THE NEW YORK TIMES – The teenager practiced driving from his apartment in San Diego down to Tijuana and back, on the orders of the criminals he was working for in Mexico.
He rehearsed how he would respond to questions from U.S. border officers. He tracked when the drug-sniffing dogs took a break.
The men who were paying him had cut a secret compartment into his car big enough to fit several bricks of fentanyl. When they loaded it up for the first time and sent him toward the border, Gustavo, who was only 19 at the time, began to tremble.
At the checkpoint, he steadied himself like he had practiced, and calmly told the border officers that he was just heading home.
They looked at his American passport — and waved him through.
Since 2019, when Mexico overtook China to become the dominant supplier of fentanyl in the United States, cartels have been flooding the country with the synthetic opioid.
Mexico has been the source of almost all of the fentanyl seized by U.S. law enforcement in recent years.
Former President Donald J. Trump and other Republicans have blamed President Biden’s border policies for the fentanyl pouring into the United States, playing on a widespread belief that undocumented immigrants are responsible for bringing it in.
In reality, the largest known group of fentanyl smugglers is not made up of immigrants traversing the desert or moving through secret tunnels — they are Americans coming through legal ports of entry.
More than 80 percent of the people sentenced for fentanyl trafficking at the southern border are U.S. citizens, federal data shows.
Officials say those numbers point to a new and alarming strategy:
Mexican drug cartels are turning thousands of Americans into fentanyl mules, deploying a torrent of couriers who can easily cross back and forth into their own country.
