But just as easily, that car could be a rolling death machine, a four-wheeled warehouse for the murderous drug fentanyl, headed for a fatal encounter with the drug addicts of America.
In a revealing article, The New York Times documented fentanyl being loaded into a vehicle for smuggling across the border and interviewed five Mexican cartel operatives—whose names were withheld to protect them from retaliation or arrest—thereby reconstructing the journey of fentanyl into the US.
“DEA continues to seize record amounts of illicit fentanyl every year.”
In a glowing shower of sparks from an acetylene torch in a seedy, cluttered auto garage in Culiacán, the Times watched the shipment begin its journey at the hands of a highly skilled cartel mechanic—who has been plying his trade for over 20 years—as he welded panels to hide the drugs inside the body of a car.
“Sometimes we place it inside the gas tank, others, under the hood by the engine, or even underneath the rocker panel,” he told the Times.
To fool X-ray machines at the border, he wrapped drugs in carbon paper, then sprayed the fentanyl with a chlorine solution to block patrol dogs from detecting the drug’s scent.
The six wrapped packs of fentanyl he was hiding in the car—13 pounds in total—would bring in $90,000. That, the mechanic said, was a smaller load than usual.
After the drugs were well hidden, a cartel driver set off for the US border, but first, a lead scout car drove ahead, looking for any signs that Mexican police may be waiting to make an arrest. Everyone was in close contact. It wasn’t a single daredevil driver—it was a complete, coordinated smuggling team.
And it was just one of many.
The driver of the car loaded with fentanyl received instructions throughout his journey as to which roads to take and which to avoid, as highways were being carefully watched.
The driver was then told to wait until a bribe could be arranged with a Mexican military checkpoint to let the vehicle through. Usually, sources said, there are at least four Mexican military posts along the route that have been paid off to ignore fentanyl cars.
Once through, the trip was again paused, while the driver’s cartel confederates arranged a bribe with an American border patrolman to allow the car to pass.
Safely back on the road, the lethal fentanyl was now headed directly to dealers in Arizona, to surface on American streets, to be used by American drug addicts and to help fill American graveyards.
These days, increased law enforcement surveillance has required that Mexican drug cartels become much more organized and sophisticated in their procedure for smuggling into the US the lethal substances that killed over 70,000 Americans in 2023, and that continue their bloody slaughter.
And as the US and Mexico step up efforts to catch fentanyl shipments, cartels have switched to sending smaller batches in multiple cars.
“This year, fentanyl is coming in like crazy. It’s going throughout the US, everywhere we hear about addiction and overdose problems,” Michael Humphries, port director in Nogales, said. “We don’t open the trunk and, ‘Hey, there’s a bag of fentanyl powder or pills.’ You know, we’re looking in tires, gas tanks, roof, floor, seats—anywhere you can imagine.
“We have disassembled engines before. One time, they pulled out two pistons from the engine. The void created by that was filled with narcotics, and the engine was still running.”
Easy money from drug smuggling means that corruption is rife along the entire border. The Sinaloa Cartel has “near-total control over the border region south of Arizona, giving the cartel easy access to the San Luis Rio Colorado and Nogales [ports of entry],” the DEA said in a 2024 report.
What no one seems to know is the quantity of fentanyl that isn’t seized.
That means, despite the millions spent on border security—and the best efforts of the DEA and other law enforcement—cartels are shockingly successful at smuggling fentanyl into the US, as the Times discovered firsthand. The driver of the load the Times followed from Culiacán even said the crossing “was easy.”
In April, as but one example, US Border Patrol Agent Jorge J. Jimenez, 54, of Rio Rico, was convicted for his role in clearing five cartel smugglers’ cars across the border for a total bribe of $20,000, according to prosecutors.
All of which means that government officials are having limited success stopping the flow of fentanyl into the US.
One report states, “DEA continues to seize record amounts of illicit fentanyl every year, from 6,875 kilograms of powder fentanyl in 2021 to nearly twice that amount, 13,176 kilograms in 2023, and close to 79 million pills containing fentanyl in 2023, more than triple the 23.6 million pills seized in 2021.”
Since last October, US Customs and Border Patrol say they seized 9,200 pounds of the drug.
The government has launched operation after operation. One, this year, Operation Hourglass, seized 1,484 pounds of fentanyl pills and powder, 15 pill press die molds and over 9,700 pounds of other illegal drugs like cocaine and heroin, along with $1,900,000 in US currency. Other operations, like Plaza Spike, Apollo, Blue Lotus, Rolling Wave, Artemis and Apollo X, have had very dramatic, cinematic names and seized various amounts of fentanyl and other drugs.
But the job of catching fentanyl smugglers is overwhelming—like searching for very tiny needles in an enormous haystack.
On an average day in March, 204,241 vehicles carrying 361,764 passengers crossed the southern US border, along with 104,926 pedestrians, 21,359 trucks with 37,456 cargo containers, 352 buses carrying 5,255 passengers and 31 trains with 3,390 rail cars.
In December 2024, 22,000 vehicles entered the Otay Mesa point of entry each day. At San Ysidro, nearly 40,000 vehicles entered the US every 24 hours.
How can you search them all?
You can’t.
The American Immigration Council states: “The sheer volume of this traffic, combined with the low chance of any individual person being subject to a more detailed screening, means that criminal organizations can easily smuggle narcotics: concealed with a traveler who is themselves concealed among all the other travelers, safe in the knowledge that only a small portion of people, vehicles or cargo containers can be searched at any given time.”
What no one seems to know is the quantity of fentanyl that isn’t seized and that evades authorities—just how much of it is illegally driven across the border to poison Americans?
Given the huge number of deaths, the best bet is A LOT.
In fact, a Department of Homeland Security report in 2023 estimates that US Customs and Border Protection manages to stop less than 3 percent of the cocaine smuggled through the southern border into the US. It’s a safe assumption that percentage applies to fentanyl as well.
“There’s a tremendous amount of illicit fentanyl and meth crossing between the ports of entry,” said Representative Clay Higgins of Louisiana.
So we won’t win this fight at the border.
The only sure way to end the fentanyl nightmare is to shut down the market for the drug. Americans must learn that it’s a deadly poison to be avoided at all costs.
Education is the answer for that.
The Church of Scientology–sponsored nonprofit Foundation for a Drug-Free World has actively battled fentanyl by publishing and distributing “The Truth About Fentanyl”—one of 15 Truth About Drugs booklets—as part of the Foundation’s award-winning educational program. To date, 160 million copies of the booklets have been distributed in 17 languages in 188 countries to warn of the dangers of fentanyl and all illicit drugs.
No, the fight can’t be won at the border, but it must be won at the gateway to the human mind.
The only way we will wipe this horror from our country is to arm ourselves and those we love with the truth.
