This week, I am breaking down what the DOJ's indictment of ten Sinaloa officials means for every state north of Sinaloa and why Mexico's MORENA party just handed Washington the opening it needed. I am also making the case for why Latin American investors and entrepreneurs belong in Arizona's semiconductor boom right now, and explaining why Devin Booker, Jaime Jaquez Jr., and a 19-year-old kid from Hermosillo represent the most important cultural moment in Mexican sports history and almost nobody is moving fast enough to capture it.

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President Trump arrived in Beijing last week leading a delegation that included Apple's Tim Cook, Tesla's Elon Musk, and Nvidia's Jensen Huang, pledging to urge President Xi Jinping to "open up" China's economy. The two leaders discussed Chinese purchases of American agricultural and industrial goods, tariffs, Taiwan, and rare earths, against the backdrop of the ongoing war in Iran. Analysts described the summit as a stabilization, not a transformation. Both sides claimed wins. Neither fully confirmed what the other said happened.

But here is what I want border state business leaders to focus on: China has weaponized its dominance over rare earths, those critical elements essential to everything from consumer electronics to vehicles to fighter jets, and that leverage shaped the entire diplomatic conversation this week.

Mexico sits on significant critical mineral deposits that the United States desperately needs to reduce its dependence on Beijing. The Yuma cobalt processing work we are advancing through Intermestic Capital is precisely the kind of North American solution that answers the question Trump and Xi were dancing around in Beijing. Meanwhile, TSMC and Intel are already deeply invested in Phoenix. The semiconductor corridor from Phoenix to Nogales is not a future concept. It is an active opportunity right now.

Every day that the U.S. and China negotiate the terms of their rivalry, the window for Mexico to step into that supply chain gap either opens wider or closes a little more. Mexico's moment in the semiconductor and critical minerals conversation is now, and Intermestic Partners is actively working to make sure border communities are positioned to capture it.

This weekend, President Trump celebrated the defeat of Louisiana Senator Bill Cassidy, one of seven Republican senators who voted to convict him after January 6, 2026, calling his political career effectively "over." On Tuesday, Trump-endorsed challengers defeated at least five of the seven Indiana state senators who had broken with the president on redistricting, a reminder that all politics, no matter how local, can be nationalized.

Now the next test arrives. Tomorrow, May 19, Kentucky Representative Thomas Massie faces a Trump-endorsed challenger, former Navy SEAL Ed Gallrein, in what has become the clearest measure yet of whether independent-minded conservatives can survive inside the modern GOP. Massie has frustrated Trump by pressing for release of the Epstein files, challenging the president on military action in Iran without congressional approval, and voting against the party's sweeping tax-and-budget legislation.

I watch this dynamic carefully because border policy lives or dies in exactly this environment. When a party consolidates around a single voice, the debate collapses. The nuanced, practitioner-grounded conversation that border communities actually need, the one about ports of entry staffing, about trade infrastructure, about the legal pathways that keep our binational economy moving, gets replaced by slogans. That serves no one on either side of the line.

The lawmakers I want to see elevated are the ones willing to walk a port of entry, sit with a produce exporter in Nogales, or talk to a freight forwarder in Laredo before they vote. Loyalty to a party is easy. Loyalty to a policy that actually works is what we need more of. Tuesday's result in Kentucky will tell us something important about whether there is still room for that kind of thinking inside the Republican tent.

On April 29, the Southern District of New York unsealed a 34-page indictment charging Rubén Rocha Moya, the sitting governor of Sinaloa, along with nine other current and former high-ranking officials, accusing them of partnering with the Chapitos faction of the Sinaloa Cartel to flood the United States with fentanyl, heroin, cocaine, and methamphetamine. This appears to be the first time the DOJ has indicted a sitting Mexican governor.

This past Friday, Gerardo Mérida Sánchez, the former secretary of public security for Sinaloa, appeared in federal court in Manhattan after his arrest in Arizona. He is the first of the ten to face U.S. justice directly.

