Mexico’s dangerous Sinaloa drug cartel is now deeply entrenched in major American cities, according to retired Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) Special Agent Brian Townsend.
“We have some larger locations that are well known for Sinaloa control, like Chicago, Los Angeles, Phoenix, Tucson, Dallas, Atlanta, and New York City,” he told Fox News. “But they have distribution points throughout the United States, and from there, they use those hubs, and then spoke out from there into our communities.”
And this, he added, is why 300 Americans are dying per day from drug overdoses, particularly from fentanyl.
(Video Credit: Fox News Digital)
The way it works, according to Townsend, is that the cartels buy the chemicals needed to make these drugs for “pennies.”
“It’s primarily from China,” he explained. “There are other countries and other suppliers, like India, involved. But China is by far number one. From the ports, they are trucked to various locations where the manufacturing of fentanyl occurs. And then from there, they’re smuggled into the United States.”
And the cartels are “very good at this,” he added, saying that they’re “making a lot of money killing Americans with it.”
Irina Tsukerman, a U.S. national security lawyer, meanwhile told Fox News that the Sinaloa cartel’s track record “even surpasses the peak impact of the Sicilian mafia families.”
“With cities like Chicago, Denver, and even Oklahoma turning into major operation hubs, Sinaloa has a throttling national hold, a shadow state within a state waging a lethal war on the American people,” she said.
This is the most recent map from the DEA (2016) that shows the territory control breakdown by cartel in the U.S.
The Sinaloa Cartel is everything that is in orange, which is 95% of the map pic.twitter.com/h0DhdJqVbj
— Ryan Saavedra (@RealSaavedra) November 27, 2019
The cartel is believed to own numerous shell companies and businesses, including restaurants and real estate. It’s also been accused of using cryptocurrency to avoid being detected and using money laundering tactics to disguise its illicit earnings.
Tsukerman added that what makes the Sinaloa cartel particularly dangerous is it controls “every stage of the drug supply chain,” which allows it to maximize its profits and keep its drugs pure.
The Sinaloa cartel is the same cartel that Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman ran before he was seized and imprisoned by U.S. authorities.
According to Townsend, the cartel operates on a “franchise model.”
“While many of us are used to major decisions being made at the top of the organization chart, in the Sinaloa cartel, you have people who may be at the bottom of the organizational chart making huge decisions,” he said.
“They don’t stop and say, ‘Hey, we need to get hold of El Chapo in prison and see if he’s OK with this.’ These are major decisions happening throughout the organization,” he added.
Townsend and Tsukerman’s interview with Fox News comes amid reports that the Trump administration has been spying on the Mexican cartels, including the Sinaloa cartel, using drones.
“The CIA under President Donald Trump has been covertly flying MQ-9 Reaper drones over Mexico to spy on drug cartels,” CNN reported Tuesday.
“The MQ-9 drones used for the missions are not currently armed. But they can be equipped with payloads to carry out precision strikes. The US regularly uses them to target suspected terrorists in Syria, Iraq, and Somalia,” the reporting continues.
The fact that the drones are capable of being armed already has critics theorizing that President Donald Trump may be intent on striking the cartels at some point in the near future.
| BREAKING: The Trump administration’s CIA has been flying the de*dly 32 Million MQ-9 Reaper drones over Mexico, tracking cartel operations in real-time.
President Trump is bringing the fight straight to their doorstep. The days of hiding in the shadows are over. pic.twitter.com/FAXmnivfca
— Hank™ (@HANKonX) February 18, 2025
And indeed, it was only days ago that the Trump administration reportedly began drawing up a list of south-of-the-border cartels that it’d like to designate as terrorist groups.
The list reportedly includes the Sinaloa cartel, in addition to Tren de Aragua, MS-13, the Jalisco New Generation cartel, the Northeast cartel, the Michoacán family, the United cartels, and the Cartel del Golfo.
Weirdly enough, this announcement upset Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum, who responded by threatening to sue U.S. gun manufacturers.
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V. Saxena is a staff writer with a decade of experience as a professional writer, and a lifetime of experience as an avid news junkie. He holds a degree in computer technology from Purdue University. Saxena also contributes to BizPac Review.
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