An “America First” approach simply cannot tolerate a wide-ranging consulate network that conspires to cultivate a distinct group that would then act as a permanent pressure lobby. That would enable Mexican leaders to influence America’s own internal debates and hinder the patriotic assimilation of the country’s second-largest ethnic bloc.

Which is why it’s good news that a State Department official confirmed to the press last week that the department was conducting such an investigation to ensure that the consulates “⁠are in line with the president’s America First foreign policy agenda and advance ​American interests.”

Hard to see how they do. Mexico’s consulates stick their noses in our elections, policy debates, and national cultural efforts. One of the reasons the consular network came together in the first place was to pull the North American Free Trade Agreement across the finish line in the 1990s.

Under former President George W. Bush, Mexico used its consulate system to advertise and issue Mexican consular IDs to Mexican nationals in the United States to “document” the “undocumented.” Under former President Barack Obama, it worked to support his most controversial policies: Obamacare, Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, and Deferred Action for Parents of Americans. In 2016, the consulates launched a naturalization drive to get more votes against candidate Donald Trump.

In February 2025, Sheinbaum’s response to Trump taking office a month earlier was to order the consulates to take “a proactive diplomatic approach” in a handful of “key areas.” These included “strategic partnerships” and “combatting disinformation.” In other words, they would engage in U.S. domestic debates and partner with U.S.-based transnational-oriented groups.

In May and June 2025, Sheinbaum openly mobilized Mexican lobbying against the creation of a remittance tax in the Congress’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act.

The New York Times reported that the State Department review may have been prompted by author Peter Schweizer’s exposé of the consulates in his 2026 bestseller The Invisible Coup: How American Elites and Foreign Powers Use Immigration as a Weapon. In it, Schweizer detailed, for example, how President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador used the consulates to oppose Trump’s border policies in 2017.

Sweitzer’s verdict was that, “Across America, the Mexican government, through its more than 50 consulates, is blatantly interfering in our domestic politics, working with American political advisors to turn legal and illegal migrants inside the U.S. into a political force to wield for their benefit.”

In a 2016 essay for National Affairs, I reached similar conclusions about the consulates, warning that “a conservative response must start with understanding that the multicultural, transnational social model, which they have allowed to grow unchecked, poses a real danger.”

Through her own misrule elsewhere, Sheinbaum has, of course, invited scrutiny of the consulates as a punitive measure. She refuses to cooperate with the U.S. in pursuing cartels that control large swaths of Mexican territory she can no longer defend. On Cuba, she has pledged to help her fellow Marxists in the Havana regime.

The consulates are central to Mexico’s state policy, however, and the State Department’s review is sure to get Sheinbaum’s attention. She might even appear to mend her ways. After Schweitzer’s book came out, she rejected his findings immediately.

“We categorically deny that they are doing anything related to U.S. politics,” she said.

That urgency was in itself revelatory and should make clear that, now that the review is underway, the Trump administration should see it through to the end.

A good question to start with: If the consulates aren’t meant to interfere in America’s internal affairs, why are so many needed?

Mexico’s 53 consulates are by far the largest number of any country. No. 2 Japan only has 17 consulates. Canada has 13 consulates, France has 10, and India, Germany, and the United Kingdom each have eight. El Salvador and Guatemala have around 13 consulates each, but they are more service-oriented than diplomatic, operate in modest office spaces or even mobile units, and are geared to help with matters such as remittances.

Mexico could argue that, “well, there are 39 million residents in the U.S. of Mexican origin, and they require consular services.” One can counter, admittedly somewhat tongue-in-cheek, that there is an equal number of Americans who self-identify as of “British” ancestry — English, Scottish, Welsh, and Scots-Irish, likely a substantial undercount — and even more Americans who claim German ancestry, yet somehow both those countries manage with eight consulates.

And that is tongue-in-cheek only up to a point. Many of these “Mexican Americans” out West will proudly tell you that their roots on U.S. soil go back to the 1700s or earlier.