And here is where we need to stop and ask the question no one in Mexico City's political class wants to answer: how exactly did narcotics produced in Sinaloa reach the United States without transiting through Sonora, Chihuahua, and Baja California? The geography alone tells the story. You cannot move product north without the roads, the corridors, and the officials who control them. Anyone who believes the corruption stopped in Sinaloa is not being serious.

The picture that is emerging is not of one rogue governor cutting a deal with traffickers. It is a ruling party with cartel entanglements across multiple states. President Sheinbaum denied she would protect anyone who had committed a crime, but simultaneously framed the indictments as a political attack on the Morena movement. That is not accountability. That is political cover.

I spent 13 years working the border, managing a CBP workforce of 60,000 people and a 13 billion dollar budget. I can tell you from experience that corruption does not respect state lines. More indictments are coming. The real question is whether Mexico's leadership will cooperate when they do, or keep choosing the party over the people.

Devin Booker never seriously connected with his Mexican heritage until he was drafted by the Phoenix Suns and found himself living in the heart of it. He is the son of former NBA player Melvin Booker and Veronica Gutierrez, a Mexican-American who raised him while his father played overseas. His maternal grandfather was born in Nogales, Mexico.

I grew up in Nogales. So let that land for a moment.

Arturo Ochoa, who has called Suns games in Spanish since 2004, put it this way: "Imagine the pride of having your team have a guy score 40 points in a playoff game, and he has Latino blood. Mexican blood like you."

Now multiply that feeling across 40 million Mexican-connected residents in the United States and 130 million people in Mexico itself, and you begin to understand what is currently being left on the table.

Jaime Jaquez Jr. of the Miami Heat is the only other active NBA player with Mexican roots, making two the total count of Mexican-connected players in the entire league. But that number is about to change in a significant way. Karim López, a 19-year-old forward born in Hermosillo, Sonora, is projected to become the first Mexican-born player ever selected in the first round of the NBA Draft. Hermosillo sits just 175 miles south of the Arizona border.

Think about what that means. A kid from Sonora, practically a neighbor, on the verge of making NBA history at the same moment the World Cup is igniting cross-border sports passion at a level we have not seen in years. The brands, the foundations, and the community programs that should be rallying around Booker as a binational cultural bridge need to move faster, and they need to pull Jaquez and López into that same conversation. This is the role Michael Jordan played for a generation. Devin Booker has Mexican blood, plays in the desert, has a grandfather from Nogales, and now a teenager from Hermosillo is about to join him in the league.

The Mexican basketball moment is not coming. It is already here.

There is a conversation I have been having with several top Southwest Venture funds, and it is one I think every investor with eyes on the border economy should be part of. The premise is straightforward: Arizona is undergoing one of the most significant industrial transformations of any state in a generation, driven by semiconductor investment from TSMC, Amkor, Intel and others. And yet the entrepreneur pipeline feeding that ecosystem is drawing almost entirely from one direction.

Latin America is producing world-class engineering and technology talent. Mexico, Brazil, Colombia, and Chile are generating founders who understand manufacturing, supply chain, and cross-border complexity in ways that Silicon Valley often does not. If we are serious about building a binational innovation corridor, then identifying LatAm investors and entrepreneurs and connecting them to Arizona's semiconductor and technology ecosystem is not just an opportunity. It is a strategic necessity 

The Nogales corridor is the proof of concept. Located at the intersection of U.S. manufacturing demand and Mexican engineering capacity, it is already attracting nearshoring interest that no one expected five years ago. The question is whether the capital and the founders needed to scale that corridor will come from within the region, or whether we will watch outside money fill a gap we should have filled ourselves 

Through Intermestic Capital, we are actively looking for partners who understand this thesis, investors and founders who see the semiconductor moment in Arizona not as a Phoenix story but as a North American story. The phone calls with top funds are not hypothetical. The funds are real. And the window to get in early is exactly where we are right now.

Thanks for reading this edition of my newsletter! I'd love to hear from you. Share your thoughts about what you think are the most critical issues that need to be addressed. Email me at [email protected] or connect with me on social media using the hashtag #Intermestic.

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