Drones and Border Cartels

WASHINGTON – Federal officials blamed the abrupt order to close airspace around El Paso, Texas for 10 days on an incursion by Mexican cartel drones, though it quickly became clear that civil aviation authorities were more worried about a new laser being tested to shoot down such threats.

The closure disrupted flights and took state and local officials by surprise, along with airlines.

The restrictions were lifted in less than eight hours on Feb. 11. But that was long enough to draw national attention to the growing threat of drone activity at the Southwest border, where drug cartels have embraced the technology for surveillance, attacks on each other and deliveries of contraband.

“Cartels are nothing if not innovative,” said Henry Ziemer, an associate fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. “The border is only secure as its weakest point, and drones dramatically help these groups in identifying those weak points and plotting out new routes for smuggling.”

A U.S. Customs and Border Protection official told Cronkite News that 34,682 drone flights were detected within 500 meters of the U.S.-Mexico in fiscal year 2025 – a figure not previously disclosed. That compares to 7,678 along the border with Canada.

In October, three explosive-laden drones struck a government building in Tijuana, Mexico, that houses the state attorney general’s office, just a mile from the California border.

In Arizona’s Yuma County, Sheriff Leon Wilmot, in office since 2013, recalls an uptick around 2020 when his deputies started to find string on roads, sometimes hundreds of feet worth in blue and red – tethers left behind when Mexican controllers dropped payloads.

Deputies found nets in residential backyards to catch the contraband.

“It’s a significant public safety threat that needs to be addressed,” Wilmot said, “because the cartels have unlimited budget, and they’re going to do what they need to do to get their product across, and they do not value human life.”

Lately, the sheriff said, the county gets three or four incursions across the border per week that he knows of.

Some drones are big enough for “a large dope drop,” he said. Others are small and quiet, ideal for scouting for law enforcement and to provide overwatch for the coyotes who smuggle people across the border.

For a small department like his, stretched thin across a county the size of Connecticut, drone mitigation is nearly impossible. So they mostly leave that to federal law enforcement.

“We’ve always been behind the eight ball with the cartels, because they’ve got the money we don’t,” the sheriff said.

Drone use by cartels

Criminals operating at the Southwest border began using drones to spot law enforcement in 2019, according to the Hague Centre for Strategic Studies, which cited an incident in El Paso in which a Border Patrol agent saw a small drone surveying the border for a group crossing into the U.S.

Drone use has increased steadily since then, according to a CSIS report by Ziemer. Within Mexico, cartels have used drones to attack law enforcement and rival gangs.

The cartels have used the Ukraine-Russia war for training.

Last July, Intelligence Online reported that cartels had sent “volunteers” to pitch in with Ukraine’s war effort. Their real goal, authorities said, was to gain advanced drone warfare expertise, in particular in the use of first-person view (FPV) drones, which are incredibly quick and maneuverable.

Ukrainian counterintelligence investigated at least one Mexican national who arrived in March 2024 using Salvadoran papers and the alias “Águila-7.” The man completed training in Lviv, where instructors became suspicious because he already had a high level of expertise.

Investigators determined that Águila-7 had been part of an elite Mexican special forces unit known as GAFE. Deserters from that unit founded the Zetas, an especially violent cartel.

Last July, Steven Willoughby, now the executive director of the Department of Homeland Security counter-drone program, testified in Congress that DHS tracked over 27,000 drones within 500 meters of the Southwest border in the last six months of 2024.

At a July 2024 hearing, Carl Landrum, vice president of civilian programs and strategy at Dedrone – a supplier of counter-drone systems – cited CBP data showing 37,000 drone sightings at the border in the previous nine months.

According to the International Narcotics Control Board’s 2024 annual report, drones are used to smuggle drugs from Morocco to Spain, at the India-Pakistan border and elsewhere.

Mexican authorities issued the first warnings about drug traffickers using unmanned aircraft in 2010. U.S. authorities detected 150 such aircraft crossing the border from 2012 to 2014.

In the second half of 2024, CBP seized more than 1,200 pounds of methamphetamine and other narcotics being transported by drone from Mexico, according to Willoughby’s testimony. In October 2023, CBP seized a drone carrying 3.6 pounds of fentanyl pills, enough to kill tens of thousands of people, he told lawmakers.

