The cartels are learning drone warfare from Ukraine



Last summer, European news outlets reported that “volunteers” from Mexican and Colombian drug cartels had infiltrated Ukraine’s military — considered the world’s “drone superpower” — to learn cutting-edge drone warfare so they could use the knowledge to kill their enemies back home.

Claims that this problem is ongoing have not yet been publicly verified by the U.S. intelligence community or the media. As yet, however, they remain undisputed. They now demand further scrutiny and broader attention in the United States to prompt appropriate action. If it’s not too late, and if the reports are correct, the U.S. urgently needs to terminate this knowledge transfer from Ukrainian soldiers to Latin America’s crime lords.

'The drone industry has exploded, and criminals have adapted the technology for attacks, which is a major challenge to battlefield aerial supremacy.'

American military, law enforcement, and intelligence personnel are deployed for clandestine work inside and around Mexico and Colombia, working to eradicate the very same criminal organizations now siphoning drone expertise from Ukraine.

This means that top-of-the-line, battlefield-proven tech and tactics could empower vengeful cartel murderers to do to U.S. ground personnel what the Ukrainian army claims it did to 30,000 Russian soldiers in July alone.

One might hope that, after the problem was made public in 2025, Ukraine quickly moved to clear out all cartel infiltrators. One would be sadly disappointed. TheFinancial Times reported that Ukraine has discovered yet more Colombians with organized crime connections in-country, demonstrating “unusual obsessions” about battlefield drone fighting. The exfiltration problem persists.

“Former paramilitaries, former guerrillas, and former soldiers are fighting and learning together here how to operate drones,” a Colombian aid worker in Ukraine told the Financial Times for the August 6 story. U.S. outlets, meanwhile, are largely sitting this one out so far.

U.S. lawmakers should note the bitter irony that the drone warfare knowledge America’s enemies are stealing was funded by some of the $70 billion in U.S. taxpayer money appropriated to Ukraine. Then they should use that as leverage: There are tens of billions more dollars in the pipeline, which should be withheld until the gang operatives are purged.

What we think we know

On July 30, 2025, the French website Intelligence Online first reported that Ukraine’s Security Service launched an investigation after Mexico’s National Intelligence Center warned that Mexican cartel fighters had infiltrated Spanish-speaking units of the International Legion.

Their alleged intention was to learn how to fly first-person view drones, gather ideas for drone-attack tech, and study battlefield tactics that Ukraine’s armed forces have famously used to stall Russia’s invasion.

Foreign outlets keep turning up new information. Poland and Bulgaria have begun their own investigations into smuggling pipelines through their territories. Granular details seem to bolster the reports. For instance, some volunteers already accomplished in drone fighting have joined the legion’s specialized tactical intelligence combat unit, known as “Ethos,” in the combat-heavy Donetsk and Kharkiv regions, according to the reports.

Polish officials reportedly revealed that private Mexican and Colombian security companies with alleged ties to drug trafficking networks financed and smuggled the volunteers into Ukraine through neighboring countries. One Colombian security firm based in Cali and Medellín reportedly recruited former Colombian Army rangers.

One smuggled Mexican legion volunteer, operating under the alias “Aguila-7,” registered in March 2024 using fraudulent Salvadoran documentation. He proved so technically proficient during drone training in Lviv that instructors called for an investigation, which later found probable connections to Mexico’s elite GAFE air-mobile special forces. Former GAFE personnel have joined cartels, the reports said.

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HUGE PERALTA/AFP/Getty Images

Why it matters

The infiltrations coincide with President Trump’s day-one declaration of a U.S. war to eradicate the cartels, designating many as foreign terrorist organizations. If cartel leaders are out to avenge what they have suffered, their drones can find many more targetable American personnel.

No one should have been surprised, for instance, when two CIA officers died this past April in a Chihuahua State car accident while traveling with Mexican forces after a drug lab raid. They were present because Trump has surged military and CIA personnel into Mexico and Latin America, as well as naval and aircraft assets for lethal boat bombing operations that have killed hundreds of drug smugglers. The operations have included supposed CIA-facilitated assassinations in Mexico.

