Federal customs officers are making more drug seizures in Chicago than any other part of the country due to a growing drug-mailing trend that is inundating O’Hare International Airport, according to homeland security officials.
The Chicago field office of U.S. Customs and Border Protection finished the 2018 fiscal year last September with more drug seizures than any of the agency’s 20 regional offices nationwide, according to data obtained by the Washington Examiner.
Chicago made 25,668 busts in fiscal year 2018, more than double the number it made in the prior year. Most of those involved the interception of narcotics being sent through the mail, though officials declined to offer more specific numbers.
New York was the runner-up with around 11,600 seizures.
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Chicago Field Office spokesman Steven Bansbach said the amount of illicit narcotics being found has so far remained high in fiscal year 2019. The region, which is comprised of 12 Midwestern states, is on pace to finish fiscal 2019 close to last year’s record number.
Bansbach cited a number of factors for the dramatic spike, but said the biggest contributor the quadrupling of the amount of foreign mail coming into O’Hare.
“It’s an increase in mail,” Bansbach said during a phone call this week. “As the volume increases, the more drugs we’re gonna catch … You have 100 parcels and one has drugs. Now if you make that 500 parcels, five have drugs.”
CBP’s mail-inspecting facility is located just outside O’Hare. Approximately 20 percent of all incoming international mail comes into the U.S. through that airport.
Seized items ranged from envelopes containing “dime bags” of cocaine and GHB, the date rape drug, to packages that try to conceal drugs inside toys, lotions, and other items. Concealment has made it difficult for prosecutors to go after online buyers or shippers because the receiver could argue they ordered the item itself, not the drugs hidden inside.
CBP officials at O’Hare also decided in mid-2017 to focus on nabbing drug packages in the coming year. They increased personnel by 20 percent, which has led to an increase in seizures.
“When we announced this fight against the opioid epidemic in the United States, we really said, ‘This is the forefront … for us here in Chicago. This is where we’re going to dedicate the resources that we have to looking for as many of these narcotics as we can and trying to stop them from coming in,'” Chicago Area Port Director Matthew Davies said during a tour of the facility last fall.
