The Trump administration is hitting one of Mexico's most violent cartel factions where it hurts — the money.
According to material obtained by Fox News Digital ahead of its public release on Tuesday, the Treasury Department will sanction 21 individuals and 25 entities connected to Los Mayos, a powerful faction of the Sinaloa cartel accused of funneling fentanyl and drug money through California and hiring hitmen to kill rivals on American soil.
At the center of the action is Ismael Zambada Sicairos, known as "Mayito Flaco" — a dual U.S.-Mexican citizen born in Anaheim, California, whom Treasury describes as the "undisputed head" of Los Mayos. He is a fugitive.
Fox News Digital reports the sanctions lay out in detail how Los Mayos allegedly maintains its grip on two critical trafficking corridors along the U.S. border through political and police corruption, money laundering, and violence that Treasury says has reached into Southern California.
Deep Penetration South of the Border
The action also exposes what Treasury describes as deep cartel penetration of government and law enforcement in Baja California, the Mexican state that borders California.
Treasury alleges that Sinaloa-linked "narco-corruption has reached the highest levels" of the state government. Specifically, the department says the ex-husband of Gov. Marina del Pilar Ávila Olmeda used his political influence to protect cartel operations, and that a former Mexicali public security chief accepted bribes to let the cartel exert control over municipal police.
The allegations add new context to a controversy that erupted last year, when the United States revoked the visas of both Ávila and her then-husband, Carlos Torres Torres. According to Fox News Digital, the State Department revoked Torres' U.S. visa in May 2025 over what Treasury now describes as his "cartel affiliation and work on behalf of the Sinaloa cartel." Olmeda's visa was also revoked around the same time; U.S. officials did not publicly disclose a reason for that action against her.
The Fox News Digital report states the Department of War also played a role in the effort. Further operational details were not immediately released.
A Broader Legal Offensive
The Treasury action is the financial prong of a strategy the administration has been building since Day 1. As the Washington Examiner reported, the State Department has now given Foreign Terrorist Organization designations to 21 related groups across the Caribbean and Latin America — including MS-13 and the Sinaloa Cartel — under an executive order signed by President Trump.
That designation let federal agencies treat cartels with the harsher tools usually reserved for Islamic terrorism. The Examiner reports the approach has produced bombings of alleged drug boats, at least two dozen prosecutions, and the military's January capture of Venezuelan dictator Nicolas Maduro. Terrorism charges against the Jalisco New Generation Cartel produced two convictions over the summer, according to the Examiner.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio told reporters Wednesday that the administration is pressing other countries to label transnational crime groups as terrorists under their own systems, and that "some have already done it." The Justice Department has charged alleged associates of Tren de Aragua, the Sinaloa Cartel, and CJNG with material support for terrorism.
Trump kept the pressure on publicly at the United Nations this week. As Houston Public Media reported, the president described Mexico as an "epicenter" of cartel violence and said its government must reclaim territory controlled by criminal groups.
The scale is not theoretical. In July, the FBI announced a $1 million reward for Satinderjeet Singh, known as "Goldy Brar," adding him to its Ten Most Wanted list over the 2023 assassination of Hardeep Singh Nijjar in Surrey, British Columbia. Patrick Grandy, assistant director in charge of the FBI's Los Angeles field office, said Singh is alleged to have ripped off Mexican cartels in Los Angeles and maintains a presence in Western Canada. The case illustrates how foreign syndicates and Mexican cartels now overlap on American streets.
What It Means for Americans
The sanctions freeze any U.S.-held assets of the named individuals and entities and bar Americans from doing business with them. For families in California and across the Southwest, the significance is more direct: Treasury is naming, publicly, the officials and businessmen it says have been collecting cartel money while fentanyl moved north through their jurisdictions.
The individuals and entities sanctioned have not had a chance to respond in court to Treasury's allegations, and the department's findings are administrative determinations, not criminal convictions. Mayito Flaco remains at large.
Our Take
For four years under the Biden regime, the cartels were treated like a weather pattern — something to be managed, studied, and politely acknowledged while the bodies piled up. The Left told us the border was a complex humanitarian situation. Tell that to the Anaheim-born kingpin allegedly running a murder-for-hire network out of the same state he was born in, or to the parents who buried a child because a fentanyl-laced pill cost less than a movie ticket.
Trump promised on the campaign trail that the cartels would be treated as what they are: armed, corrupt, murderous enterprises at war with the United States. Twenty-one individuals. Twenty-five entities. A Mexican state government's inner circle named in a Treasury action. This is what it looks like when Washington stops pretending the Sinaloa cartel is somebody else's problem.
There will be howls from the usual quarters about sovereignty and diplomacy. Here is the question to ask: if a foreign criminal network is hiring hitmen to kill people on American soil and buying off the police just across the border, whose sovereignty is being violated — Mexico's, or ours?
Patriots, the sanctions are only as good as the enforcement behind them. Watch whether the named networks are actually frozen out, and whether the fugitive at the top is run to ground. The money is the cartel's oxygen. Cutting it off is how this ends.