An “Americas Counter Cartel Coalition” of 19 Latin American countries is heavily reliant on local national security forces within which U.S. intelligence community operatives are embedded. Additionally, some 9,000 U.S. military personnel are stationed along 845 miles of the U.S. southern border in expanding “National Defense Areas” intended to deny cartel drug-load entries along with illegal immigration. By many accounts, gangs in Colombia and Mexico are angry about the resulting killings, drug lab raids, boat bombings, profit disruptions, and imprisonments on U.S. terrorism charges.

By now, we would know if the cartels were killing more American personnel. They are not, likely deterred by the knowledge that crossing such a bright line would incur even more painful American wrath. But are the cartels building that capacity to get Trump off their backs in due time?

Before any reporting about cartels in Ukraine, Mexico’s cartels were already using sloppily repurposed commercial drones to drop grenades and explosives on rivals and indigenous security forces. That’s still happening in Mexico and Colombia, including the first recent attacks by FPV drones. In October 2025, a coordinated three-drone FPV attack hit the state prosecutor’s office in the Mexican border city of Tijuana, destroying six vehicles a mile from the U.S. border.

Senior Colombian officials told the outlet they are already seeing Ukraine-style first-person-view drones in recent widespread use. However, a Colombian drone pilot in Ukraine told the Financial Times that pilots still hadn’t mastered how to replicate some technology or set explosive charges.

“The drone industry has exploded, and criminals have adapted the technology for attacks, which is a major challenge to battlefield aerial supremacy,” Colombian Defense Minister Pedro Sánchez told the newspaper.

What to do now

Ukraine-style drone attacks against Americans in Mexico or Colombia could upend U.S. counter-cartel initiatives tactically and politically. Body bags returning home are a tragedy. But they also have a way of undermining public support in any war. Tactics and strategic trajectories change as a result. Just ask Moscow.

To head off this shameful outcome, the White House must forcefully leverage direct U.S. military aid to have Kyiv immediately remove cartel operatives from its formations, subject to direct verification by American investigators.

Next, the U.S. must speed up and diversify current efforts to counter the emerging drone threat along the border and to help foreign allied governments protect embedded U.S. personnel. The U.S. should do what it can to intercept drone equipment and technology imports into Latin America. And leadership should make sure American soldiers and operatives posted abroad burrow deeper out of sight.

In the meantime, if anyone wonders whether the U.S. might actually redouble its efforts if the cartels kill any Americans, the Trump administration should loudly message that they had better believe we will.

Editor's note: This article was originally published in the American Mind.

Pro-MAGA Mexican union head: America needs a richer Mexico



Mexico should be rich. It shares a 2,000-mile land border with the largest consumer market on earth, coastlines on two oceans, abundant natural resources, and a young workforce. Prosperity should have arrived decades ago.

The industrial boom did. Mexico is now America’s largest trading partner for the third consecutive year, selling the United States $534 billion in goods in 2025. It has become a major manufacturing power, and the nearshoring wave that followed the trade war with Beijing made it one of the world’s most sought-after industrial destinations.

‘We are not applying to be the world’s next sweatshop. We are applying to be America’s trusted factory floor.’

But too little of that prosperity reached the people doing the work. For decades, Mexico’s biggest export was not cars or electronics. It was Mexicans: More than 12 million now live abroad, most of them in the United States. A thriving country does not export its own children by accident.

Alejandro Martínez Araiza, national general secretary of the National Trade Union for Food and Commerce, Mexico’s oldest private-sector union, has an explanation economists rarely say out loud.

“Cheap labor was never an accident. It was the design,” Martínez Araiza told me. “Investment came for the low wage, and the system was built to guarantee the wage stayed low. Protection unions were the lock on the door. Corruption was the guard. The worker was never meant to prosper, because his poverty was the product being sold.”

That diagnosis is relevant today because the old design now stands between North America and its goal of competing more effectively with China. Martínez Araiza is candid about the scale of the challenge: China still dwarfs Mexico in manufacturing output.

“Can Mexico replace China? In volume, never, and anyone who promises otherwise is selling you something,” Martínez Araiza said. “You do not defeat China by trying to be China. You defeat it by being the neighbor China can never be: next door, with shared interests, and rules you can actually verify. We are not applying to be the world’s next sweatshop. We are applying to be America’s trusted factory floor."

That is why he treats labor enforcement as supply-chain security. A real factory with real workers, better wages, and an independent union able to walk the floor is harder to disguise as a front company. In his formulation, labor enforcement becomes a certificate of origin that paperwork alone cannot fake.

