EXCLUSIVE — Texas will soon begin looking into whether Mexican cartels have attempted to build tunnels under the U.S.-Mexico border to facilitate drug and human smuggling into state-owned land, the Washington Examiner has learned.
Texas General Land Office Commissioner Dawn Buckingham directed her office on Monday to work with Customs and Border Protection to learn about signs of underground tunneling between the United States and Mexico, and to determine if there are signs of this activity.
In a memo sent on Monday to the Texas GLO’s Chief Clerk Jennifer Jones and General Counsel Jeff Gordon, Buckingham called for the state to begin surveilling state land along the 1,250-mile boundary with Mexico for evidence that it has been targeted for tunneling.
“In 2023, it was reported that an illegal-alien campsite was discovered approximately 30 miles north of the border in Hudspeth County, where vast stretches of uninhabited land and difficult terrain provide an advantage to those willing to evade law enforcement,” Buckingham wrote.
Buckingham anticipated that the massive downturn in illegal immigrant arrests at the southern border since President Donald Trump took office may prompt criminal organizations that smuggle people and drugs to turn to covert ways to smuggle, including by going underground.
“I hereby direct the appropriate divisions within the Texas General Land Office (GLO) Asset Enhancement Department to identify tracts of GLO land along the border, specifically Hudspeth County, that could be used for cartel-tunnel entry points into the United States,” Buckingham said. “I am directing our field personnel to begin surveilling these properties for evidence of tunnel entrances using our drones or other technology while carrying out their land inspections.”
Mexican cartels have historically built deep tunnels to move mostly drugs into the U.S. The tunnels may originate in a home near the border on the Mexico side and end in a warehouse or business on the U.S. side.
The Washington Examiner reported that during a four-state border trip in 2020, the addition of hundreds of miles of border wall in Arizona and California was expected to lead cartels to attempt to build tunnels, as well as go out to sea to smuggle people and goods.
“Don’t be fooled into thinking that the cartels and smuggling organizations won’t do whatever to try to adapt,” Anthony Porvaznik, former chief of Border Patrol’s Yuma sector in western Arizona, said at the time. “We fully expect to see more tunneling activity.”
Three types of tunnels are generally seen under the southern border: rudimentary tunnels comparable to gopher holes that only go several feet deep; those that connect into existing infrastructure systems, such as a drainage system; and sophisticated ones that can go as deep as 90 feet. The underground passageways may be equipped with electrical wiring, lighting, ventilation systems, and a track system for transporting large quantities of goods, such as narcotics.
Federal investigators typically learn about the elaborate kind of tunnel very early on and intentionally do not bust it until it is almost complete, former Border Patrol Chief Rodney Scott told the Washington Examiner in 2020.
In 2018, an Arizona man who owned an abandoned Kentucky Fried Chicken restaurant one block from the Arizona border was arrested after law enforcement discovered he had been trafficking drugs from a home in Mexico through a 600-foot-long underground tunnel to the kitchen of the fast-food joint.
The KFC kitchen contained an eight-inch hole in the floor that led 22 feet down to a wood-beam-lined walkway, which was 5 feet tall and 3 feet wide, according to CBP.
In 2017, Border Patrol agents apprehended 23 Chinese nationals who entered the U.S. from Mexico through an underground tunnel near San Diego, California.
Tunnels discovered by the federal government are filled in with concrete to prevent operations.
DRUG SMUGGLERS’ TUNNEL RAN 600 FEET FROM MEXICO TO KFC IN ARIZONA
The San Diego region’s soil composition makes it the most suitable for tunnel builders out of the nine regions by which the Border Patrol divides the southwest border, Border Patrol officials said in 2020.
Although a tunnel was discovered in West Texas’s El Paso in January, the rest of the state rarely sees tunneling due to the land composition.
