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US spy planes hunt for intel on Mexican drug cartels as surveillance flights surge near border

CNN — The US military has significantly increased its surveillance of Mexican drug cartels over the past two weeks, with sophisticated spy planes flying at least 18 missions over the southwestern US and in international airspace around the Baja peninsula, according to open-source data and three US officials familiar with the missions.

The flights, conducted over a 10-day period in late January and early February, represent a dramatic escalation in activity, current and former military officials say, and come as President Donald Trump directs the military to secure the border and deter cartels’ drug smuggling operations.

The Pentagon has historically flown only about one surveillance mission a month around the US-Mexico border, according to one former military official with deep experience in homeland defense. Typically, officials instead focus these planes on collecting intelligence on other priorities, such as Russian activity in Ukraine or hunting Russian or Chinese submarines.

The activity highlights how the military has already begun shifting finite US national security capabilities away from overseas threats to focus on the southern border, where Trump has declared a national emergency.

 

 

At least 11 of these recent flights around the US have been by Navy P-8s, a particularly prized plane with a sophisticated radar system that specializes in identifying submarines but is also capable of collecting imagery and signals intelligence.

One nearly six-hour flight on February 3 was conducted by a U-2 spy plane, one of the US military’s most venerated reconnaissance aircraft, designed during the Cold War for collecting high-altitude imagery of the Soviet Union.

Current and former military officials with deep experience in counternarcotics work on the border said they could not recall a U-2 being used for this purpose before.

 

A U-2 spy plane, seen in 2018.
A U-2 spy plane, seen in 2018.  Ben Margot/AP/File
 
 
A Navy P-8A Poseidon patrol aircraft, seen in 2024.
A Navy P-8A Poseidon patrol aircraft, seen in 2024.  Damon Coulter/SOPA Images/LightRocket/Getty Images/File
 
 
An Air Force RC-135 Rivet Joint, seen in 2011.
An Air Force RC-135 Rivet Joint, seen in 2011.  Master Sgt. William Greer/US Air Force/File
 
 

The flight paths span the US-Mexico border, with missions in California, Arizona and Texas. CNN also identified at least one longer mission that looped around the Baja peninsula and passed near Sinaloa on February 4. That plane, an Air Force RC-135 “Rivet,” specializes in hoovering up communications from the ground.

The flight track looping around the Baja peninsula has been in use “for a long time,” one defense official said. But it’s “getting more use now.”

Despite flying over US airspace along the border, these aircraft are capable of collecting intelligence deep within Mexico, former officials said.

Military takes lead on counternarcotics

The ramp-up underscores Trump’s determination to wield the military as the lead agency tackling counternarcotics and border security — two issues that have historically been led by domestic law enforcement agencies.

Less clear is how the Trump administration plans to leverage information it acquires. It could be used to build a body of evidence for further foreign terrorist designations, or even to identify information that could be given to the Mexican military to help target cartel activities.

Some current and former US officials expressed quiet concerns to CNN that the intelligence flights could be part of an effort to find targets for the US military to strike itself.

Trump has threatened to drop bombs on fentanyl labs and send special forces to take out cartel leaders, actions that could violate Mexico’s sovereignty and disrupt relations with the United States’ largest trading partner.

 

US Marines adjust concertina wire along the the Mexico-US border, as seen from Tijuana, Mexico, on February 6.
US Marines adjust concertina wire along the the Mexico-US border, as seen from Tijuana, Mexico, on February 6.  Jorge Duenes/Reuters
 

Trump has kicked off the process of designating cartels as foreign terrorist organizations, a move that has raised questions about the potential for direct US military action inside Mexico.

The president has also ordered thousands of additional active-duty troops to the border, even as migrant crossings are at their lowest level since 2020.

Those troops are assisting US Border Patrol and providing more intelligence specialists to assess threats and migrant flows, according to sources familiar with the planning. The troops are not authorized to perform law enforcement roles, such as making arrests or seizing drugs. They’re also barred from engaging with migrants other than helping transport them.

Current and former US officials see a clear effort to shift more responsibility for America’s counternarcotics mission to the military, which has decades of experience fighting other non-state terrorist groups around the globe that have some operational similarities to the cartels.

“I think the cartels would be foolish to take on the military, but we know they’ve taken on the Mexican military before, but now we have the United States military,” border czar Tom Homan told ABC News on Thursday. “Do I expect violence to escalate? Absolutely, because the cartels are making record amounts of money.”

A cartel scout looks through binoculars on the US-Mexico border in Sunland Park, New Mexico, on January 24.
A cartel scout looks through binoculars on the US-Mexico border in Sunland Park, New Mexico, on January 24.  Justin Hamel/Bloomberg/Getty Images
 
 

But former officials and analysts point out that cartels also differ from Islamist terror groups overseas in key ways. They are essentially commercial organizations, not ideological ones. They are not interested in governing populations or seizing territory. They in some cases are deeply entwined with parts of the Mexican government — which the US military actively partners with and supports.

“Yes, parts of the state collude with the cartels, but there are others resisting, and we need them — and [Mexican President Claudia] Sheinbaum most of all — to work with us,” Will Freeman, a fellow for Latin America studies at the Council on Foreign Relations, wrote in a recent essay in The New York Times.

That makes cartels a fundamentally different adversary from what the Defense Department is used to countering — part of why, until now, most of the military’s counternarcotics work has been done in support of law enforcement agencies such as the Drug Enforcement Administration and the Department of Homeland Security.

Among those designated as foreign terrorist organizations are groups such as ISIS, Boko Haram and Hamas, among others.

CNN’s Oren Liebermann and Sanika Tank contributed to this report.

Author: Avery Schmitz, Katie Bo Lillis, Priscilla Alvarez and Natasha Bertrand

Source: CNN:::

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