjacent financial networks. The cartels themselves have billions of dollars and a direct financial interest in ensuring that the border remains porous, that deportation operations remain legally constrained, and that public sympathy for migrants stays high enough to limit aggressive enforcement. If non-profit structures could be used to fund activist organizations that oppose enforcement, direct resources toward creating humanitarian conditions that overwhelm border systems, or sustain litigation that delays removals — that is a rational investment for an organization like the CJNG. Spending ten million dollars to protect a multi-billion dollar trafficking operation isn’t a cost. It’s a bargain.

Political actors on both sides who benefit from a perpetually burning border. On both sides of the American political aisle, the border crisis is useful. It energizes voter bases, justifies budget allocations, and provides a constant supply of emotionally charged imagery. A cynical observer might note that nobody in Washington, across multiple administrations of both parties, has actually solved the border problem — despite all sides claiming to want to. Permanent crisis is politically productive. Resolution is not.

Ideological open-borders advocates. This is the most controversial entry, but intellectual honesty requires including it. There are genuine, sincere humanitarian organizations that believe border enforcement is morally wrong and work actively to undermine it through legal challenges and public advocacy. That is entirely their right. The question — and it is a legitimate one — is whether any of those organizations have, wittingly or unwittingly, had their funding streams compromised or redirected by actors with far less noble motives.

Domestic political actors protecting Electoral College power through population manipulation. This one hits closest to home and may be the most politically explosive consideration on this list. The 2030 Census is not a distant abstraction — it is a hard deadline with enormous consequences for American political power. Congressional seats and Electoral College votes are apportioned based on total population, not just citizens. That means every person residing in a state on Census day counts toward that state’s representation in Washington, regardless of immigration status.

Several large states have faced the prospect of losing congressional seats and Electoral College votes as domestic migration patterns shift populations toward other regions. A sustained, significant influx of migrants into population-losing states could blunt or reverse those losses entirely. The math is cold and it is simple: more bodies in the count means more seats, more votes, more political power locked in for a generation.

If political actors — whether party operatives, dark money networks, or ideologically aligned non-profits — understood that dynamic and were deliberately funding conditions that direct migration flows toward specific states, they would be engaging in what amounts to demographic manipulation of the Electoral College at a national scale. Not through the drawing of district lines, but through the movement of people. It would be nearly impossible to prove, extraordinarily difficult to prosecute, and breathtakingly effective if executed with any degree of coordination. The 2030 Census will be contested terrain unlike any in modern American history. The question of who funds the conditions that shape who is counted and where deserves the same investigative scrutiny as any other exercise of raw political power — arguably more.

How Would It Actually Work?

The infrastructure to execute this kind of operation already exists. Here’s the mechanics of it.

Shell non-profits and fiscal sponsorship. The American non-profit system is, by design, relatively easy to establish and relatively difficult to fully audit in real time. A foreign actor — a state intelligence service, a cartel financial network, or an ideologically driven foundation — could establish or fund a legitimate-seeming 501(c)(3) focused on “migrant rights,” “humanitarian border assistance,” or “asylum advocacy.” The stated mission is entirely legal. The underlying funding source is the problem.

The NGO-to-advocacy pipeline. Non-profits fund advocacy organizations. Advocacy organizations fund media. Media shapes public perception. Public perception drives policy. This isn’t a conspiracy theory — it’s how modern influence operations work, and it’s been documented in multiple foreign interference investigations. The question is who sits at the origination point of that funding chain and whether those origins are being disclosed honestly.

Litigation as a weapon. Some of the most effective tools against border enforcement have been legal challenges filed by non-profit organizations. That is entirely constitutional and often serves legitimate purposes. But consider the hypothetical: if a foreign actor or cartel network wanted to systematically slow deportations, complicate enforcement operations, and keep asylum pipelines open, funding litigation nonprofits would be an extraordinarily effective and completely legal-looking strategy. Every injunction is worth more than any tunnel.

Humanitarian infrastructure that doubles as facilitation networks. This is perhaps the most uncomfortable part of the thought experiment. There are legitimate, genuinely well-intentioned organizations that provide food, shelter, legal aid, and transportation to migrants — including migrants in Mexico waiting to cross into the United States. Now ask: if a bad actor wanted to facilitate the movement of people — for trafficking, smuggling fees, or political optics — what better cover than a humanitarian non-profit that already has vehicles, safe houses, legal teams, and deep community trust?

The Historical Precedent Is Real

Before any of this gets dismissed as conspiracy thinking, it is worth being precise: this has happened before, and it has been documented.