His proposals for the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement review follow from there: automatic consequences for violations, enforcement covering warehouses and logistics as well as factories, a regional wage floor of $7.25 an hour, and a verification alliance of democratic worker organizations across all three countries.

RELATED: Meet the man making Mexico useful again

Daniel Cardenas/Anadolu/Getty Images

Martínez Araiza is equally candid about Mexico’s vulnerability. More than 80% of Mexican exports go to the United States.

“China can survive a trade war with America. Mexico cannot, and I will not pretend otherwise,” he told me. “That is exactly why Mexico’s only rational strategy is a USMCA so credible and so enforceable that no one ever needs a trade war. Certainty is the cheapest stimulus that exists."

Then comes the part Washington rarely considers. Mexico maintains trade agreements with about 50 countries. “Everyone talks about Mexico as somebody's back door,” Martínez Araiza said. “I want the opposite: Mexico as America’s front door. Build it together in North America, and sell it to the world through our agreements. Close the back door. Open the front door. Made in North America, sold to the world.”

When work pays, people stay. "Pay a real wage, and Mexico’s biggest export goes back to being products, not people," he says. Border security, in his telling, begins on the payroll.

American readers may be skeptical of a Mexican union leader offering trade advice. But the incentives line up. His program raises the cost of the labor arbitrage that moved American factories south while reducing one of the pressures that drives migration north. President Trump’s trade agenda seeks both outcomes.

Martínez Araiza proposes to pursue them with something the American taxpayer does not have to create: organized workers already inside the supply chain, using secret-ballot elections and replacing the old protection-union system workplace by workplace.

The design that kept Mexico poor is breaking. The question is whether North America can replace it with something that lets workers, manufacturers, and both countries prosper together.

“There is no fair trade on poverty wages,” Martínez Araiza said. “The best tariff is a good wage.”

MILK MONEY: How Mark Carney chose the dairy cartel — and China — over a Trump trade deal



On Friday night, Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney ordered his negotiators to walk away from a trade agreement with President Donald Trump, less than an hour before a new round of American tariffs was set to take effect.

To hear Carney tell it, the reason was simple: It was a “bad deal.”

Carney increasingly looks like a prime minister in China's pocket.

“We take this step confident that it is in the best interests of Canada,” Carney said Saturday. “And that, by rejecting a bad deal, standing up for Canada, and focusing on what we can control, we are building a Canada strong for all.”

On Tuesday, his government announced retaliatory tariffs of up to 50% on $27.6 billion in U.S. goods, effective September 8.

“When the United States of America asked too much and offered too little, we made a choice,” Finance Minister François-Philippe Champagne said. “We chose Canada.” Does anyone really believe that?

'War' cry

Carney walked away not because the deal was necessarily bad for Canada, but because confrontation with the United States serves his politics. He is prepared to endure 50% American tariffs on roughly $20 billion in Canadian exports because he is frankly ecstatic to be “at war” with the United States — it cements his appeal with an anti-American base that thrives on Canadian martyrdom.

“You're at war when you're attacked, and we got attacked,” Carney said.

Just as Carney vilified the U.S. and Trump in his last “elbows up” federal election campaign, he is again playing the victim card in his latest attempt to cast Trump as the unreasonable aggressor. Carney certainly appears to have planned for this rejection, and politically he is enjoying it — just as his Liberal Party has long galvanized its supporters with anti-American rhetoric.

Carney has provided few details to Canadians about just exactly why the trade deal was so “bad,” except to make outrageous suggestions that the U.S. was trying to strip Canada of its official bilingualism — which would be a wonderful phenomenon — and erode its French-language culture.

He has also claimed that Trump was demanding restrictions on trade deals Canada could make with other countries.

Playing around

But this is clearly a smoke screen. Carney hardly behaved as though securing a trade deal was urgent when he went on vacation to Italy just 10 days before the tariff deadline. He returned to Canada with the tariffs about to take effect but managed to gain a three-day moratorium as negotiations continued.

He wasn't serious about preserving the old economic relationship with the United States then, and he isn't now.

If Carney had been serious about preserving Canada's economic relationship with the United States, he would not have spent years arguing for a world economy less dependent on American economic power.

