A Department of Homeland Security official warned a Senate committee this week that Mexican drug cartels could soon deploy weaponized drones at the border.
DHS’s Steven Willoughby wrote in testimony to the Senate Judiciary Committee that in the last six months of 2024, more than 27,000 drones were detected within 500 meters of the southern border.
It’s “only a matter of time before Americans or law enforcement are targeted in the border region,” he wrote.
But Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum dismissed that claim.
“There’s no information that there are new drones at the border right now,” Sheinbaum told reporters Wednesday.
Mexican drug cartels use drones for a variety of purposes, the Brookings Institution’s Vanda Felbab-Brown said. Cartels have used the technology to smuggle contraband across the border, for surveillance and also to target Mexican law enforcement and rival groups.
“The capacity has been there for a while,” Felbab-Brown said. “The cartels would have to be much less afraid of U.S. law enforcement to escalate in this manner.”
President Donald Trump has suggested he would consider drone strikes of his own inside Mexico to target cartels.