During the Cold War, the CIA itself used non-profit foundations as conduits for funding anti-communist movements abroad — a fact that became public and caused enormous controversy. Soviet intelligence used structurally similar arrangements to fund peace movements in Western Europe that, whatever the genuine convictions of their participants, served Moscow’s strategic interest in opposing NATO rearmament.

More recently, investigations into foreign interference in American elections revealed that social media campaigns — some funded through shell organizations with deliberately obscured origins — were specifically designed to inflame the immigration debate. Not to advance any particular policy outcome, but simply to maximize division and conflict. The goal wasn’t a position. The goal was the fight.

In the immediate wake of El Mencho’s killing, one of the first things U.S. and Mexican intelligence analysts will be doing is tracing money flows — not just cartel money, but the broader ecosystem of organizations, media outlets, and advocacy groups that have a financial stake in the border remaining in crisis. That isn’t paranoia. That is counterintelligence. That is the job.

What It Does to the Asylum System

If bad actors — foreign or domestic — were deliberately funding conditions that generate asylum seekers while simultaneously funding legal and advocacy organizations that maximize the difficulty of processing or denying those claims, the effect on the U.S. immigration system would be nothing short of catastrophic.

You would see immigration courts, already burdened with a backlog approaching three million cases, systematically overwhelmed by well-funded legal challenges to every removal order. You would see policy paralysis, where every enforcement action is immediately met with litigation that prevents implementation in any direction. You would see humanitarian optics weaponized — images of families in distress, children at the border, overcrowded facilities — driving media coverage and public emotion in ways that make coherent enforcement politically impossible.

And at the center of it all, you would see a funding loop built on permanent chaos. Cartel violence generates asylum seekers. Asylum seekers overwhelm the border system. A compromised non-profit network funds litigation and advocacy that prevents enforcement. Enforcement failures create more chaos. More chaos generates more migrants. More migrants generate more smuggling fees for the cartels. The cartels fund more violence. Round and round it goes — and somewhere in that loop, money is being made, power is being exercised, and Electoral College math is being quietly recalculated by people who have absolutely no interest in ever seeing any of it stop.

What Should We Actually Be Watching For?

Hypotheticals are only useful if they generate real questions that serious people pursue. So here is what journalists, congressional oversight committees, and intelligence agencies should be asking right now, in the days and weeks following El Mencho’s killing:

Who is funding the anticipated surge in asylum litigation? As deportation orders increase and CJNG fragmentation generates new waves of asylum claims, follow the money upstream — not to the named 501(c)(3), but to the foundations, foreign donors, and pass-through organizations behind them.

Are any humanitarian organizations operating in high-violence Mexican states receiving funding with cartel connections, however indirect? This is difficult to trace, but financial investigators have done it in other contexts. The question is whether anyone in authority is asking it with sufficient urgency.

What role do foreign governments play in funding U.S.-based immigration advocacy? Several countries have a direct economic interest in maintaining large diaspora communities in the United States sending remittances home. Are any of them funding advocacy organizations that shape American immigration policy? And is that funding being properly disclosed under the Foreign Agents Registration Act?

Are the social media narratives around the El Mencho killing and its aftermath being amplified artificially? Watch the information environment over the coming days. If certain narratives — whether “open the border” or “the invasion has begun” — are being amplified at speeds inconsistent with organic engagement, that is a signal that deserves investigation rather than dismissal.

And perhaps most importantly: which states are positioned to benefit most from a significant influx of migrants before the 2030 Census count, and are any political organizations in those states — or their allied non-profit networks — doing anything that appears designed to direct those flows in their direction?

The Bottom Line

El Mencho’s death is simultaneously a tactical victory and a potential humanitarian catastrophe in the making. Mexico’s government took a calculated risk under enormous pressure from Washington. Whether that risk pays off depends almost entirely on what happens inside the CJNG over the next 90 days. History is not on Mexico’s side.

But the deeper story — the one that will outlast whatever happens in Jalisco over the coming weeks — is about the machinery that surrounds the crisis. The legal infrastructure. The advocacy networks. The funding streams. The political incentives. The Census math. The foreign actors watching American democracy strain under the weight of a border debate it seems constitutionally incapable of resolving.

The border debate has always been easier to have in the abstract, when the violence is a statistic on a State Department advisory. It becomes much harder to sustain comfortable abstractions when Guadalajara is a ghost town, when American tourists are sheltering in hotel rooms watching fires burn from their balconies, and when a cartel organization with a presence in all 50 U.S. states has just lost its leader and has no obvious successor.

The question isn’t whether the United States is prepared to handle a wave of asylum seekers from Mexico. It probably isn’t. The real question is whether anyone in Washington has the courage and the political independence to follow the money behind this crisis all the way to its source — wherever that source turns out to be.

Because if they did, the answers might be far more uncomfortable than anything happening at the border itself.