As early as 2009, while serving as governor of the Bank of Canada, Carney declared that “globalized product, capital, and labour markets lie at the heart of the New World Order to which we should aspire.”

A decade later, as governor of the Bank of England, Carney was explicitly discussing the growing international importance of China's currency, the renminbi, or yuan. In his 2019 Jackson Hole speech, he noted that “the greater use of the renminbi in international trade is also leading to its growing use in international finance” and discussed the possibility of it becoming “a truly global currency.”

Carney argued that the dollar-dominated international monetary system was becoming unsustainable and proposed a new “synthetic hegemonic currency” that would reduce the world's dependence on the U.S. dollar.

New order

Now, as prime minister, Carney has gone considerably farther in embracing Beijing.

During his January visit to China, where he forged a new strategic partnership with Beijing, Carney told Chinese Premier Li Qiang that the progress in their relationship “sets us up well for the new world order.”

Days later at Davos, Carney spoke of a “rupture in the world order” and argued that middle powers such as Canada should seize the opportunity to build a new order. He pointedly noted that Canada had concluded strategic partnerships with China and Qatar in the past few days.

Carney increasingly looks like a prime minister in China's pocket. Rather than retreat from Beijing in response to American concerns, he has been accelerating Canada's economic embrace of it.

But what, exactly, was the “bad deal” that Carney rejected?

In an interview with the New York Times, U.S. Trade Representative Jamieson Greer revealed previously undisclosed details of the American offer.

“The United States had offered to reduce its tariffs on steel, aluminum and autos, and eliminate a recently imposed tariff on Canadian lumber,” the Times reported, adding that Greer said the measures “would have given Canada the most preferential treatment of any trading partner.”

There were, of course, sticking points. One involved Chinese goods entering the United States through Canada.

According to an August 2026 White House report, “The Great Transshipment Scam,” Canada is among the countries the Trump administration identifies as “Tier 1” conduits for illegal transshipment — the practice of routing goods through third countries to evade American tariffs:

In plain terms, illegal transshipment is smuggling disguised as trade — fraud cloaked in paperwork — and, in truth, nothing new. For centuries, traders have routed goods through third countries to exploit tariff gaps, dodge imperial duties, skirt embargoes, and take advantage of preferential access offered by certain ports.

Washington wants its trading partners to crack down on Chinese transshipment. Mexico did — and got a trade deal.

Milking it

Then there's Carney's fealty to Canada's powerful dairy cartel.

Carney has pledged that he is “loyal” to Canada's supply-management policies, especially as they apply to dairy products. The system protects Canadian dairy, poultry, and egg producers from foreign competition and keeps prices artificially high.

Trump has repeatedly eviscerated this economic policy and demanded greater access for American farmers.

The dairy cartel is exceedingly powerful in Canada and played an important role in the 2017 Conservative Party leadership race, when Maxime Bernier, a former foreign affairs minister who campaigned against supply management, was narrowly defeated by Andrew Scheer, who supported it.

Bernier recently told me that Carney's refusal to put supply management on the negotiating table amounted to sabotaging the discussion with Washington.

He specifically blamed Canada's protected dairy, poultry, and egg producers for standing in the way of a better agreement.

“We must put on the table the cartel in supply management, the cartel in dairy, poultry, and eggs,” Bernier said.

“If you put that on the table, we will be able, I believe so, to have a deal with President Trump.”

And Bernier was blunt about where he believes Canada's political leaders stand: “Carney and Poilievre are on the side of the cartel. They are not on the side of Canadian consumers.”

Politics as usual?

Bernier knows something about the political power of supply management. Recalling his own Conservative leadership defeat, he said dairy interests “decided to buy membership cards for the Conservative Party of Canada ... to be able to beat me at the leadership contest.”

“They know what happened to me when I did fight against the cartel,” Bernier said.

So was this really a bad deal for Canada, or just the usual machinations of a prime minister who deeply comprehends the political advantages of being “at war” with the U.S.?

Carney has effectively placed his political future in the hands of the dairy cartel and his wager on China, even though Canada's economic and military future remains inextricably tied to the United States, its largest trading partner and defense ally.

Some might call this insanity. But it's really just politics as usual for Mark Carney.

Cartels Are Exploiting Mexico’s Cattle Trade As Americans Pay More For Beef

Traffickers use falsified paperwork and black-market identification tags to launder smuggled animals into legitimate Mexican commerce.

