Catching fentanyl at the border

MARY REICHERD, HOST: It’s Thursday the 4th of April, 2024.

This is WORLD Radio and we thank you for listening! Good morning, I’m Mary Reichard

MYRA BROWN, HOST: And I’m Myrna Brown.

First up on The World and Everything in It: our southern border.

The Department of Justice this week landed a major blow to a powerful Mexican drug operation … the Jalisco New Generation Cartel.

Alamdar Hamdani, U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of Texas, announced the bust. About two dozen suspected drug traffickers who operated out of the Houston area were taken into custody.

HAMDANI: Those charged are alleged to have sourced the drugs from Mexico, smuggled the drugs from Mexico across the border into the Southern District of Texas, into Houston and into places like Atlanta, Pensacola, New Orleans, Nashville, and Chicago.

REICHARD: Joining us now to talk about threats at the border is Anthony Ruggiero. He was a senior national security advisor to former President Donald Trump, and now leads the Nonproliferation and Biodefense Program for the Foundation for Defense of Democracies.

Anthony, welcome back.

ANTHONY RUGGIERO: Well, thanks for having me. Good to be back.

REICHARD: This drug bust really shows the intensity of the border and drug problem. Twenty-three people arrested, with 16 suspects still at large. This one operation seized over a thousand pounds of meth, cocaine, heroin, pentobarbital and over twenty thousand fentanyl-laced pills. The Justice Department said all of those drugs were smuggled across the U.S. southern border. How is this happening?

RUGGIERO: Well, you're really seeing the core of the drug crisis right now, you know, layered on top of our border crisis, where you have drugs moving into the United States. And, you know, fentanyl gets a lot of the headnote headlines, and deservedly so since it's it's one of the leading killers, if not the leading killer of Americans 18 to 45. But there are other as you mentioned, meth and cocaine and heroin and other drugs that are that are either, you know, putting Americans into addiction or in some cases killing them.

REICHARD: I want you to connect the dots for us. I saw a piece that you wrote about this: China makes a lot of these precursors to drugs like Fentanyl. So how does it get here from there and who pays the middle men?

RUGGIERO: Yeah, this is the important part of the drug crisis, right? Americans are suffering. And China plays an important role in all of the different stages. So you think about the very beginning of the stage, right? As you asked, how do these, how are these drugs being made? If we're looking at fentanyl, precursors that are being shipped to Mexico, and then that's being created, and then it's being shipped to the United States. Then the issue is, so you have these drugs in the United States, and they're being bought by Americans, and then it's a cash business. And so how do the cartels get that money back into Mexico? Because it's not for free, they need that money to sustain this operation. And what you have is you have these innovative Chinese money laundering organizations that have stepped into the fold, have taken on a lot of the risk. Because when you're dealing with a money laundering operation and a drug operation, there's a chance for interdiction. And so those Chinese money launderers take that cash, U.S. cash, then they transfer it within the Chinese banking system, and then the cartels get their money back in Mexico. And so for the cartels, that's that's sort of almost the end for them. Then this money gets works its way back into the U.S. financial system, because you have Chinese citizens and others who cannot move this amount of money from China because of controls, and so they use it to buy real estate and pay for universities and other things. So you have this drug-laced money that is killing Americans, that is being laundered by the Chinese organizations and their banks, and is staying inside the United States, inside our financial system.

REICHARD: It’s obvious that lax security at the border correlates to drug flow into the US. Talk more about that.

RUGGIERO: Right, I mean, obviously having, you know, issues at the border where, where people can come and go, and, you know, items come and go. There's a lot of seizures at the border. But I think we can all understand that, you know, last year, I think the number was the amount of fentanyl seized at the border around that area could have killed every American in the United States. But you know, they're obviously not getting everything. So there are, there there is fentanyl coming into the U.S. through that mechanism. You know, how do you stop the drugs coming in? You're using sanctions, using the Justice Department to go after the cartels, you're going after pill presses, because the other thing is when these fentanyl laced drugs are made, they're made to look like the real thing, right? They're illicit, but they look like the real thing. So they, they go after the pill presses. So they're doing that, they're at the front end of that cycle. But what we're not doing enough on is the following the money. And you know, Secretary Yellen, Treasury Secretary Yellen is supposed to go to China in the near future, I mean, that should be her number one priority. Americans are dying from this. China is playing a major role in this, they need to do more to stop it.

REICHARD: You’ve researched this matter for a long time. What options do we have to fight these criminal enterprises taking advantage of an insecure border?

RUGGIERO: Right, I, you know, I think there are ways to address this, I mean, you know, we've seen the Justice Department is using their tools. But, you know, when we look at a lot of these issues, you know, one of the things we see is that, sometimes an administration will will look at a subset of an issue and tackle that either because they think the broader issue is too complicated or, or for whatever reason. And you know, throughout my career in different phases and different subjects, I think there's always a benefit to going after the entire thing. And so, when we're talking about whether it's, you know, immigration or we're looking in this particular instance on the on the drug trafficking side, it seems that we are focused on a node of the problem and not the entirety of the problem. So you know, widen that aperture to address more of what we need to will pay dividends down the road.

REICHARD: Anthony Ruggiero is a senior fellow with the Foundation for Defense of Democracies. Anthony, thanks for joining us.

RUGGIERO: Thanks for having me.

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