The Drug Enforcement Administration opened a fentanyl lab on the U.S.-Mexico border as it warns of the Mexican drug cartels’ global reach.
The agency is accelerating its efforts to curtail the out-of-control fentanyl epidemic that has swept the United States and expanding far beyond America’s borders.
DEA Administrator Anne Milgram testified before the House Judiciary Subcommittee on Crime and Federal Government Surveillance on July 27 to discuss the threat from the Mexican cartels and their Chinese allies.
The U.S. government has been battling a worsening fentanyl crisis since 2019, after a surge of illegal fentanyl entered the country from Mexico using Chinese precursor chemicals.
Ms. Milgram told Congress that the DEA has been overhauling its approach to countering illegal narcotics since the arrival of the synthetic opioid, over the past decade.
DEA Upping Its Efforts to Stop Fentanyl From Crossing the Border
The DEA chief told Congressional lawmakers that her agency recently opened a lab in the border city of El Paso, Texas, called the Joint Intrepid Lab.“It is a fentanyl profiling lab with the idea being that we will immediately test fentanyl as quickly as we can, as it gets seized at the border, so we can determine who is responsible for making that fentanyl, what it is made up of, and also have an early warning system for future drugs,” told the House subcommittee.
“These cartels are hiding fentanyl in fake pills that look like Oxycodone, Xanax, Percocet, Adderall,” Ms. Milgram said.
“They’re also mixing it with cocaine, heroin, and methamphetamine, all to induce Americans to take fentanyl without knowing it and to drive addiction.”
The new testing facility will allow the Customs and Border Protection’s Office of Field Operations officers to evaluate the fentanyl seized from pedestrians and vehicles at the ports to be immediately reviewed for inspection.
Government scientists are able to determine what precursor ingredients were used in making the drugs.
They are then able to trace the substances to particular companies in China or identify which of those chemicals are being used by the cartels and where drug smugglers are moving the product across the border.
Two Mexican transnational criminal organizations, the Jalisco cartel and the Sinaloa cartel, are the main sources of fentanyl into the United States, along with dozens of other countries where they have a presence.
The DEA has formed three teams: one to track Jalisco, a second to track Sinaloa, and a third that focuses solely on money laundering between the Mexican cartels and the Chinese.
“They are mapping the cartels. They’re analyzing these criminal networks that now exist in more than 40 countries. And they’re developing targeting information on the members of those networks wherever they operate across the globe,” Ms. Milgram told the House regarding the DEA’s operations.
Washington Demands That Mexico And China Do More To Stop Opioid Crisis
In an interview with NBC’s Meet the Press earlier this month, Ms. Milgram said that despite the DEA being “ready to work with anyone who will work with us,” the agency has “not had the cooperation that we want to have” from Beijing and added that the Mexican government also “needs to do more.”When asked if Beijing was willing to participate in the crackdown, Ms. Milgram said: “We have had recent conversations with Chinese authorities, both in Beijing and in Washington, talking about improving law enforcement cooperation.”
“For about the past year, we have not had the cooperation that we want to have. And, of course, we have offices in the People’s Republic of China and all over Asia. We have 334 offices around the world. So the recent conversations, I think, are very important, and now we have to see if we can turn this into law enforcement cooperation,” she added.
Last month, the Justice Department filed criminal charges against four Chinese chemical makers and eight individuals, over allegations they knowingly trafficked chemicals that were used to make fentanyl.Mexico City Accused of Lagging in Its Efforts to Stop Cartels and Their Chinese Partners
Ms. Milgram has been calling on the Mexican government to step up its law enforcement effort alongside U.S. authorities.
“I think where we are right now is first, the United States is now taking an across-government approach,” the DEA chief told NBC.
“And so in the past six months, 12 months, we have sat with [the Department of the] Treasury, we have sat with [the Department of] State, we have sat with other federal law enforcement agencies. And the deputy attorney general has been to Mexico, as has the president’s homeland security adviser. And they’re all delivering the message of how important and critical this is.”
“We are seeing some increased cooperation with Mexican law enforcement and the military … I think it couldn’t be said enough: we cannot allow 110,000 Americans to die. And we have to do everything we can so we need to do more and Mexico needs to do more,” she continued.
Milgram added that regardless of whether the cartels were designated as foreign terrorist organizations, “that would not change our current authorities. So DEA’s role in defeating the cartel would be essentially the same.”
Mexican President, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, wrote to Chairman Xi Jinping of China, in April, urging him to help stop shipments of fentanyl precursors.
He also complained to Mr. Xi about calls from the Biden administration to designate Mexican cartels as terrorist organizations.
“Unjustly, they are blaming us for problems that in large measure have to do with their loss of values, their welfare crisis,” said President Obrador in reference to Washington.
