By Todd Bensman
AUSTIN, Texas – It’s early but not too early to note that President Donald Trump’s all-out World War on cross-border smuggling into the United States of fentanyl, the highly lethal synthetic opiate responsible for 120,000 American overdose deaths in recent years, is achieving remarkable impacts for the first time in a decade.
A key indicator of broader total smuggling at and between the southern border’s ports – U.S. law enforcement seizures of fentanyl — has dropped 50 percent since the November election, indicating a greater decline in total fentanyl smuggling.
That decline is attributable to Trump’s reset of U.S. Customs and Border Protection orders to aggressively hunt the drug as agents and thousands of active-duty soldiers are now free of processing hundreds of thousands of illegal immigrants crossing the southern border every month during the Joe Biden term. Trump policies quickly ended that mass migration distraction, as I wrote in The Daily Wire on March 20.
For context on what is happening now with inbound fentanyl flows, from 2019 to 2023, the amounts seized rose every year in tandem with American overdose deaths and remained high in the 2,000-pound monthly range during 2024.
But In December and January, President-elect Trump threatened devastating trade tariffs against Mexico if Mexico did not seriously crack down on the cartel production and smuggling even before he entered office.
From October 2024, Southwest Border fentanyl seizures fell from 2,000 pounds in 85 seizure events, to 990 pounds in 47 seizure events in January 2025, CBP seizure data shows. Then in February 2025, seizures plummeted even further to 590 pounds in 45 events. Combined, those January and February numbers are 50 percent less than the same period in 2024 and among the very lowest monthlies recorded since 2020.
Ranking administration officials, Border Patrol supervisors who hunt the drug on the ground, and media reporting from cartel laboratory-infested regions of Mexico tell us that March’s seizure numbers will solidify a reversal of a deadly decade-long upward fentanyl smuggling trend.
“Trump’s policies are having an impact, one hundred percent,” Acting Administrator of Trump’s Drug Enforcement Administration Derek Maltz told me for this Daily Wire story. And much more that Americans concerned with this scourge will find surprising.
A stunning cartel business pragmatism in the face of Trump
What Maltz said next almost defies commonly believed narratives about Mexico’s cartel crime syndicates, especially the idea that they are more impulsively violent than strategic and pragmatic. Yet cartel leaderships appear to have opted to a surprising strategic change in the face of Trump’s campaign against them over fentanyl, Maltz said he is given to understand in his current position.
The cartels appear to have determined that Trump is so bad for business over this one drug that they have decided to quit smuggling it into the American market and send it to Europe and other parts of the world instead. What to do about the lost revenue? Easy; make up the difference by shipping greater volumes of less-politically and physiologically lethal drugs like cocaine and methamphetamine, Maltz said.
“We got their attention [the cartels] with a lot of talk about the deaths in America, and the cartels got very concerned. It became a business decision.” Maltz told me.
Indeed, cartels in the fentanyl crosshairs are facing existential threats that no prior president in modern times has posed, over just this one line of cartel business.
While it’s too early for anyone to declare victory in the unprecedented Trump war on fentanyl smuggling into America, Maltz attributes slowing fentanyl smuggling directly to Trump’s controversial 25 percent trade tariffs, which compelled the first Mexican military raids against production labs in Sinaloa Cartel-controlled Culiacan, Mexico.
After his November 2024 election, Trump vowed to follow through with executive orders that would establish punishing tariffs on China for tolerating the export of precursor fentanyl-making chemicals to Mexico and on Mexico to compel raids that have been destroying laboratories almost since inauguration day.
He designated nine Mexican cartels as Foreign Terrorist Organizations subject to global financial isolation, surveillance and terrorism charges for anyone who partners with them.
The cartels no doubt also felt heat from unspecified threats of possible U.S. military action against them and their labs as Trump increased U.S. spy flights over Mexico, repositioned CIA officers into Mexico, deployed war ships to the Pacific and Gulf of America, and put specialized light infantry divisions on the southern border facing Mexico.