Trump administration is deporting Mexicans to countries beyond Mexico — and the Mexican government is not happy about it



Mexican officials are upset that the Trump administration is quietly deporting Mexican nationals to countries beyond their country of origin reportedly in order to deter re-entries.

President Donald Trump had promised to institute mass deportations in his second term in office, and so far, he has taken many steps to fulfill that pledge.

'Mexico consistently takes the steps necessary to ensure the safe and dignified return of all its nationals to national territory.'

According to CBS News, the administration is quietly deporting Mexicans to Honduras and Guatemala despite the Mexican government saying it will gladly take in its citizens.

The CBS report cited official sources from the Department of Homeland Security who requested anonymity.

The officials said at least hundreds of deportees had been sent to Honduras and Guatemala in recent months, but it was unclear when the policy had begun.

Mexico's Foreign Ministry told CBS the administration objected to the alleged policy.

"The government of Mexico accepts the return of all its nationals. It therefore rejects the deportation of Mexican nationals to third countries and has no such agreement in place," read the statement from the agency.

"Mexico consistently takes the steps necessary to ensure the safe and dignified return of all its nationals to national territory," they added.

A spokesperson for the DHS told CBS that the U.S. administration was "utilizing all lawful options to carry out the largest deportation operation in history, just as President Trump promised."

Adam Isacson, a Washington Office on Latin America researcher, told CBS that the policy was "almost entirely punitive."

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He added, "It's the same as the purpose of sending them to Ecuador or Africa or anywhere else: to broadcast the hardship, to make sure people know that this is a possible consequence of remaining undocumented in the United States and to encourage people to self-deport."

CBS requested comments from the governments of Honduras and Guatemala but did not receive a response.

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Meet the man making Mexico useful again



For years, Washington has asked the same question about Mexico: Can we count on our southern neighbor as a serious security partner? Increasingly, the answer appears to be yes.

Much of the change runs through Omar García Harfuch, Mexico’s secretary of security and citizen protection. Under President Claudia Sheinbaum, Harfuch has emerged as one of the most important officials in Mexico — and perhaps the Mexican official who matters most to American security.

The United States does not need a subordinate in Mexico. It needs a capable neighbor that shares our interest in destroying the criminal organizations threatening both our countries.

Americans have good reason to pay attention.

The United States and Mexico share a 2,000-mile border and one of the world's largest trading relationships. Yet security cooperation has too often failed to reflect how intertwined the two countries have become. Cartels built multinational criminal enterprises. Fentanyl poured north. American weapons and illicit money moved south. Mutual suspicion kept Washington and Mexico City from confronting those problems as effectively as they should have.

That appears to be changing.

Harfuch has built something Washington desperately needs: trust.

American law enforcement officials increasingly speak of Mexico as a partner. DEA Director Terry Cole has publicly discussed his communication with Harfuch. FBI Director Kash Patel has met with him as cooperation between the two countries has expanded. Secretary of State Marco Rubio has praised Mexico's efforts against organized crime.

More important than the rhetoric are the results.

Mexico has transferred major cartel figures to American custody. Mexican security forces have expanded operations against organized crime. The Sheinbaum government has deployed forces to the border and worked more closely with American agencies on narcotics trafficking, intelligence, and cartel networks.

For Washington, Harfuch's appeal is straightforward: He understands American concerns, and he acts on them.

That does not make him an American proxy. It makes him an effective Mexican official who recognizes a basic geopolitical reality: The United States and Mexico face many of the same enemies.

The cartel selling fentanyl in Dallas or Phoenix may also be extorting businesses and murdering civilians in Mexico. Neither country can defeat these organizations while treating the border as the end of its responsibility. Washington should keep pressing for measurable results against fentanyl production, cartel finances, and cross-border criminal networks.

Harfuch seems to understand that better than many of his predecessors.

Consider the recent dispute over American avocado inspections in Michoacán. Security concerns disrupted U.S. inspection operations in one of Mexico's most important agricultural regions. Mexico responded by deploying more than 1,500 federal personnel while officials worked with Washington to restore operations.

Avocados may seem far removed from national security. They aren’t.

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Michael Nagle/Bloomberg/Getty Images

Organized crime has penetrated legitimate industries across parts of Mexico, using extortion and violence to profit from ordinary commerce. When American inspectors cannot safely do their jobs, cartel violence becomes an American economic problem too.

