Communities across the West are feeling whiplash after President Donald Trump announced and then delayed steep tariffs on many Mexican goods — for the second time in two months.
Since his first days in office, Trump has used the threat of tariffs to pressure Mexico to do more to stop drug smuggling and migration into the United States. But in negotiations, Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum has focused on the U.S. product fueling both of those phenomena: guns.
Despite its strict gun laws, Mexico faces an epidemic of gun homicides. Seventy percent of the firearms recovered in the country come from the U.S., according to data from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF). An estimated 200,000 guns are trafficked south across the border annually — many of them purchased legally in Arizona and Texas by U.S. citizens who are paid to pass them off to smugglers. Last month, after Trump accused the Mexican government of colluding with cartels, Sheinbaum fired back on social media. “If there is such an alliance anywhere, it is in the U.S. gun shops that sell high-powered weapons to these criminal groups,” she wrote.
Last week, that argument made it to the U.S. Supreme Court. The justices are currently considering a $10 billion lawsuit filed by the Mexican government, which alleges that U.S. gun manufacturers “deliberately aided and abetted the unlawful sales of firearms” to cartels.
Ieva Jusionyte has been following this story both in the courts and along the border. An anthropologist at Brown, she spent years researching cross-border gun smuggling for her 2024 book, Exit Wounds, which examines the impacts of the trade on civilians in the U.S. and in Mexico. High Country News spoke with Jusionyte about the relationship between firearms and migration, the stakes of the Supreme Court case, and what it would take to dam the “iron river.” (This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.)
High Country News: In your book, you cite a statistic that’s really striking, which is that there are only two legal gun stores in Mexico — and in the U.S. border states alone, there are nearly 10,000. How did this come to be the case?
Ieva Jusionyte: The U.S. and Mexico have very different gun laws and gun industries. In the United States, there’s been a gun industry since the 19th century, and we also have the Second Amendment. In Mexico, firearm ownership is also a constitutional right, but that right is circumscribed. In the Mexican Constitution, it says that certain firearms will be reserved for military use.
Because Mexico didn’t have a powerful gun lobby, they successfully passed this law in the early 1970s that monopolized the importation of firearms and the sale of firearms within the country. The SEDENA, the Secretariat of National Security, is the only institution that’s allowed to import and sell firearms in Mexico. So for decades, they only had one gun store, on the military base in Mexico City. If someone got the permit to own a firearm, which is not easy, they had to go and get it from Mexico City. They opened the second one in 2019 in Monterrey, Nuevo Leon, because that’s where a big population of hunters and recreational shooters live, and it’s very far for them.
And in the United States, those almost 10,000 stores? Those are licensed firearm dealerships. It doesn’t even account for the number of gun shows and private sales.
HCN: The issues at the center of the tension between Trump and Sheinbaum are guns, drugs and migration. Can you help break down the relationship between those things?
IJ: They are all directly linked, right? In the United States, there’s a big demand for drugs because of the addiction epidemic. Those drugs are supplied by Mexican organized crime groups that compete with each other to provide this very lucrative commodity to U.S. consumers. In order to compete for trafficking routes, they need guns that they can’t obtain in Mexico. So they get them from the United States. Now, migration comes into the picture — because violence caused by these organized crime groups displaces a lot of people. And then people are fleeing north to seek safety in the United States. There’s this vicious circle of violence.
“What the Mexican government is trying to do is change the narrative, because the narrative is always, ‘Mexico is the problem and has to stop drugs and migrants.’ They want to include guns in this conversation.”
What the Mexican government is trying to do is change the narrative, because the narrative is always, “Mexico is the problem and has to stop drugs and migrants.” They want to include guns in this conversation.
HCN: Last month, Sheinbaum told reporters that as part of their initial deal to delay tariffs, Trump had agreed to work with Mexico to stop the flow of U.S. guns into Mexico. What are your thoughts on the prospects for Trump addressing this issue?
