Mexican Cartels Fly 9,000 Drone Flights into U.S. to Surveil Law Enforcement Operations

Mexican drug cartels have conducted more than 9,000 drone flights into U.S. airspace in the last year to surveil American law enforcement and security operations in the southern border region, a senior Homeland Security official told Judicial Watch this week. The drones are observing federal, state, county, and city agencies near the Mexican border, including the U.S. Border Patrol, Texas Department of Public Safety, Texas National Guard, county sheriffs and local police. The Border Patrol, which operates under Customs and Border Protection (CBP), has captured about a dozen of the drones, and accessed the Unmanned Aerial Vehicles’ (UAVs) guidance and memory systems to gain intelligence information, according to a high-level official at the agency....

Federal officials on the ground tell Judicial Watch that the cartels use the UAV surveillance flights to facilitate human smuggling and drug trafficking. Specifically, they help identify gaps in border coverage and assist the cartels in overwhelming certain areas to create a diversion for moving sensitive or high value loads through alternate border locations...

Back in 2018, an academic study found that cartels use drones to look for Border Patrol agents and inform drug smugglers of their positions. The research focused on the complex security landscape of military drones for border security and non-state actors with sharply diverging motives to develop their own drone surveillance capacities.