The International Narcotics Control Board reported that traffickers have shifted to custom-made drones capable of transporting up to 100 kilograms, or 220 pounds.

Like hobbyists in the U.S., many cartels started with off-the-shelf quadcopters, most of which are made by DJI, a leading Chinese manufacturer. By last May, at least one was using an FPV, according to a widely-cited social media post that purported to show the first such use by a cartel in Mexico.

That drone was identified as a DJI Avata 2, which sells for about $600 each. It was attributed to the Cártel de Jalisco Nueva Generación, or Jalisco New Generation Cartel.

The CJNG has its own “Drone Operators” unit. From 2021 to 2025, it was responsible for roughly one in five cartel drone attacks linked to a particular cartel – 42 incidents that resulted in 21 deaths, according to a report from the National Counterterrorism Innovation, Technology, and Education Center.

That was more than any other cartel, according to the report, which uses information from Armed Conflict Location & Event Data, a monitoring group.

By September, the Sinaloa cartel was also using FPVs as part of an arms race with the CJNG, according to a report from Stephen Honan, a fellow with the Atlantic Council’s Counterterrorism Project.

“In the criminal world, there is no intellectual property,” said Rodrigo Nieto-Gomez, a professor at the Naval Postgraduate School focused on border security. “Once somebody does something effectively, everybody else will copy.”

While the cartels have used drones to attack each other, the violence has not spread to the U.S. side so far.

“We think they’re too afraid to ever attempt something like that against us, military or police forces,” Nieto-Gomez said. “We are depending on their self-restraint to keep our agents safe, and that’s, for me, an unacceptable situation.”

Why drones are so difficult to stop

The Border Patrol uses radars, radiofrequency sensors and infrared cameras to detect drones along the border.

Intercepting a drone spotted on the U.S. side, though, is tricky.

Options include shooting a net to capture it or entangle its propellers, though net guns have limited range; flooding the radio frequencies that connect the operator and drone; and jamming to disrupt a drone’s satellite link.

Local law enforcement agencies like the Yuma County Sheriff’s Office typically don’t have such tools.

DHS does, and it’s planning to get more.

On Jan. 12, the department announced a $115 million plan to speed procurement of counter-drone technology in time for the World Cup and the celebrations related to the nation’s 250th birthday.

“This will help us continue to secure the border and cripple the cartels, protect our infrastructure, and keep Americans safe as they attend festivities and events,” Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem said in a press release.

On Dec. 30, DHS announced that the Federal Emergency Management Agency had awarded $250 million to the 11 states hosting FIFA World Cup events this year. It was FEMA’s biggest non-disaster grant ever.

The use of a military laser in El Paso shows the risk of trying to shoot down unmanned aircraft over urban areas.

The FAA ordered the 10-day ground stop at the city’s international airport out of concern for commercial flights.

“The challenge of securing the border from drones is the fact that there’s so much civilian presence there,” Ziemer said.

There’s also the risk that debris might fall on someone across the border.

“There’s real potential for a miscalculation that creates an international incident,” he said.

The SAFER SKIES Act, part of the 2026 National Defense Authorization Act signed into law in December, eases restrictions on disabling or destroying drones. Under previous law, only federal law enforcement was allowed to do so. Going forward, trained state and local law enforcement will be authorized to protect public gatherings, critical infrastructure and prisons against drones.

The act directs the departments of homeland security, defense and transportation to provide counter-drone technology and training.

An Arizona law from early 2025 provides immunity against lawsuits when a peace officer shoots down a drone within 15 miles of the border, if they suspect it was being used in smuggling or other illicit activity.

Lauren Bresette, the senior manager of government relations for the Security Industry Association, called the new federal law a “huge step forward” in recognizing drones as a national security threat.

But, she said, the training will prioritize local law enforcement agencies working on major events like the World Cup over agencies along the border.

“There’s so many ways that you can DIY a drone and then load it with any packages you want,” she said. “There’s YouTube videos that teach you how to do that. So as this technology has advanced and become way more widely acceptable to anyone, it’s become more and more of a threat that we need to keep our eyes on for homeland security purposes.”

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