As Senior Fellow in Border Security for the Texas Public Policy Foundation, Josh Jones conducts organized crime and security assessments in Mexico, evaluating threats to Texas, other Southwest Border states and the national security interests of the United States.
An 18-year veteran of the U.S. Department of Justice, Jones previously worked on the front lines of transnational criminal organization investigations as a federal prosecutor in Washington, D.C., and San Diego, California. His work took him from Colombian cocoa fields and Guatemalan jungles to the mountains of the Golden Triangle in Mexico, leading to the arrests and prosecutions of some of the most notorious criminal organization leaders in the history of Latin America. Most recently, he served on the Attorney General’s Joint Task Force Vulcan, a task force created to eliminate the threat of MS-13 in the United States. He won numerous national case-of-the-year awards from the Organized Crime Drug Enforcement Task Force, the Department of Homeland Security, the Drug Enforcement Administration, and the High Intensity Drug Trafficking Area program.
The dramatic initial success of Operation Enduring Freedom in Afghanistan, by any measure one of history’s most effective military offensives, gave way to 20 years of increasingly bureaucratic, decreasingly effective nation-building efforts, culminating in this month’s surrender to the Taliban and calamitous evacuation of Kabul. As the Biden administration planned what would become the August...
Alma Barragan was a 61-year-old mayoral candidate in the small central Mexican town of Moroleon. On May 25, twelve days before the June 6 election, she stood at a campaign event, microphone in hand, speaking of a time in the idyllic past when the people of Moroleon could safely walk its streets. She urged an...
“Imagine the suspicion, the jokes, the memes.” Mexican President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, “AMLO,” presides over a country ravaged by cartel violence and spiking homicide rates, decimated economically by the COVID-19 pandemic, and well behind the curve in immunization rates. Yet on a Monday morning in early May, his concerns about Mexico’s global reputation were...
As a candidate, Joe Biden promised amnesty for illegal immigrants already in the United States and expanded asylum for those on the way. Now that he’s become president, Biden formally lifted his predecessor’s pandemic-based prohibition on border crossings for minors from Northern Triangle countries, ostensibly turning away all other would-be immigrants. In February, 59 percent...
In a 2009 episode of HBO‘s Flight of the Conchords, Brian, the fictional prime minister of New Zealand, wants to meet the American president. Unable to convince the White House switchboard operator that New Zealand is a real country, Brian travels to Washington and instead takes a public White House tour hoping for a “chance” meeting with...
In January, police in the Mexican state of Tamaulipas found 19 charred corpses in two burned-out vehicles. The initial investigation showed they had been shot first, then set aflame. They were migrants, many from Central America, on their way to Texas. One of them was Marvin Alberto Tomás — “Lefty” to his friends. He left his family in Guatemala...
Do you think France, Canada or Great Britain would be OK if the Americans detained their defense secretary without telling them?” a Mexican official asked rhetorically in the January 2, 2021, issue of The Economist. Anyone versed in the Mexican criminal underworld might respond by noting that cabinet officials in Europe and Canada generally don’t...