The teenager practiced driving from his apartment in San Diego down to Tijuana and back, on the orders of the criminals he was working for in Mexico. He rehearsed how he would respond to questions from U.S. border officers. He tracked when the drug-sniffing dogs took a break.
The men who were paying him had cut a secret compartment into his car big enough to fit several bricks of fentanyl. When they loaded it up for the first time and sent him toward the border, Gustavo, who was only 19 at the time, began to tremble.
At the checkpoint, he steadied himself like he had practiced, and calmly told the border officers that he was just heading home.
They looked at his American passport — and waved him through.
Since 2019, when Mexico overtook China to become the dominant supplier of fentanyl in the United States, cartels have been flooding the country with the synthetic opioid. The amount of fentanyl crossing the border has increased tenfold in the past five years. Mexico has been the source of almost all of the fentanyl seized by U.S. law enforcement in recent years.
Former President Donald J. Trump and other Republicans have blamed President Biden’s border policies for the fentanyl pouring into the United States, playing on a widespread belief that undocumented immigrants are responsible for bringing it in.
In reality, the largest known group of fentanyl smugglers is not made up of immigrants traversing the desert or moving through secret tunnels — they are Americans coming through legal ports of entry. More than 80 percent of the people sentenced for fentanyl trafficking at the southern border are U.S. citizens, federal data shows.
Officials say those numbers point to a new and alarming strategy: Mexican drug cartels are turning thousands of Americans into fentanyl mules, deploying a torrent of couriers who can easily cross back and forth into their own country.
“Americans are taking Mexicans’ smuggling jobs,” said David Bier, a border security expert at the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank. “The cartels are really using U.S. citizenship as an asset that they can leverage.”
Bars, gyms, rehab facilities, trailer parks — these are all places where recruiters have found couriers in recent years, court records show. A college football star was lured in by a friend after dropping out of school. A mother raising three special-needs children took the job while facing eviction. A homeless man was recruited from an encampment in a Walmart parking lot.
Federal agents uncovered a recruitment network inside more than a dozen San Diego high schools, where from 2016 through 2020 students working on behalf of criminal groups in Mexico persuaded their classmates to cross the border with fentanyl, according to three former federal agents directly involved in the operation.
“The cartels are directly recruiting anyone who is willing to do it, which typically is someone who needs the money,” said Tara McGrath, U.S. attorney for the Southern District of California. “The cartels spread their tentacles and grab ahold of vulnerable people at every possible opportunity.”
Americans have always been involved in drug smuggling, but in recent years, as fentanyl has inundated the country, traffickers have begun to rely more on U.S. citizens than ever before.
Pandemic border closures may have been a factor, experts say, possibly pushing cartels to depend more on Americans, who were among the few people allowed to cross freely. But fentanyl also has unique qualities that make it an ideal product to be moved in compact packages by individual travelers: It is extraordinarily potent and very easy to make.
One hundred times more powerful than morphine, fentanyl can be extremely profitable even in small quantities, meaning a single courier can smuggle lucrative amounts of the drug just by hiding it in their glove compartment or under their clothes.
The synthetic opioid is so lethal that you could die from ingesting a couple of milligrams, an amount that fits on the tip of a pencil. In the past five years, fentanyl became the leading cause of death for young adults in the United States, and now kills nearly as many Americans aged 18 to 45 as guns and car accidents combined, a New York Times analysis of federal data shows.
For traffickers, fentanyl is a miracle product. According to U.S. prosecutors, the Sinaloa Cartel spends only $800 on chemicals to produce a kilo, an amount that can net a profit of up to $640,000.
It can also be replaced quickly. If a load gets intercepted at the border, traffickers do not have to wait for plants to grow the way they do with cocaine or heroin — they just mix up a few chemicals and send over a new batch.
“Losing product is relatively unimportant,” said Jonathan Caulkins, a drug policy expert at Carnegie Mellon University. With merchandise that expendable, Mr. Caulkins said, “you can use straightforward and low-tech ways of smuggling,” like sending inexperienced American drug mules over the border in droves.
Border officials have found giant loads of the synthetic opioid strapped to teenagers’ bodies, stuffed into crutches and in bags of potato chips. They seized a microwave oven crammed with 166,000 pills, and opened a backpack with $60,000 worth of fentanyl hidden inside breakfast burritos.
The Biden administration has poured resources into trying to stanch the flow of fentanyl into the United States, reporting record seizures of the drug in recent years. But officials admit that much more could be done.
“We need more tools — legislation to modernize our customs laws and enhance penalties — and resources like more officers, more technology, and more money to fuel our fight,” Customs and Border Protection’s commissioner, Troy A. Miller, said in a statement.
Almost all of the fentanyl found at the southern border arrives in cars — and only 8 percent of the personal vehicles that cross are scanned for drugs, Customs and Border Protection says.
“We continue to utilize all of our assets, all of our interviewing skills to apprehend and interdict these individuals,” said Sidney Aki, the director of field operations at the San Diego field office for the agency.
“It’s a challenge of a cat-and-mouse game with the cartels,” Mr. Aki added. “They see we are hypervigilant, focused on certain strategies — they change in a heartbeat.”
For this account, The Times reviewed hundreds of pages of court records and spoke with several Americans convicted of smuggling fentanyl. Their full names are being withheld for fear of reprisals.
