CORPUS CHRISTI, Texas — There are said to be about 3-thousand border patrol agents from Corpus Christi down to the Mexican border. Many of them are focused on stopping the flow of illegal drugs from Mexico.
3News looked at how that effort is and spoke with one of the top interdiction officers in the entire country about how there seems to be an explosion of hard drugs hitting our streets.
Photos provided to 3News by our border patrol shows recent drug busts throughout the Rio Grande Valley sector. That area stretches from the border to Corpus Christi
“A lot of people think it’s a border issue a border problem but it’s not these drugs are heading into middle America,” said Border Patrol Supervisory Agent, Christian Alvarez. “We get them at our checkpoints we interdict there and keep them from hitting the streets of middle America.”
Alvarez also told 3News that marijuana is a constant problem and that last year they confiscated 118,000 pounds of pot. Meth is the hard drug that agents see the most of and in 2019 they seized about 4-thousand pounds of the illicit drug destined for all points north.
Mike Tamez, supervisor of the Nueces County District Attorney’s Criminal Interdiction Unit says the cartels have the pedal to the metal as their racing to move drugs from Mexico to the US as the economy continues to re-open and people now have the money for drugs.
“There has been a lot, I’m talking a lot of meth and a lot of Coke within the last two months. It’s all due in part to COVID restrictions and that’s after speaking with other interdiction groups around the country that’s one thing they’re saying and we can see it here as well,” said Tamez.
Tamez says he continues to try and get area law-enforcement agencies to join his effort to expand the task force to be able to patrol more of our highways and seize cartel drugs and cash.
“I just left a meeting today with some constables and we’re going to be adding folks to this criminal introduction initiative that we’re doing with the District Attorney’s Office it’s a huge plus putting more officers on the highway,” said Tamez.
Border patrol says it has a total of 3,000 agents covering the Rio Grande Valley sector. Many of those officers in that day-to-day battle to stop the smuggling of drugs. But many others are weighed down by having to deal with human smuggling. Now, officials say the problem has gotten better as just a few years ago there were about 15 hundred captured each day in our area. That number is now down to around 500.
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