U.S. officials have delivered a memo to Mexico "proposing a path to potentially having U.S. security personnel accompany counter-cartel operations inside Mexico," along with wider intelligence sharing, The New York Times reported on Saturday, October 24, citing U.S. and Mexican officials. The Times wrote that the administration is "hoping for a win before the midterm elections" on November 3; that is the paper's and its sources' account, and Washington has not said so on the record. A White House spokeswoman told the paper that it is unacceptable for foreign terrorist organizations to control large areas of Mexico, according to Spanish-language accounts of the report. On Monday, President Claudia Sheinbaum said the United States has asked for joint operations many times and Mexico has always refused. She did not confirm receiving the memo.
What the memo reportedly proposes
The memo has not been published, and Profoundd could not read the Times article directly; its details here come from published accounts of it. According to those accounts, the memo outlines a way for U.S. personnel to join Mexican operations against cartels and seeks more intelligence sharing. The Times reported that Washington earlier gave Mexico a list of targets and that Mexico has detained or killed most of them, including the Jalisco cartel leader Nemesio Oseguera Cervantes, "El Mencho," who died in February after a special forces operation that Mexico's Defense Ministry said used U.S. information. That eased the pressure for a time, the paper reported. It also reported that U.S. military officials warned the White House that acting against cartels in Mexico without Mexico's consent could end security cooperation. President Trump said at a White House lunch on October 15 that "the cartels control Mexico" and that he had told Sheinbaum so. Sheinbaum has rejected that claim before: when Trump said at the G7 summit in June that cartels control Mexico, she answered, "He is not well informed; I have told him so personally."
Sheinbaum's answer
"They have asked several times for joint operations in our country, and we have always said no, that territorial integrity cannot be violated, and that we coordinate, but without their participation in our territory," Sheinbaum said at her morning press conference on October 26, according to the Mexican news agency Agencia Reforma. (Quotes from Spanish are Profoundd's translations.) "It's nothing new," she said; the requests began from "the very first moment" the Trump administration took office. Any request for U.S. equipment, she said, comes "at Mexico's request and never with United States forces operating in national territory." She contrasted her policy with that of former President Felipe Calderón: "We do not agree with the participation, as was done in Calderón's time, of the presence of United States forces on the ground."
Sheinbaum described the cooperation Mexico does accept. In September, at her request, the Senate unanimously authorized 139 U.S. Army soldiers to enter Mexico, carrying weapons, for training at the Santa Gertrudis military base in Chihuahua, El País reported. She cited recent "mirror operations" on the Tamaulipas border, launched after U.S. authorities reported shots fired from Mexico, in which each country's forces acted on their own side. She said U.S. agency personnel in Mexico must follow the Constitution and the National Security Law, and repeated four principles for the relationship: sovereignty, territorial integrity, mutual trust, and "coordination without subordination." Mexico amended its Constitution in 2025 to bar foreign field operations without the federal government's express authorization, and the law does not allow U.S. agents to be armed, the Associated Press reported.
The Chihuahua case
The memo arrives as Mexico prosecutes a former state official over CIA officers who, the federal government says, joined a state raid without its approval. In April, a convoy returning from a raid on a drug lab in the mountains of Chihuahua, led by the state's investigations agency, went off a road; two Chihuahua investigators and two Americans died. U.S. Ambassador Ronald Johnson called the Americans "embassy personnel"; the AP later confirmed they were CIA officers. Two other U.S. agents in the convoy were later expelled. Sheinbaum said none had permission to operate in Mexico and that the federal government did not know they were there. "There cannot be agents from any U.S. government institution operating in the Mexican field," she said at the time.
Federal prosecutors have since charged César Jáuregui, Chihuahua's former attorney general, with treason, accusing him of authorizing the Americans' participation, a decision only the federal government can make. Over the weekend, federal Judge Ricardo Alfonso Santos Dorantes ruled that the case can proceed and kept Jáuregui in pretrial detention at the Altiplano maximum-security prison; the ruling is not a verdict. Attorney General Ernestina Godoy said the participation "violates the sovereignty and integrity of the Nation." Jáuregui's defense says the two Americans who died were providing training in intelligence and drones. Federal investigators describe something else: according to the Mexican newspaper El Universal, which saw details of the prosecutors' file, the two "did not act as passive observers but as members of the armed tactical cell" and "actively took part in tactical foot maneuvers, carried long guns, wore balaclavas," El País reported on October 20. Samuel González, a former chief organized-crime prosecutor, told the AP that Jáuregui may have failed to inform the federal government, but "even if that were the case, it would not constitute treason." The charge carries five to 40 years.
Whether Chihuahua was an exception is disputed. CNN reported in May, citing unnamed sources, that CIA officers had taken part in deadly operations against cartel members inside Mexico. A CIA spokesperson called that "false and salacious reporting," and Security Secretary Omar García Harfuch said Mexico "categorically rejects" any suggestion of "lethal, covert, or unilateral operations by foreign agencies" on its territory. Carlos Pérez Ricart, a professor at the Mexican university CIDE, told the AP that U.S. anti-drug agents have long joined such operations through trust with state or local officials, "often without the federal government's knowledge": "These actions happen, have happened, and will continue to happen."
This article reflects reporting through the afternoon of Monday, October 26, 2026. Sources: The New York Times report as quoted by Political Wire and summarized by The Rio Times, El Financiero and The Mexican Times; Agencia Reforma via Noroeste; El Imparcial; The Associated Press via WSOC and PBS NewsHour; Expansión (October 25 and June 18); CNN; El País, October 20 and September 15.
