U.S. Customs and Border Protection officers working at a northern border port of entry stopped a tractor-trailer headed from Washington state into Canada that was loaded with $3 million of cocaine.
Officers assigned to the Blaine, Washington, crossing received an anonymous trip on May 7 about a truck that would be hauling millions of dollars of the illegal white powder across the international border, according to Whatcom County Superior Court records obtained by the Bellingham Herald.
Customs officers stopped a blue 2000 Freightliner with British Columbia tags towing a trailer with Oklahoma plates as it attempted to pass through outbound inspection lanes May 9. The officers found five handbags in the back of the trailer that contained 132 pounds of cocaine, worth $3 million in street value.
The driver, 41-year-old Ajitpal Singh Sanghera, told federal officials he had picked up the trailer in Seattle earlier Saturday. Sanghera had crossed the U.S.-Mexico border more than 40 times since January, leading CBP to believe he is part of a transnational criminal organization that moves drugs.
Sanghera was booked into Whatcom County Jail on suspicion of a controlled substance with intent to deliver, according to public records. He is being held on $100,000 bail. It was not clear if he is a U.S. or Canadian citizen. The CBP did not immediately respond to a request for additional information.
The CBP’s Air and Marine Operations arm, along with the U.S. Coast Guard, seize billions of dollars worth of cocaine annually by monitoring boat traffic off the western and eastern coasts of South America, where most cocaine is grown and made into the final product then shipped to Mexico or Caribbean islands. Once drugs are smuggled into the United States, the further north they are transported, the more the value increases due to the cost of transportation.