An unexpected source of Trump credit; The New York Times
As part of the Trump administration, Maltz might be expected to lose some credibility crediting his boss’s policies for good news about fentanyl.
Except that Maltz is hardly alone in attributing Trump’s policies to early apparent success. Natalie Kitroeff, the New York Times’ Mexico City bureau chief toured some manufacturing labs in the city of Culiacan with another reporter in December 2024, the Sinaloa Cartel-controlled city believed to be Mexico’s central hub for manufacturing fentanyl with well over 100 labs.
In a March 2025 interview on the newspaper’s The Daily podcast, Kitroeff said she returned to Culiacan after Trump’s inauguration “to see whether all of the pressure that Trump had put on Mexico had led to real changes, whether any of this actually made a difference.”
Kitroeff’s conclusion, after serendipitously witnessing Mexican troops raiding labs as she drove through Culiacan on the follow-up trip?
“It was really remarkable. The dynamics, it seemed, had completely changed from the last time we were there,” she said, adding that her cartel sources “told us there was basically no production of fentanyl happening in the city. It had totally plummeted, fallen off a cliff” because “there is such an intense crackdown by the government right now.”
“Is this all because of Trump,” the show’s host Michael Barbaro asked Kitroeff?
“Yeah, I think that’s what it looks like to a lot of people, a lot of regular Mexicans, a lot of cartel members, and a lot of security experts who have been studying this for a long time,” she responded.
“I think it’s pretty clear that the amount of progress, arrests, raids, lab busts, the pace of these actions is something that we’ve not seen in recent history in Mexico. One analyst told us, we’ve seen in one month what we might have seen in years,” Kitroeff continued. “I think what we’ve seen is that at least in this context, in this month, and in this place, the tariffs worked, for now at least.”
The reporter and Maltz said production still goes on elsewhere in Mexico.
But Maltz said his government intelligence suggests the cartels are contemplating shipping the drug to Europe, Australia and to other wealthy developed countries but not as much to the United States because of the Trump heat.
“They’re going to produce it and ship it over that way instead,” he said. “There’s a very good chance that other parts of the world may be getting shipments of fentanyl from the cartels, unless they just curtail the production altogether, which I don’t see happening.”
He and others also note that U.S. law enforcement began seizing higher volumes of cocaine and methamphetamine smuggled over the border since Trump’s election instead of fentanyl, also suggesting a self-preserving cartel strategy change.
What about American deaths?
Another vital indicator that warrants tracking as a means to judge the longer-term success of Trump’s muscular fentanyl initiatives: overdose deaths.
It’s just too early to know how the apparently falling smuggling rates translate to saved lives because significant declines in overdose deaths began a year ago, according to the latest just-released Center for Disease Control report on the subject, which lags real time by four months. Death rates fell by 24 percent for the 12 months through September 2024, from 114,000 to a still outrageous 87,000. The CDC attributes the decline to better life-saving treatment and awareness programs inside the United States but also to a factor it dubs without elaboration “shifts in the illegal drug supply.”
That factor almost assuredly is a reference to a secretive deal that President Joe Biden bartered for Mexico in December 2023 to deploy 35,000 troops with orders to militarily contain illegal immigration flows in deep southern Mexico to help Biden’s presidential reelection campaign defend its border policies against Trump. Mexico responded to Biden’s favor request with major impactful force throughout the Biden or Harris reelection campaign that dramatically reduced human smuggling, as I frequently reported, and also no doubt hindered some fentanyl smuggling.
Trump watchers and all Americans who authentically care about the extreme damage this drug from Mexico has wrought on the United States should hope seizures continue to plummet as this likely means less is getting smuggled over. But Americans deserve to know if “shifts in illegal drug supply” are saving far more American lives and will continue doing so.
If the American body count number falls to pre-carnage norms, Trump will have earned his country’s enduring gratitude and a place of reverence in American history on that meritorious achievement alone.
So far, anyway, the earliest results give rise to optimism.
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