WASHINGTON – U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi, the DEA and U.S. Attorney’s Office for New Mexico held a news conference Tuesday to discuss a historic drug operation.
Bondi announced the U.S. made its largest fentanyl bust in the nation’s history, with 11.5 kilograms of fentanyl including 3 million fentanyl pills taken off the streets.
She says the pills were stamped as Oxycodone.
She says the operation targeted one of the largest and most dangerous drug trafficking and foreign terrorist organizations, the Sinaloa Cartel.
Bondi says the drugs were in New Mexico, Arizona and Utah.
She says agents also seized approximately $5 million in cash, 35 kilograms of methamphetamine, 7.5 kilograms of cocaine, 4.5 kilograms of heroin and 49 rifles and pistols.
“It took months and months of work and investigation leading up to smaller buys, smaller cases to get this massive amount of drugs and guns off our streets,” Bondi said.
A key player in the U.S. government’s battle to combat the flow of deadly fentanyl is a team at a little-known research lab in northern Virginia that’s working to analyze seized narcotics and gather intelligence to find ways to stop the supply.
Attorney General Pam Bondi traveled to the Drug Enforcement Administration lab to meet with chemists who are tasked with identifying the ever-evolving tactics employed by cartels to manufacture drugs flowing across the southern border.
“We are trying to reverse engineer what the cartels are doing at any given time,” senior DEA research chemist David Guthrie told Bondi. “Whenever something new shows up, it’s our job to figure out how that got in there. Did they change the recipe? Are they using a new compound?”
Bondi donned a blue DEA lab coat as she toured the facility in an effort to put a spotlight on a key Trump administration priority to combat the illicit flow of fentanyl that’s blamed for tens of thousands of overdose deaths every year.
The chemists showed Bondi the ease with which cartels are able to produce fentanyl, and detailed how their team is working to identify new compounds to help law enforcement keep illicit drugs off the street.
“That’s how easy it is to kill Americans,” Bondi said after watching blue pills shoot out of a pill press seized by investigators that’s capable of producing 15,000 pills an hour.
The Trump administration has sought to increase pressure on violent drug cartels and criminal gangs, charging an alleged high-ranking member of Tren de Aragua in Colombia with terrorism offenses earlier this month.
The White House has linked the fentanyl issue to his tariffs, saying the president is working to hold Mexico, Canada, and China “accountable to their promises of halting illegal immigration and stopping poisonous fentanyl and other drugs from flowing into our country.”
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