Alleged armed members of a Mexican drug cartel were found and arrested on the Texas side of the Southern Border this week.
Five people believed to belong to the Cartel Del Noreste were arrested Thursday in Fronton, Texas, by the Texas Department of Public Safety, National Guard and Border Patrol, according to Fox News.
Disturbingly, the group included some juveniles. Two men were armed with rifles, authorities said, and several were wearing tactical gear.
I’m told the group of 5 suspected CDN cartel members also had two pretty terrified looking juveniles with them who were later found in the brush after the group was arrested.
Photo: @TxDPS pic.twitter.com/G0N5mKTy45— Bill Melugin (@BillMelugin_) June 2, 2023
Cartels are already reaching far beyond Texas, according to KABB-TV.
“We have a lot of cartel activity in Mexican cartel activity in the state of Idaho, especially … Boise,” Sheriff Kieran Donahue of Canyon County, Idaho, said.
“So we have a lot of Hispanic gangs, a lot of activity, who deal the narcotics for the cartels, outlaw motorcycle gangs, who deal with drugs to the cartels, and that violence associated. So really, we’re all in the same fight is what it is,” he said.
Donahue said the Sinaloa Cartel and Cartel Jalisco Nueva Generacion are both strong in Idaho.
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The does not shock Richard Sanchez, a DEA special agent in charge who is based in the Rio Grande Valley.
“The Sinaloa Cartel has tentacles reach globally, they are in every state in the United States. They’re in 47 countries around the world we have identified, so their tentacles are strong, they are violent, and they use every means possible to ensure that they are able to make as much money as they can,” he said.
Idaho is not the only state far from the border seeing evidence of cartel activity.
Sheriff Sam Page of Rockingham County, North Carolina, said he deals with stash houses and cartel-linked crime.
“What I’ve come to found over the past 13 years that what comes to the border doesn’t stay there. It comes to communities all across America,” he said.
The sheriff added: “It’s come to fruition, that if we fail to secure our borders, every sheriff in America will become a border sheriff.”
“Sheriffs across the country are experiencing issues that started at the border, and then continue to move through the country and come into our communities,” said Page.
California has multiple locations where cartel-funded farms illegally grow marijuana on public lands, according to the Courier-Journal.
“There are entire areas — in the Mendocino National Forest, Six Rivers, Angeles — that are simply no-go areas because of the high level of cartel activity,” Rich McIntyre, director of the Cannabis Removal on Public Lands Project, said.
“You’re hiking in the woods, and all of a sudden, you’re looking down the business end of an AK-47.”