In fact, only 29% of U.S. residents of Mexican origin are foreign-born, as per the Pew Research Center. Additionally, 35% of those are naturalized U.S. citizens. So fewer than 1 in 5 of these persons require any consular help whatsoever. Not put too fine a point on it, more than 80% of those are American, and Mexico has no claim on them.

But that is not at all how Mexico sees things. It formulated its state policy of acercamiento, or drawing closer, in which the consulates play the key role, in the 1990s to ensure that the fifth, sixth, seventh generations and beyond remained tied to Mexico.

The Mexican view came across most starkly in a comment then-President Vicente Fox put in on his presidential website in 2002. Mexico, he said, “is one nation of 123 million citizens — 100 million who live in Mexico and 23 million who live in the United States.” Fox created the Institute for Mexicans Abroad and put at its head the Texas-born Juan Hernandez to bring these U.S.-based persons the message that “although far, they are not alone.”

Hernandez then went on ABC News with a message for Mexican Americans: “I want the third generation, the seventh generation, I want them all to think ‘Mexico First.’”

In 1997, Fox’s predecessor, Ernesto Zedillo, told a convention of the progressive pressure group La Raza, whose leaders meet on a regular basis with Mexican leaders, that “I have proudly affirmed that the Mexican nation extends beyond the territory enclosed by its borders and that Mexican migrants are an important, a very important part of it.”

Zedillo later amended the Mexican constitution to allow Mexicans to become dual nationals. He privately told a group of Mexican American leaders in Texas in 1995 that the goal of dual nationality was “to develop a close relationship between his government and Mexican Americans, one in which they could be called upon to lobby U.S. policymakers on economic and political issues involving the United States and Mexico.”

One of the main architects of this acercamiento policy, Carlos Gonzalez Gutierrez, today the consul general in Los Angeles, the biggest and most powerful consulate, described the approach in more cloaked diplomatic language in an essay he penned for the Journal of American History in 1999.

“The pertinent question is: How may the Mexican government guarantee in the second and subsequent generations (who were not born in Mexico and do not expect ever to live there) the awareness of being part, not simply of an ethnocultural minority, but of the Mexican diaspora in the United States?” Gonzalez Gutierrez wrote.

Mexico, thus, seeks “the most effective resources and strategy to cultivate in Americans of Mexican ancestry the desire to remain close to their cultural roots, to the values and traditions that provide identity to those who feel they are (actually or symbolically) natives of Mexico.”

In his essay, Gonzalez Gutierrez makes clear that he understands that the U.S. government’s creation of a synthetic panethnic category, Hispanics, allows Mexico City to try to lever up its influence from 39 million to all 60 million “Hispanics” in this country. To make sure that Mexico retains the warm feelings of all these people, Gonzalez Gutierrez has already secured a formal partnership with the lobbying organization of the Smithsonian’s Latino Museum, which is being planned, but not yet built. The head of the museum’s lobbying group traveled to Mexico City in 2024 for Sheinbaum’s inauguration.

And every Monday morning, Gonzalez Gutierrez holds a public audience at the LA consulate, where people will vent off about immigration issues or even on whether the original homeland of the Aztecs was inside the U.S.

To Gonzalez Gutierrez, assimilation is a myth. The “merging of the different national identities of the immigrants into a new American nationality does not correspond to the experience of Mexican immigrants. … The myth of the melting pot, which in the United States has dangled a universal promise of vertical social mobility based on individual merit in a classless society, cannot easily explain the marginality of Mexican communities.”

And from Mexico’s perspective, we can see why. To have its lobbying pressure group, or even a fifth column it can activate one day, Mexico City must work against assimilation. To America, which takes in immigrants yet is determined to remain a distinct nation, assimilation is not an option. It is something it must oppose.

COURT-PACKING COMETH?

“The one absolutely certain way of bringing this nation to ruin, of preventing all possibility of its continuing to be a nation at all,” former President Theodore Roosevelt said in 1915, “would be to permit it to become a tangle of squabbling nationalities … each preserving its separate nationality.”

And this, aside from Sheinbaum’s blundering, is ultimately why the Trump administration must see its review and consulate reduction through to the end. It’s either America First or Mexico First.