Staggering Philly drug bust shows traffickers turning to East Coast
By MICHAEL RUBINKAM | ASSOCIATED PRESS | JUN 19, 2019 | 10:14 PM
If drug interdiction can be compared to a giant game of whack-a-mole, federal law enforcement officials delivered one mighty wallop this week when they raided a container ship at Philadelphia's port and discovered a staggering amount of cocaine. Hidden inside seven shipping containers were 33,000 pounds of the illicit drug, one of the largest caches ever intercepted on U.S. shores and a quantity that’s almost “beyond comprehension,” as Patrick Trainor, a spokesman for the U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency in Philadelphia, put it Wednesday. Federal officials estimated the seized drugs had a street value of more than $1 billion.
The feds' find was another sign that traffickers are turning to East Coast seaports as a result of increased law enforcement pressure along the country's southwest border, a development cited by the drug enforcement agency in its latest national threat assessment. It was at least the third major bust in Philadelphia and New York since February.
"As soon as interdiction puts pressure on one place, it just pops up somewhere else. We've continually seen that," said Nicholas Magliocca, a University of Alabama researcher who studies how traffickers adapt to interdiction. "As long as the demand is there, and there's money to be made, traffickers are going to find a way."
Cocaine use and overdose deaths are on the rise in the U.S. after years of decline as production has surged to record levels in Colombia, the source of about 90% of the U.S. supply.
Agents were doing another sweep Wednesday through thousands of containers on MSC Gayane, a cargo ship owned by Swiss firm MSC Mediterranean Shipping Co., but had not found any cocaine since their initial search on Monday, according to Stephen Sapp of U.S. Customs and Border Protection in Philadelphia. Two members of the crew have been charged with conspiracy to possess cocaine aboard a ship, but details of their case are sealed. An affidavit obtained by The Associated Press said that MSC Gayane was at sea off the west coast of South America when it was approached by more than a dozen boats loaded with cocaine. Crew members aboard the larger ship helped transfer the drugs, authorities said. The cargo ship docked in Colombia, Peru, Panama and the Bahamas before arriving in Philadelphia early Monday. Federal authorities raided the ship later that day. The ship's second mate was arrested after agents swabbed his hands and arms and detected traces of cocaine, an affidavit said. “The 500 kilos that we got in March, good hit, good hit,” said Trainor, the Philadelphia DEA agent. “But was that a huge loss to the cartels? Probably not. But 15,000? Oh yeah. I’m sure somebody had a really, really bad day yesterday somewhere in South America.”
'I don't know who's telling the president this is a good idea': Former ICE director says Trump's wall makes 'so little sense'
"El Chapo trial shows why a wall won’t stop drugs from crossing the US-Mexico border"
Michelle Mark Jan. 22, 2019, 1:06 PM
U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) Director Sarah Saldana answers a question while testifying before a Senate Judiciary hearing to examine the Administration's immigration enforcement policies, in Washington, Tuesday, July 21, 2015. Associated Press/Molly Riley
* A former director of the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency told Yahoo News that President Donald Trump's border wall won't stop the "true threats."
* She said the wall might be effective in keeping out a young migrant child, but it won't do much to stop cartels that use submarines to ship drugs into the United States.
* "I don't know who's telling the president this is a good idea," she said.
The former director of the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency said President Donald Trump's insistence on a border wall makes "so little sense" and fails to focus on the "true threats" facing the US-Mexico border.
"The true threat is not a mother or child at the border. That is not a true threat. It's not a mother or a child or a family in the interior already here for one two three, 10, 20 years," Saldaña said. "It can be effective to some degree. It may be that a small child cannot scale a wall, perhaps. Is that the person we're trying to keep out?"
Saldaña noted that a wall won't do much to protect Americans against cartels, for instance, who sometimes use submarines to haul drugs up the coast.
Customs and Border Protection data .. https://www.cbp.gov/newsroom/stats/cbp-enforcement-statistics .. also show that the vast majority of drugs seized at the border are caught at legal ports of entry — not in areas that lack barriers. In the first 11 months of the fiscal year 2018, 90% of heroin, 88% of cocaine, 87% of methamphetamine, and 80% of fentanyl that US authorities seized were all found at legal ports of entry.
Mexican migrants prepare to jump the border fence to get into the U.S. side to San Diego, Calif., from Tijuana, Mexico, Saturday, Dec. 29, 2018. Associated Press/Daniel Ochoa de Olza
"That's not going to be effective against them. And isn't that the group we're trying to keep out? Those that truly present a threat to public safety?" she said. "In my view, that's where the rubber meets the road."
Saldaña helmed ICE through the latter years of the Obama administration, when the sky-high deportation rates began to decline.
The Customs and Border Protection agency has estimated .. https://www.gao.gov/assets/690/682838.pdf .. that each mile of border fencing designed to stop people costs $6.5 million. That's a high price to pay for a barrier that would span hundreds of miles and wouldn't affect threats like drug trafficking, Saldaña said.
"I don't know who's telling the president this is a good idea," she said. "The true threats are those persons who come to do harm to our country, and that's quite frankly a very small number compared to the number of people who seek entry. This is why the wall that is being proposed, enforcement-wise, makes so little sense."
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Democracy Is for the Gods Just scratch the surface of the human community and soon you will find the horde [...] And what a sweet surrender! Alexander the Great, Julius Caesar, Napoleon, Hitler and Mussolini were all smooth talkers, charmers of crowds and great political seducers. P -Their relationship with the crowd was particularly intimate. For in regimes of this kind, whenever power is used and displayed, the effect is profoundly erotic. What we see, for instance, in “The Triumph of the Will” (thanks, in good measure, to Leni Riefenstahl’s perverse genius), is people experiencing a sort of collective ecstasy https://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=149765840
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