The U.S. is using unarmed drones to conduct surveillance of drug cartels inside of Mexico, according to U.S. and Mexican officials, highly secretive operations that helped Mexican officials arrest major drug figures like Sinaloa cartel drug lord Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán.
The flights, launched from airfields inside Mexico using Department of Homeland Security and CIA drones, have been used to seek out remote fentanyl labs and track the movements of internationally wanted figures like Guzmán, the officials told The Wall Street Journal.
A U.S. Predator drone was in the air assisting Mexico when El Chapo was captured at the Sinaloa beach resort town of Mazatlán in 2014.
After the drug lord escaped a Mexican maximum security prison by tunneling out, U.S. drones took to the skies again to hunt El Chapo, surveilling his movements for weeks.
On the eve of a 2015 operation to recapture the Sinaloa gangster, officials called off the plan after getting word that actor Sean Penn and Mexican soap opera star Kate del Castillo were planning to meet with El Chapo for an interview and to discuss potentially making a movie about his life.
By January 2016, another strike was planned to capture El Chapo in the city of Los Mochis. The drug lord initially evaded capture by fleeing in a secret tunnel under a bathtub in a safe house and then walking through a sewer, but he was apprehended by a police officer.
General Ricardo Trevilla, Mexico’s defense minister, said last week that U.S. drone intelligence assisted in the capture of the security chief for Iván Achivaldo Guzmán, one of El Chapo’s sons, who have assumed their father’s drug business as he sits in a U.S. federal prison on a life sentence.
Officials have also reportedly credited the drone program with helping locate another Chapo son, Ovidio Guzmán, who was captured after a massive gun battle in 2023 between Mexican special forces and cartel soldiers at a fortified compound north of Culiacán, the capital of the cartel’s home base of Sinaloa state.
The flights have reportedly been taking place since the early 2000s.
“There’s a cooperation,” Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum said earlier this month. “These flights are part of a coordinated operation between the U.S. and Mexican governments, and have been done for many years.”
Trevilla told reporters this week U.S. drone flights “were not ordered by Donald Trump to watch Mexican cartels,” and rather are a regular part of U.S.-Mexico security cooperation, where Mexican officials formally request assistance and lay out the extent of U.S. involvement.
The flights go “well into sovereign Mexico,” a U.S. official told The New York Times, which this month first reported the existence of the CIA drone flights in Mexico.
The unmanned drones, which aren’t presently authorized to take lethal action, are used to detect fentanyl labs, which emit chemical signatures visible from the air, according to the report.
The U.S. military’s Northern Command has also been flying surveillance flights above the border region and deployed a task force of intelligence analysts to the international boundary line, per the paper.
The nature of security U.S. and Mexican operations against the cartels remains a sensitive and highly watched topic in both countries.
In the U.S., the Trump administration has designated six top Mexican drug gangs as foreign terrorist organizations, opening the door to potential military strikes.
“They know that at any time, they could be anywhere — if it comes to that, if it comes to that — they could be in a car, they could be in a house, and they could be vaporized,” Todd Zimmerman, the Drug Enforcement Administration’s special agent in Mexico City, recently told the Los Angeles Times of the designation. “They’ve seen it in the Afghan and Iraq wars. So they know the potential that’s out there.”
The White House has also declared a national emergency, with plans to send up to 4,000 National Guard troops to the border.
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth recently said that when it comes to taking on the cartels, “All options are on the table,” including cross-border raids.
The administration has threatened Mexico with major tariffs if it doesn’t step up enforcement against drug trafficking and illegal immigration.
South of the border, President Sheinbaum has sought to balance cooperating with the Trump administration and allaying domestic concerns about U.S. overreach.
She’s promised to send thousands of national guard troops of her own to the border, while at the same time, her party has proposed to reform the Mexican constitution to further guarantee the country’s sovereignty in the face of foreign intervention.
“This cannot be an opportunity for the United States to invade our sovereignty,” Sheinbaum said this month of the terror group classification, saying Mexico sought collaboration, not “subordination,” working with the U.S.
