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Tag Archives: Guns
Mexican drug cartels pay Americans to smuggle weapons across the border, intelligence documents show
Watch the CBS Reports documentary “Arming Cartels: Inside the Mexican-American Gunrunning Networks” in the video player above.
Mexican drug cartels have been smuggling a vast arsenal of even military-grade weapons out of the U.S. with the help of American citizens, a CBS Reports investigation has found.
Exclusively-obtained U.S. intelligence documents and interviews with half a dozen current and former officials reveal that the American government has known this for years but, sources said, it’s done little to stop these weapons trafficking networks inside the United States, which move up to a million firearms across the border annually, including belt-fed miniguns and grenade launchers.
Dozens of cartel gunrunning networks, operating like terrorist cells, pay Americans to buy weapons from gun stores and online dealers all across the country, as far north as Wisconsin and even Alaska, according to U.S. intelligence sources. The firearms are then shipped across the southwest border through a chain of brokers and couriers.
Project Thor / Obtained by CBS News
When CBS News pressed the Justice Department about its findings, a senior official confirmed that “We absolutely recognize the problem here that … the lion’s share of firearms trafficked to Mexican cartels are coming from the United States.”
For more than 50 years, the U.S. government has waged an unsuccessful war on drug traffickers, who are now fueling a deadly fentanyl epidemic. The free flow of American guns across the southern border empowers the cartels to protect their drug operations and outgun Mexican authorities, U.S. officials said.
“We have allowed the cartels to amass an army,” said Chris Demlein, who served as a senior special agent with the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives — the ATF — until 2021.
U.S. government photo
Demlein led the first interagency intelligence project aimed at identifying and dismantling the cartels’ international weapons supply chains across the U.S. Within months of its launch on July 25, 2018, the initiative, known as Project Thor, connected the dots between hundreds of disparate law enforcement cases, uncovering vast networks that give these criminal groups on-demand access to American guns. They briefed hundreds of government officials on their discoveries, including the National Security Council and senior Justice Department leadership.
CBS News
Project Thor found that the problem of cartel weapons smuggling was far worse than previously understood. They estimated that cartels were trafficking between 250,000 and 1 million weapons every year, with a retail value of up to $500 million, not including ammunition and tactical supplies, according to intelligence analysis reviewed by CBS News.
Project Thor concluded that American guns were being used to fuel an unprecedented spike in violence across Mexico. Up to 85% of firearms found at those crime scenes traced back to the U.S.
Without Project Thor, U.S. law enforcement “bureaucracies were more interested in defending their turf than prosecuting criminal organizations,” said Edwin Starr, who retired from the ATF as a senior special agent in December 2022. Starr credited the interagency program with leading to a major breakthrough in one of his firearms trafficking cases that, according to Demlein, helped take down an entire cartel gunrunning network.
On Dec. 8, 2021, ATF chief of staff Daniel Board praised Project Thor’s “insight, initiative and hard work” as he presented the team with the agency’s Distinguished Service Medal.
But Project Thor was denied funding for fiscal year 2022, according to internal documents and sources with direct knowledge, effectively shutting it down. The Justice Department and ATF would not disclose how much money is dedicated to the mission of countering international firearms trafficking to Mexico.
Over the course of four months in 2023, CBS News repeatedly asked the Justice Department about its efforts to combat international gun trafficking. When senior officials finally agreed to speak, they said they were “not familiar” with Project Thor, even as they agreed with its findings about the magnitude of cartel gun running operations on U.S. soil.
The Biden administration signaled a new commitment to tackle the issue at a June 14 press conference, pointing to the ATF’s Operation Southbound, an investigative and prosecutorial “nationwide initiative” designed to “disrupt the trafficking of firearms from the U.S. to Mexico” focused on border states. Officials also pointed to funding for gun tracing and ongoing diplomatic efforts to train and equip Mexican law enforcement with that technology.
However, other law enforcement, intelligence and diplomatic officials told CBS News they doubt their own agencies’ commitment to dismantling cartel gunrunning networks across the U.S., and criticized the ongoing approaches as “ineffective.”
“Any U.S. strategy that depends, for its success, on Mexican law enforcement efforts in Mexico is doomed to failure,” warned Christopher Landau, who served as U.S. Ambassador to Mexico until 2021. “We’ve been talking about this for 10, 20 years. Nothing is changing. … This has been a major bipartisan failure of the U.S. government for many decades.”
Senior officials defended their approach to countering weapons smuggling out of the country.
“ATF is committed to stopping as many guns as possible from being illegally trafficked into Mexico,” ATF Director Steven Dettelbach told CBS News in a statement, touting the prosecution of 100 people in the past year. “Investigating straw purchasers is just one tool that we use. Our efforts also include large scale, long term, complex investigations of entire trafficking networks.”
Neither the Justice Department nor ATF provided evidence to demonstrate that their efforts have meaningfully reduced the flow of American firearms to Mexico. U.S. law enforcement seized 1,720 firearms in the first six months of fiscal year 2023. According to Deputy Attorney General Lisa Monaco, speaking at a news conference in June, “that’s a more than 65% increase over the same period last year.” But it accounts for less than 1% of all firearms being smuggled across the border, based on estimates by Project Thor and the Mexican government.
