Mexico aims to crackdown on cartel violence, mulls over merging National Guard with nation’s army to quell violent spats

TOPSHOT - A Mexican National Guard vehicle drives past children playing as families of asylum seekers wait outside the El Chaparral border crossing port as they wait to cross into the United States in Tijuana, Baja California state, Mexico on February 19, 2021. - The Biden administration plans to slowly allow 25,000 people with active cases seeking asylum into the US previously enrolled in the Migrant Protection Protocols program, known as "Remain in Mexico," with community organizations testing for Covid-19 and providing hotels to quarantine migrants upon arrival during the pandemic. (Photo by Patrick T. FALLON / AFP) (Photo by PATRICK T. FALLON/AFP via Getty Images)Mexico’s President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador recently said he is looking into ways to streamline the country’s National Guard amid an increase in violence in the country. Reports said that Lopez Obrador has flirted with bypassing Mexico’s Congress in order to give control of the National Guard to Mexico’s army. This would give Mexico’s military control over policing practices in the country. 

DOJ ends Trump-era China Initiative program to fight espionage

FILE - Matthew G. Olsen, of Maryland, nominee to be an Assistant Attorney General for the Department of Justice, attends a Senate Judiciary Hearing on Capitol Hill in Washington on July 14, 2021. The Justice Department is ending its China Initiative. The move announced Wednesday, Feb. 23, 2022, by Assistant Attorney General Olsen amounts to a rebranding of a Trump-era program that was created to crack down on economic espionage by Beijing but that critics said had unfairly scrutinized Chinese professors on the basis of their ethnicity. (AP Photo/Amanda Andrade-Rhoades, File)Joe Biden’s Justice Department ended a Trump-era program that countered Chinese espionage against the United States. This week, the DOJ said the 45th president’s China Initiative was not broad enough and claimed it created a climate of fear among Asian Americans.