Heroin is getting cheaper in the United States because of the ease with which Mexican cartels are smuggling drugs across the southern border, an Arizona sheriff told lawmakers Monday.
“With heroin, [the price has] actually gone down,” Cochise County Sheriff Mark Dannels testified at a House Homeland Security subcommittee field hearing in Arizona.
That observation came as part of a panel of witnesses who argued that drug cartels dominate the southern border, notwithstanding the enforcement successes touted by Department of Homeland Security officials. Increased security in some parts of the border has driven drug smuggling operations to rural areas such as Cochise County, which is particularly vulnerable because drug cartels can use two cities on the Mexican side of the border as staging grounds, according to witnesses at the hearing.
Dannel emphasized that cartels have deployed sophisticated technology in support of their drug smuggling operations. “Aside from the normal use of human backpackers (mules), clandestine tunnels, and vehicles, the trafficking organizations have resorted to the use of ultralight aircraft, which cannot be detected by normal radar, cloned vehicles appearing to be law enforcement or other legitimate companies, and most recently the use of catapults, which hurl bundles of marijuana into the U.S. to awaiting co-conspirators,” he said in his prepared remarks.
That testimony was buttressed by another panels who suggested that senior officials at U.S. Customs and Border Protection are deceiving lawmakers by providing misleading data about the agency’s efforts.
“If I was a member of Congress from a non-border State and I sat through a CBP briefing about how the border was secure I would be inclined to believe them,” National Border Patrol Council member Art Del Cueto said in his prepared remarks. “The entire border is controlled by Mexican drug cartels. Nothing moves along this border without their permission and illegal aliens and narcotics are simply two lines of business within the same organization … the money that the cartels earn from illegal alien smuggling underwrites the same organizations that are flooding our streets with narcotics.”
CORRECTION: An earlier version of this story misidentified the agency whose briefing Art Del Cueto mentioned. The Washington Examiner regrets the error.
