We Are Throwing Away Decades of Trust Built to Fight Global Drug Trafficking

The Trump Administration has made American communities less safe by draining and diverting the Department of Justice’s ability and capacity to fight global narcotics trafficking.

Despite its high-profile claims of recent success, this Administration has purposefully slashed the department’s drug-fighting abilities – well beyond the dissolution of the nationwide Organized Crime Drug Enforcement Task Forces program, as shown in former deputy director Thomas Padden’s previous article on Justice Connection Substack.

Eliminating Bilateral Drug Dialogues

The White House has pulled the Justice Department’s Criminal Division prosecutors away from bilateral drug dialogues that we previously pursued robustly with major narcotics source countries – nearly eliminating those dialogues completely.

Over the past several presidential administrations, the Criminal Division invested many years of work and talent in creating new working law enforcement partnerships with India and the People’s Republic of China (PRC) focused on reducing the supply of deadly synthetic opioids – primarily fentanyl and its many analogues – and their precursor chemicals on the global market. Specifically, prosecutors from the Narcotic and Dangerous Drug Section, along with senior leaders in the Criminal Division, participated in those discussions consistently.

Because of these efforts, in 2019 the PRC took the novel and impactful step of legally controlling and regulating fentanyl-related substances as a class instead of regulating individual drugs, which had led illicit producers to simply alter their chemical production formulas to create different equally-powerful drugs outside of the regulations.

This step and others allowed the PRC’s law enforcement agencies to work cooperatively with U.S. career law enforcement authorities in Beijing to focus on suspicious, gray-market shipments of fentanyl precursor chemicals from the PRC’s vast chemical production industry. Importantly, this in turn allowed U.S. investigators to obtain more and better evidence from the PRC to support U.S. prosecutions of Chinese precursor chemical suppliers and shippers.

These efforts were continuing to gain traction until February 2025, when Attorney General Bondi and her deputies essentially halted that work. Moreover, the Narcotic and Dangerous Drug Section was later fully closed and absorbed into the Money Laundering and Asset Recovery Section, further diminishing the department’s ability to prosecute large-scale narcotics cases and coordinate counterdrug programs with other agencies.

Severely Cutting Resources in Mexico and South America

The Administration has severely cut the number of attorneys working on multi-agency programs that gather first-hand evidence on the leaders of drug trafficking organizations (DTOs) in Mexico and South America.

These programs are often the only effective way to find our most-wanted cartel commanders hiding in drug-source countries and to develop witness testimony necessary to prosecute them in the U.S. For example, these programs played key roles in supporting the U.S. prosecutions of cartel leaders like Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman of Mexico’s Sinaloa Cartel, Dairo “Otoniel” Usuga David of Colombia’s Gulf Clan, and Ruben “El Menchito” Oseguera Gonzalez of Mexico’s New Generation Jalisco Cartel.

That’s the end result, but just as important are the close relationships that have been built with our law enforcement partners in Mexico, Colombia, and other countries. Those partnerships help our foreign counterparts cultivate sources of information and construct their own domestic cases against DTOs.

We have invested an immense amount of time, talent and money in building those relationships over the past several decades. The drastic cut in resources will result in fewer fugitives captured abroad and brought to stand justice in the U.S., along with fewer prosecutions developed domestically in those countries. That could embolden DTO leaders in Mexico, Colombia and other countries to surge even more synthetic opioids, cocaine, methamphetamine, heroin and other drugs to the U.S. market.

Mass Firing of State Department Staff

Staffing cuts beyond the Justice Department have also impaired efforts to fight drug trafficking. The Administration’s mass firing of State Department staff working on many of these international counternarcotics programs diminishes the U.S.’s ability to advance bilateral law enforcement relationships in drug source and transit countries.

These relationships – many of which have been standing for decades – are critical because they often lead to defendants being captured and then extradited to the U.S., necessary foreign-based evidence and witnesses being introduced in U.S. courtrooms, and high-level drug traffickers being prosecuted successfully in the U.S.

The President’s announcement signaling intent to withdraw tens of millions of dollars in annual U.S. counternarcotics financial support directed to Colombian law enforcement will further alienate our closest source-country counternarcotics ally since the 1990s, dampen Colombia’s cooperation with U.S. interests, and damage our efforts to extradite defendants and obtain important evidence. The U.S. has invested substantially in that cooperation for decades because it advances our interests, and we appear now to be approaching an unnecessary flashpoint.

Exodus of Career Prosecutors

This Administration’s unprecedented politically motivated terminations of career prosecutors in U.S. Attorneys’ Offices and in the Criminal Division, along with the resignation of many more out of principle, has eroded the crucial knowledge and talent base in those important components.

Those career prosecutors doing the daily work of supervising investigations and prosecuting cases cannot be quickly or easily replaced with others of equal experience and capability.

If the White House directs more criminal investigations based on political and personal vengeance through U.S. Attorneys whose chief qualification is loyalty to the President, more federal prosecutions will be rendered simply as spectacles, and more career prosecutors will likely be fired or leave on their own.

All of this will likely lead to fewer substantive prosecutions of real drug and other violent crime, damaging our neighborhoods and communities.

Together, all of these steps could lead to fewer drug seizures here, greater quantity and variety of drug supply across the country, and fewer and slimmer prosecutions of cartel leaders, their lieutenants, and local drug networks in the U.S.

Who wins and who loses then?

Joseph S. Gerbasi retired from the Department of Justice in March 2025 after a 28-year career there. He served as a line prosecutor in the Child Exploitation and Obscenity Section, as a special Assistant U.S. Attorney in the District of Columbia and the District of Alaska, and for the last 22 years as a trial attorney in the Narcotic and Dangerous Drug Section.