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Democrats urge Trump administration to ramp up efforts to curb trafficking of U.S.-made guns across border
Washington — A group of House and Senate Democrats is urging top Trump administration officials to use the recent designation of Latin American cartels and gangs as foreign terrorist organizations to take action to curtail the flow of American-made guns across the southern border.
The 14 Democratic lawmakers said in a letter to Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Attorney General Pam Bondi that the designation unlocks additional legal tools that would allow the administration to disrupt the cartels’ financial networks and impose harsher penalties on entities that provide material support to them.
Federal law makes it a crime, subject to fines and up to 20 years in prison, to knowingly provide material support or resources to a foreign terrorist organization. Entities that provide weapons, money, equipment or other support to those groups can face federal prosecution if found liable.
“If you want to really tackle the fentanyl trade, you have to tackle the source of the power of the people who are involved in that trade, and there’s no way to do that without addressing the guns that they receive from American-made manufacturers and dealers,” Rep. Dan Goldman, a New York Democrat who led the letter, told CBS News. “It’s a choice I would say, which is you can’t actually successfully dismantle the cartels without also dismantling the gun trafficking that goes southward that allows them to send the fentanyl trafficking northward.”
The Democrats urged the Departments of Homeland Security, State and Justice to take “immediate” steps to stem the flow of firearms manufactured in the U.S. into Mexico by boosting interagency cooperation to dismantle smuggling rings that facilitate gun trafficking; expanding inspections at border crossings; increasing law enforcement efforts against straw purchased and gun dealers that provide material support to smugglers; and bolstering intelligence-sharing between the U.S. and Mexican authorities and other partners to target weapons traffickers.
“This steady supply of weapons coming in from the north has allowed these criminal organizations to gain control over fentanyl and human trafficking across the border and undermine Mexican law enforcement,” they wrote in the letter. “Put simply, if we do not stop the flow of American-made guns across the southern border to Mexico, we cannot stop the flow of fentanyl into our country over that same border.”
Goldman said the Justice Department should initiate investigations into gun makers and dealers to determine whether they’re knowingly distributing and selling guns to drug cartels, either directly or through straw purchasers.
“The fact that there is an intermediary does not mean that there isn’t a criminal conspiracy that they are a part of, and that the DOJ needs to use this new foreign terrorist organization-designation to apply more pressure on the gun industry to stop the flow of American guns to the cartels,” he said.
Between 200,000 to 500,000 American-made guns are trafficked into Mexico each year, a pipeline that’s been called the “iron river.” Nearly half of all firearms recovered at Mexican crime scenes are manufactured in the U.S., according to data from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives. Mexico, meanwhile, has just one gun store in the country and stringent firearms laws.
An investigation from CBS Reports exposed how Americans are helping Mexican drug cartels smuggle weapons across the U.S.-Mexico border. Guns are purchased by straw purchasers in the U.S., and a network of brokers and couriers then transport them across the border and into Mexico. U.S. intelligence documents and interviews with current and former federal officials revealed that the federal government has known about the weapons trafficked by cartels for years, but has done little to stop the networks that operate in the U.S..
In an effort to combat the violence wrought by drug cartels, the Mexican government filed a lawsuit in U.S. district court in 2021 against seven of the biggest U.S. firearms manufacturers and one wholesaler. Mexico is seeking $10 billion in damages from the gun industry, as well as other forms of relief.
Firearms manufacturers, though, are seeking to block the suit because of a federal law that shields them from liability for harms stemming from the criminal misuse of their products by another person. The Supreme Court is currently considering whether Mexico’s suit can proceed, with a decision expected by the end of June.
Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum sought to use the suit as leverage in trade negotiations with President Trump after his administration designated drug cartels as terrorist groups and threatened earlier this year to impose 25% tariffs on Mexican imports.
Mr. Trump agreed in February to a 30-day pause on the tariffs on Mexican imports after speaking with Sheinbaum. Mexico’s president said at the time that the U.S. government is “committed to working to prevent the trafficking of high-powered weapons to Mexico.”
Goldman, who served as lead counsel in the first impeachment investigation of Mr. Trump before he was elected to Congress, said dismantling drug cartels to stop the trafficking of fentanyl and other drugs into the U.S. is a shared goal with the administration and should bring collaboration.
“One component of doing that has got to be stopping the Iron River streamline of American guns going into the cartel’s hands,” he said.
Goldman introduced legislation in the last Congress that aimed to strengthen border security by curbing the trafficking of U.S.-made guns and ammunition across the southern border and said he is working to re-introduce the bill in the current Congress.
Joining Goldman on the letter are: Senators Ben Ray Lujan and Martin Heinrich of New Mexico, Michael Bennet of Colorado, and Catherine Cortez Masto of Nevada, and Representatives Robert Menendez of New Jersey, Eric Swalwell of California, Seth Magaziner of Rhode Island, Lou Correa of California, Debbie Wasserman Schultz of Florida, Jill Tokuda of Hawaii, Nellie Pou of New Jersey, Timothy Kennedy of New York and Gabe Vasquez of New Mexico.