Washington - The United States Monday said it was giving a huge boost to its cooperation with Mexican law enforcement officials to help bring down the illicit drug trade and was even doubling and quadrupling its anti-drug efforts on the border.

The efforts come as Mexico last week beefed up its military presence to 10,000 armed troops in the violence-plagued border city of Juarez.

"The Department of Justice stands ready to take the fight to the Mexican drug cartels," vowed Deputy Attorney General David Ogden at the briefing to reporters at the White House.

Ogden noted there would be coordination with the US Department of Homeland Security and the US State Department.

Janet Napolitano, secretary of Homeland Security, laid out an entire "inventory of actions that are underway," including a doubling of the number of law enforcement people working in border enforcement, doubling the number of agents working in the aliens and violent crime section, a tripling of DHS intelligence analysts and a quadrupling of border liaison officers who work with Mexican justice officials.

"We are moving mobile X-ray units to the border ... to help identify anomalies in passenger vehicles," Napolitano said.

The moves come as US Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton prepared to visit Mexico Wednesday and Thursday, where anti-drug initiatives are likely to top the agenda.

US President Barack Obama is to visit Mexico on April 16, on his way to the Americas summit in Trinidad on April 17-19.

Rising tension between Mexico and the US centres on both the fight against drug trafficking and recent trade disputes, but the illicit drug trade is expected to dominate the agenda of Obama's and Clinton's visits.

Mexico is angry at a recent US decision to cut assistance agreed to by both countries to help Mexico fight organized crime gangs, and it was not clear how Monday's high profile announcements in Washington will affect those cutbacks.

Mexico insists that the US must cut down the demand for illicit cocaine and other drugs among Americans to help solve its own problems as a largely transit country for drugs produced in Colombia and Peru.

Mexican President Felipe Calderon has also insisted that the US crack down on the number of illicit weapons flowing back into Mexico, purchased with drug sales in the US. Napolitano said that the weapons' trade would be targeted in the boosted border efforts.

Calderon's crackdown on drug cartels over the past two or three years has resulted in a jump in violence near the US border among trafficking gangs and retributions against police.

Inside Mexico, more than 6,000 violent deaths in 2008 were blamed on fights among the drug cartels and attacks on law enforcement officials.

Last week, Calderon sent 10,000 federal troops into the border city of Juarez, where they are exercising a type of martial law. In Juarez alone, 1,800 murders took place in 2008, and 390 killings so far this year, many of them through gruesome beheadings. (dpa)