Cash Cows: Gangs Allegedly Smuggling Drugs Across Border Inside Cattle

The Mexican cartels appear to be smuggling drugs into the U.S. inside cows, according to sources interviewed at the border in Texas and New Mexico last week. The cartels are known to use cattle cars to smuggle drugs, but also seem to be using the cattle themselves as couriers.  

“When they do the spaying process, they’ll ship the drugs in the cows,” Hudspeth County, Texas, Sheriff Arvin West told The Daily Signal, adding the cartels are nothing if not ”creative.”

Sporting a cowboy hat and a badge pinned to his chest, West said the cartels began using bovine couriers for drugs when Mexico started shipping more heifers — young female cows that have never given birth — into the U.S. due to shrinking U.S. cattle inventory.  

The U.S. imported more than 1.2 million head of cattle from Mexico in 2024, a little over 400,000 of which were heifers, according to Oklahoma State University. U.S. regulation requires every heifer be spayed in Mexico before entering the U.S., and the cartels found a way to exploit this U.S. policy.  

Former New Mexico state Sen. Steve McCutcheon is a cattle rancher himself and explained the practice to The Daily Signal during a visit in Luna County, New Mexico.  

The cartels have a network of livestock buyers in Mexico who pay cash for cattle, McCutcheon said. When the heifers are spayed, if the cow is being used for smuggling, a vacuum sealed bag of drugs is inserted inside before the animal’s flank is stapled back together, he explained.  

Dr. Gary Thrasher, a large-animal veterinarian based near the border in Arizona, spent over a decade working with veterinarians in Mexico to train them how to properly spay heifers. Cattle are not prone to infection in the same way horses or other large animals are, Thrasher told The Daily Signal on a call Monday.  

“It’s really a rare thing for a cow to have an infection,” Thrasher said, explaining that it would be possible for a cow to be physically unaffected by a sealed bag of drugs inside it. While putting a bag of drugs in a heifer would not be difficult, removal would be challenging, Thrasher said, adding that it would also be expensive, but after spending years working on both said of the border, the veterinarian said, the cartels “may be doing it.” 

The cartels operate their own trucking companies that are legitimate American businesses, but are “owned and funded by the cartels,” McCutcheon said. While the cattles’ papers are checked at the border, detection of drugs inside animals poses a unique challenge to Customs and Border Protection officials.  

Once the cattle make it through a port of entry, the cartels remove the drugs from the cattle in the U.S. before the animals are sold in a legal sale. Then, the cartels trade the drugs for cash in the U.S., the drug money is hidden inside the trucks that go back into Mexico, and that cash can then be used to buy more cattle, and the cycle repeats, McCutcheon explained.

“This is something we have not encountered, nor is there any evidence to suggest that this is happening at the Santa Teresa port-of-entry cattle crossing,” Roger Maier, public affairs specialist for U.S. Customs and Border Protection told The Daily Signal in an email Monday. 

The Daily Signal also reached out to the USDA’s Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service to ask whether the office was aware of this possible methodology of drug smuggling.  

“Combating drug smuggling is not part of the APHIS mission,” Michael Stepien, a spokesman for the USDA’s Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service, told The Daily Signal when asked about the unique drug smuggling technique.  

Over the course of his 29-year career at the CBP, Robert Perez says he never encountered a cow being used to smuggle drugs into the U.S., but added such a practice “does not surprise me, because the lengths with which the cartels … will go to smuggle and conceal the drugs, it really knows no bounds.”  

Perez, who retired in 2021 after serving as CBP deputy commissioner for more than three years, says during his career, the CBP did encounter a dog being used to smuggle drugs into the U.S.  

“I’ve seen … planted narcotics in dogs where … quite inhumanely—cruelly, you know—the animals were operated on, and then drugs were inserted in to the animal in a way that … would allow the animal to obviously persevere through coming through the border only to then later have the drugs extracted,” Perez said in a call Monday.  

Using cattle and cattle cars to smuggle the drugs is not only appealing to cartels due to the detection challenges, but cattle cars tend to move faster than other trucks, according to James Frietze, who spent 25 years serving in the New Mexico State Police, retiring in 2019.  

During transport, cows lose weight because they are not eating, Frietze explained. The faster the livestock can reach their destination, the less weight they lose, the healthier they stay, and the more money the seller makes. Likewise, more drugs moving into the U.S. faster also means more money for the cartels.    

Speaking over a cup of coffee in downtown El Paso, Texas, Frietze told The Daily Signal some in law enforcement in New Mexico think the cartels are backing away from human smuggling due to Trump’s actions to secure the border. Instead, the cartels are expected to increase drug smuggling; specifically, of methylphenidate and cocaine.  Methylphenidate is used to treat attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder.

Given increased security at the border under the Trump administration, the cartels are “going to start doing more tunnels,” Frietze said, noting that U.S. law enforcement’s use of drones is pushing some drug smuggling underground.  

In January, authorities discovered a tunnel under the border wall connecting Juárez, Mexico, to El Paso.  

CBP seized 275,000 pounds of drugs at the southern border in fiscal year 2024. Already in fiscal year 2025, which began Oct. 1, CBP has seized more than 81,000 pounds of drugs at the southern border.  

Frietze says his concern is the drug smuggling will increase in New Mexico “because Texas is doing what it needs to do” to secure its border.  

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