The haul included nearly 2 million pills with a street value of about $12 million. The Guard is pitching in at the border just as the CHP did in the Bay Area.
The California National Guard’s Counterdrug Task Force
helped seize 1,541 pounds of illicit fentanyl at the southern border last month, including more than 1.7 million fentanyl pills with an estimated street value of $11.9 million.
Guard members with the task force are deployed in cross-government efforts to stop transnational organizations that traffic fentanyl and other illegal narcotics.
“California continues the intensive work of keeping fentanyl out of our communities, helping law enforcement seize over 204 percent more fentanyl last month than the month prior,” Gov. Gavin Newsom said in a statement.
Guard members have played a key role in the state’s anti-drug trafficking measures, Newsom said.
In June, the governor
doubled the number of service members dedicated to fentanyl interdictions, as well as other drug seizures, from 155 to nearly 400 at California ports of entry. Also that month, Guard members
helped seize more than 1 million fentanyl pills and 423 pounds of fentanyl powder across the state.
In a video
filmed in June at the Mexico border just east of the San Ysidro Port of Entry, Newsom said the Guard has more than 390 men and women working on the border and throughout the state on narcotics interdiction, reconnaissance, and more.
“This work will help take down transnational organizations and the illegal drugs they attempt to bring into our state—holding smugglers accountable and taking deadly drugs off our streets,” Newsom wrote on X.
The task force uses air and ground assets to interdict narcotics trafficking and build criminal investigations.
After initial success in 2022, Newsom
increased the deployment of Guard members at border entries from 40 to 60 the following year. The state has spent $60 million over four years to expand the Guard’s work in California, the governor’s statement said.
Deploying Guard members at the border is a tactic similar to the governor’s enlisting the California Highway Patrol to help battle drug trafficking in the Bay Area.
The so-called public safety partnership in San Francisco from May 2023 to May 2024 led to the seizure of nearly
700 pounds of fentanyl.
The Guard has also appeared in California communities as part of its “War on Fentanyl” to help educate youth on the threat posed by narcotics.
On Sept. 11, Cal Guard and its Drug Demand Reduction Outreach team
met with students at Fontana Middle School in San Bernardino County to discuss fentanyl’s dangers and the impact it is having on young lives after a 12-year-old student at the school died because of fentanyl poisoning.
California had 7,560 opioid-related
overdose deaths in 2023, according to the state Department of Public Health. The mortality rate was 19.39 per 100,000 residents, up 5 percent from 2022.