One woman met her recruiter while in rehab in Los Angeles, where the two struck up a friendship, according to court records and interviews with the woman and her lawyer. The woman, who asked to be identified by her first initial, M., said that her friend started pressuring her to smuggle drugs only after they spent years getting to know each other. When M. resisted, her friend flew into a rage.
“She was like, ‘I have your address,’” M. said. “‘I’m part of a cartel in Mexico and we go all around the world, so wherever you go, we’re going to find you.’” Anthony Colombo, the lawyer who defended M. after she was detained, said the recruiter had targeted “vulnerable women” at the rehab center. M. was sentenced to 18 months in prison.
Cartels look for Americans who “are naïve as to what they’re getting involved in,” said Mr. Colombo, who, in addition to a slate of low-income clients, has also represented accused cartel leaders. Low-level couriers, he said, “are going to be intentionally kept in the dark because if they’re caught, they don’t know anything.”
The job offer reached Gustavo in San Diego after he drank too much beer at a party and confessed to a friend that he badly needed money. At the time, he was the main provider for his mother in their San Diego apartment. His brother had moved out, and his parents were divorced. Gustavo was working at a grocery store, but struggled to pay the bills.
“I want to be a boss,” he told his friend that night. “This job isn’t feeding me and my mom.”
After a few days, his friend called him and said he knew an “old guy in Tijuana” who had a job available and was always at the same bar right across the border. Gustavo did not ask what kind of work.
When he got to the bar a few Sundays later, Gustavo said he spotted a middle-aged man wearing designer clothes and surrounded by beer and women. Gustavo introduced himself, and after the two exchanged some pleasantries, the man took a thick wad of cash out of his pocket. “‘If you really want to work,’” Gustavo recalled the man saying, “‘then here you go.’”
Gustavo said he barely considered what he might be getting himself into. He had never seen that much money before. He took the job.
“The drivers are interchangeable and disposable to the people at the top of the food chain,” said Keith Rutman, the lawyer who represented Gustavo. “If someone says no today, they’ll find someone else.”
The cartel operatives directly interacting with couriers like Gustavo are often several layers removed from cartel leaders, officials say.
Osvaldo Mendivil-Tamayo, a 25-year-old man from Tijuana who pleaded guilty to drug charges in 2020, operated as a sort of freelancer for cartels, overseeing a cadre of recruiters, according to court records and his lawyer.
He used Snapchat to talk to recruiters about identifying American students who regularly crossed from Tijuana to San Diego. One recruit was only 15 years old. Through his lawyer, Mr. Mendivil-Tamayo, who was recently released from prison, declined to comment.
The recruiters generally deliver the same pitch: We will pay you anywhere from $1,000 to $10,000 for a few hours of low-risk work.
David, an addict in his 50s, said he drove through the border with drugs nearly every day for three months before he was apprehended by the authorities. Sometimes, when he went to pick up a load from a stash house in Tijuana, he said, he would find four or five other Americans already there, waiting for drugs to be strapped to their bodies.
“Anybody that can drive across the border can get a job down there, literally, passing drugs,” David said in an interview from federal prison.
Federal and state law enforcement in San Diego have put up billboards urging teens not to bring drugs across the border. The Drug Enforcement Administration started a program to educate high school students about the risks of smuggling.
But it is hard to compete with a persistent cartel operative.
Gustavo’s recruiter called him out of the blue one afternoon. “‘I got a car for you,’” he recalled the man saying. It was a Honda Civic, a few years old and gleaming, and it was waiting for him in Tijuana.
Gustavo was ordered to get basic insurance for the car, and to start driving across the border every three days. The man told Gustavo that he wanted him to feel comfortable being approached by the border officers. He was told if he wanted to back out, he would have to pay the man several thousand dollars.
When Gustavo smuggled drugs for the first time, he left the car in a parking lot near the highway in San Diego, as instructed. He came back a few hours later to find more than $6,000 stuffed in the glove box.
“I’m over here struggling, of course I’m gonna use the money to pay bills,” Gustavo said. He bought so much food at the store that it did not fit in the fridge. Before he knew it, Gustavo had made tens of thousands of dollars.
But then a few months later, while driving up to the Otay Mesa border entry into California, he got a bad feeling in his gut. There was almost no one else in line to cross and Gustavo suddenly sensed that something was about to go terribly wrong.
He took a breath, told himself it was in his head and kept driving.
While he was waiting in line to show his identification, an officer approached his car and asked where he was headed. San Diego, Gustavo said, trying to sound calm. According to court documents, the officer noticed a loose cloth on the back seat.
The officer popped the trunk, pushed the back seat down, unzipped the seat cover and “immediately observed plastic wrapped packages,” according to the court documents. Gustavo was visibly shaking, the officer noted.
More than 13 kilos of fentanyl were found stuffed into the back seat. After he was put under arrest, Gustavo told the officers his story from start to finish, court documents show. Then he called his mother, who was at a new job cleaning offices.
She wailed into the phone. “‘Why would you do this?’” he recalled her asking.
Gustavo pleaded guilty to fentanyl trafficking in August 2021, and was sentenced to 32 months in federal prison. He has since found a job in construction, solid work that pays well.
“This is a good path for me,” he said.
The post The American Drug Mules Smuggling Fentanyl Into the U.S. appeared first on New York Times.
