DEA opens fentanyl lab on the border and warns of Mexican drug cartels’ global reach
Anna Giaritelli
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The Biden administration is stepping up its fight to curtail the burgeoning fentanyl epidemic that is sweeping the United States and expanding far beyond the U.S. borders.
Drug Enforcement Administration Administrator Anne Milgram informed House lawmakers during an oversight hearing Thursday that the federal agency recently opened a lab in the border city of El Paso, Texas, called the Joint Intrepid Lab.
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“It is a fentanyl profiling lab with the idea being that we will immediately test fentanyl as quickly as we can, as it gets seized at the border so we can determine who is responsible for making that fentanyl, what it is made up of, and also have an early warning system for future drugs,” Milgram testified before the House Judiciary Subcommittee on Crime and Federal Government Surveillance.
The new facility will allow fentanyl that Customs and Border Protection’s Office of Field Operations officers seize from pedestrians and vehicles at the ports to be immediately taken over to the lab for inspection.
Scientists can determine what precursor ingredients are used and connect the dots as to which Chinese companies’ chemicals were being used by which cartel and where drug smugglers were moving the product into the United States.
Milgram said the DEA has overhauled its approach to countering illicit drugs since the arrival of fentanyl over the past decade. Two Mexican transnational criminal organizations, the Jalisco cartel and the Sinaloa cartel, are the main proprietors manufacturing fentanyl and pushing it into the U.S. as well as dozens of other countries where they have a presence.
The DEA has expanded its global reach to match the cartels’ expansion. The agency has launched three teams: one to track Jalisco, a second to track Sinaloa, and a third that focuses solely on money laundering between the Mexican cartels and the Chinese.
“They are mapping the cartels. They’re analyzing these criminal networks that now exist in more than 40 countries. And they’re developing targeting information on the members of those networks wherever they operate across the globe,” Milgram said of her DEA agents.
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The DEA targeted U.S.-based drug cartel members recently and arrested more than 3,300 people who belonged to the Sinaloa and Jalisco cartels between May 2022 and May 2023.
“These cartels are hiding fentanyl in fake pills that look like Oxycodone, Xanax, Percocet, Adderall,” Milgram said. “They’re also mixing it with cocaine, heroin, and methamphetamine, all to induce Americans to take fentanyl without knowing it and to drive addiction.”