IJ: I don’t know whether the Trump government will deliver what they are promising the Mexican government. One indication of that is that there’s nothing in writing, the Trump administration hasn’t even admitted what they promised to do. So it’s more like a rhetorical handshake.
The only thing I imagine them doing is strengthening the cooperation between law enforcement agencies, doing more gun tracing. But they would not implement any policies that would actually show results, such as requiring smart guns, limiting how many semi-automatic rifles a person can buy per month, or having more background checks during private sales. I don’t think that will happen.
HCN: The U.S. has attempted to address the flow of guns south to Mexico before, with disastrous results — like in Operation Fast and Furious, in 2010, when agents with the ATF knowingly allowed straw buyers to purchase guns that were then traced to multiple murders. Could you talk about what went wrong there and why this issue has proven so difficult to address?
IJ: These operations were run on the premise that we will let the straw buyers take the guns to smugglers, and let the smugglers take the guns across the border in order to follow the small fish and find the big fish. That didn’t happen that way, because (the agents) lost track of these guns as soon as they crossed the border. The results were horrible, because thousands of guns ended up in Mexico through these operations, and they are still circulating. They’re still being recovered.
In more recent years, there has been cooperation between the ATF and the HSI (Homeland Security Investigations), which is part of the Department of Homeland Security, and they are doing more investigative work before guns reach the border. That has somewhat helped. What doesn’t help is trying to stop guns at the border. You can’t stop every vehicle, the same way you can’t stop every vehicle entering the United States to check for drugs. So that kind of investigative work needs to be done beforehand.
HCN: The U.S. Supreme Court is currently considering whether the Mexican government has standing to pursue its suit against gun manufacturers. The justices seem skeptical, though. What are the stakes of this case?
IJ: The stakes are huge. Because if the Mexican government succeeds in convincing the Supreme Court that their lawsuit can proceed, that would have huge implications for other countries around the world where U.S. guns play an important role — for example, Haiti, where over 80% of guns come from the United States. It might also have domestic repercussions. What we have in the United States is PLCAA, the Protection of Legal Commerce and Arms Act, which protects gun manufacturers and dealers from liability from injuries caused by legally sold products. The Mexican government is saying that they are not party to this agreement: They did not agree to exempt gun manufacturers for violence caused in their country — and they provided a lot of proof.
“If school shootings in the United States have made only a minor dent in the public opinion and gun policies, then violence in Mexico is even less likely to influence our politicians.”
I’m not very optimistic that the Supreme Court will allow this to continue because of the composition of the Supreme Court, and because of the recent track record of repealing a lot of gun laws rather than instituting any gun laws. And if, you know, school shootings in the United States have made only a minor dent in the public opinion and gun policies, then violence in Mexico is even less likely to influence our politicians.
HCN: Trump has blamed Sheinbaum for not doing enough to halt fentanyl trafficking and migration. But Mexico’s War on Drugs has actually played a big role in fueling violence, which spurs migration to the U.S. What can that history tell us about how to address these issues?
IJ: The main takeaway from that is probably that you can’t address any of these issues separately. If guns were more difficult to obtain in the United States for people who intend to traffic them, then there would be less violence in Mexico and less displacement and less extortion, and perhaps fewer drugs would come into the United States. But on the Mexican side, there are also policies that need to be addressed, because as long as there is demand, the supply will get to them. So the question is: What can Mexico do to strengthen its criminal justice system, to strengthen trust in the government’s ability to provide security for the population?
In the U.S., treating guns and drugs as a public safety issue has helped. So, for example, legalizing marijuana has helped. The trafficking of that commodity has been significantly reduced. So combining public health policies with criminal justice policies would show the best results.
What doesn’t show good results is this militarized approach, both to border security and fighting organized crime groups in Mexico, and to dealing with the drug epidemic in the United States. These policing approaches only create more of the problems that they are marketed to solve.
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