Do Drug Cartels Actually Use Drones at the Border?

Trump administration officials said the sudden closure of El Paso’s airspace this week was because of a drone flown by a Mexican cartel.

In reality, U.S. officials shot a laser at a party balloon, The New York Times reported.

Yet the case still raises an important question: How big of a threat are cartel drones?

The answer seems to depend upon whom you ask.

The view from the U.S.

Trump administration officials and some border-state lawmakers have warned that Mexican cartels are using drones along the border to smuggle drugs and surveil U.S. law enforcement.

In July, Steven Willoughby, director of the counter-drone program at the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, testified to Congress that U.S. officials had detected 60,000 drone flights within 500 meters, or about a third of a mile, of the U.S.-Mexico border — or 326 a day — in the second half of 2024. He suggested U.S. authorities had seized 1,200 pounds of drugs smuggled on drones across the border over that period.

There were few, if any, public reports of such seizures during that time frame. Instead, NewsNation reported at the time that Mexican cartels were using devices to disrupt U.S. Border Patrol drones flying along the border.

In March 2024, a U.S. Air Force general told Congress that more than 1,000 drones entered into the United States from Mexico per month. And in February 2023, a Texas sheriff told Congress that over the previous 31 days, there had been nearly 2,000 cartel-operated drones crossing the border from Mexico into three Texas counties.

The view from Mexico

Mexican officials for years have admitted that cartels use drones inside Mexico, including to attack one another and authorities. However, they have largely avoided the question of drones along the U.S.-Mexico border and downplayed the threat in the few instances they have addressed it.

Responding to questions about Mr. Willoughby’s testimony in July, President Claudia Sheinbaum of Mexico told reporters, “There is no information regarding new drones currently at the border,” and “There isn’t anything, let’s say, to be particularly alarmed about right now.” Mexico’s secretary of the Navy added in the same news conference that small commercial drones used by the cartels had not been detected at the border.

On Wednesday, after the temporary airspace shutdown in El Paso, Ms. Sheinbaum again said, “There is no information about the use of drones at the border.”

A Mexican state security official who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss private information said this week that cartels were increasingly using drones at the border to smuggle drugs and surveil law enforcement.

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Public cases

Since at least 2017, there have been a series of media reports and government news releases documenting cases of cartels using drones along the U.S.-Mexico border.

In 2017, U.S. officials arrested an American man caught allegedly using a drone to transport 12 packages of methamphetamine from Mexico to San Diego.

In 2023, U.S. Border Patrol agents reported that human smugglers, known as “coyotes,” were deploying small drones to monitor border patrol movements during an illegal crossing near San Diego.

And in October last year, three drones dropped explosives on a prosecutor’s office in Tijuana, Mexico; cartels used drones to attack Mexican security forces in Río Bravo, several miles from the border; and Mexican officials confiscated 18 drones in Reynosa, a border city.

The cartels’ use of drones is especially visible far from the border, in central Mexico. In Michoacán, the Cartel Jalisco New Generation and rival groups locked in a brutal territorial war have sharply expanded their drone operations in recent years.

In Sinaloa state, amid mounting pressure from the Mexican government and fears of a potential U.S. intervention, criminal groups like the Sinaloa Cartel have increased their anti-drone technology and hired people skilled in operating and tracking the aircraft, cartel operatives told The Times.

The view from analysts

Renato Sales, a former national security commissioner in Mexico, said cartels have been using drones to move drugs across the border for at least a decade. Federal officials first began noticing criminal groups adopting drones around 2015, he said, when they were using them for surveillance, intelligence gathering and the transportation of narcotics.

“They modernize all the time,” he said. “Drones are just the cartels’ carrier pigeons of postmodernity.”

David Saucedo, a Mexican security analyst, accused Mexican officials of downplaying the threat of drones to avoid angering President Trump, who has been threatening to strike cartels in Mexico. “They know what is happening at the border,” he said of Mexican officials.

Cecilia Farfán-Méndez, an analyst in San Diego who studies the cartels, said she believes that U.S. officials are overstating the threat, while Mexican officials are understating it.

She also was skeptical cartels use drones frequently to smuggle drugs, versus hiring U.S. citizens to carry the contraband across the border, which tends to be far harder to detect.

“We have a lot more evidence they’re using legitimate ports of entry for trafficking things, rather than using a drone that, as we are seeing right now, attracts a lot of attention,” she said.

Aline Corpus contributed reporting from Tijuana, Mexico.

Jack Nicas is The Times’s Mexico City bureau chief, leading coverage of Mexico, Central America and the Caribbean.

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