The Cartels Have Gotten in on The Drone Wars

When we think of the chaos on the southern border, many of us probably imagine lines of illegal migrants trudging up a muddy riverbank behind a cartel mule and crawling through a hole in a fence before being loaded onto a bus heading to Chicago. What we probably don’t think of (at least as often) is someone piloting a high-tech, remote-controlled drone and conducting surveillance or making deliveries. And yet that’s increasingly what’s been happening, according to the American military and the Border Patrol. The cartels have stepped up their technology game and there are now literally thousands of drones crossing into American airspace every month. That sort of technological leap makes fighting off the cartels even harder than it already was. (NY Post)

More than 1,000 drones per month are crossing into US airspace near the border with Mexico, a top general told lawmakers Thursday.

The number of unmanned drone incursions is “alarming” and presents a “growing” potential threat to national security,  Air Force Gen. Gregory Guillot, the commander of North American Defense Command and US Northern Command, said during a Senate Armed Services Committee hearing. 

“The number of incursions was something that was alarming to me as I took command last month,” Guillot said in response to a question from Sen. Ted Budd (R-NC).

The Rio Grande Valley is a hotspot for drone activity according to another Border Patrol agent. They have seen as many as 2,000 there in a single month. It’s being reported that the cartels now have more drones on the border than our own forces do and by a wide margin. Despite the fact that drones are rather expensive, that’s probably not all that surprising. Our military and border enforcement workers are supposed to keep track of their budgets (at least in theory) but the cartels are making such ludicrous amounts of money through trafficking drugs and human beings that money is no object. If we manage to knock one down, they just put up another one.

Knocking them down when we manage to spot them is also more easily said than done. There are a lot of drones flying around the border all of the time. The news networks use them to gather footage and some of the locals along the border are reportedly using them as well for legitimate purposes. Mobile units have a hard time keeping track of all the traffic. If you just start shooting them down randomly, you’ll probably be hit with some lawsuits sooner or later and there is always the risk of collateral damage when you miss.

Most of the drone flights are not transporting illicit goods, though there are concerns that a few of them are for smaller, high-value items, including weapons. The majority of the flights are conducting surveillance, monitoring the movement of our troops and border patrol units, and looking for openings where they can get through. This allows the cartels to more easily evade detection and capture.

Of course, there is one way that this threat could definitely be mitigated to a major degree. If we finished building the wall and restricted all traffic over the border to the authorized crossing points, we could let the cartels do all of the aerial sightseeing they might wish to do. Who cares? If we spot one with a package, we could dispatch someone along the proposed border wall road to quickly retrieve it. (Or watch it and wait for someone to come pick it up and arrest them with the goods.)

Sadly, we are highly unlikely to see any significant progress on the wall while Joe Biden is still in office. He could have a big chunk of it finished before the election if he was motivated to do so, but he’s not. So the Cartel Airlines operation will probably remain in operation at least until he’s out of office and some sanity can be returned to the situation. (Fingers crossed.)