The response illustrated the Harfuch approach: Identify the problem, work with the Americans, and deploy the resources necessary to address it.

Washington should encourage more of this, particularly on fentanyl.

The drug has devastated American communities and made Mexican cartel activity a domestic American security issue. Washington is right to demand aggressive Mexican action against the organizations producing and transporting it.

Mexico has legitimate concerns of its own. American firearms move south. Drug money crosses the border and flows through financial institutions. Cartels exploit weaknesses in both countries.

The answer is not another round of diplomatic finger-pointing. It is sustained cooperation among American and Mexican law enforcement, intelligence, and financial authorities.

That requires trusted people on both sides. Harfuch has increasingly become that person for Washington.

His rise is particularly significant because close security cooperation with the United States remains politically sensitive in Mexico. Elements of the Mexican left have long viewed such ties with suspicion. Harfuch has nevertheless shown that working with Washington does not require surrendering Mexican sovereignty.

In fact, the opposite is true.

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Blake Fagan/AFP/Getty Images

A Mexican government capable of dismantling criminal organizations, protecting businesses, and imposing the rule of law across its territory is more sovereign, not less. Cartels that control territory and intimidate public officials pose a far greater threat to Mexican independence than intelligence cooperation with Washington ever could.

Sheinbaum deserves credit for recognizing that and empowering Harfuch. The Trump administration should recognize the opportunity as well.

Washington should remain demanding. Mexico still faces enormous problems with organized crime, corruption, and violence. Cooperation should not be confused with complacency. The United States should continue pressing for measurable results against fentanyl production, cartel finances, and cross-border criminal networks.

But American foreign policy also needs to recognize progress when it occurs.

For years, the U.S.-Mexico security relationship was defined by mistrust. Today there are signs of something different: two governments recognizing that they have more to gain by confronting shared threats together than by blaming each other for them.

The United States does not need a subordinate in Mexico. It needs a capable neighbor that shares our interest in destroying the criminal organizations threatening both countries.

In Omar García Harfuch, America may finally have found that partner.

$634,000 worth of alleged COCAINE being smuggled into US from Mexico seized by feds: CBP



U.S. Customs and Border Protection has reported busting a smuggling operation at a port of entry at the United States-Mexico border.

CBP told Blaze News that officers at the cargo facility at the Pharr International Bridge had seized $634,000 worth of cocaine on Friday.

'The Department of Homeland Security and CBP have delivered the most secure border in history, stopping illicit narcotics and dangerous criminal aliens from entering our communities.'

The alleged contraband was found hidden in a commercial tractor-trailer coming from Reynosa, Mexico, and heading into the U.S., CBP said.

CBP said the vehicle was referred to secondary inspection and that officers detected anomalies using a nonintrusive inspection device. Officers then physically inspected the vehicle and discovered 47.48 pounds of alleged cocaine concealed in 18 packages.

Special agents of Homeland Security Investigations initiated an investigation, and the Office of Field Operations at CBP seized both the vehicle and the alleged narcotics, CBP said.

"Our CBP officers continue to successfully use their skills and expertise to intercept another load of hard narcotics," said Carlos Rodriguez, the port director at the Hidalgo/Pharr/Anzalduas port of entry.

The massive port of entry has often been the site of smuggling operations thwarted by customs officials. In 2024, CBP reported seizing $5.4 million in methamphetamine hidden in a shipment of papayas.

RELATED: Woman caught trying to smuggle live animals through US-Mexico border, CBP claims

"Fulfilling President Donald J. Trump’s mandate, the Department of Homeland Security and CBP have delivered the most secure border in history, stopping illicit narcotics and dangerous criminal aliens from entering our communities, which will keep America safe for generations to come," read the press release from CBP given to Blaze News.

Luis Bazan, the director of the Pharr International Bridge, said in 2024 that an estimated $50 billion worth of trade flows through the enormous international industrial corridor.

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She killed her husband. Then she killed her firefighter wife. Now she faces an even longer stretch behind bars.



A 54-year-old California woman last week pleaded guilty to murdering her Cal Fire captain wife in 2025, according to authorities.

Yolanda Olejniczak Marodi is scheduled for sentencing Sept. 2, according to KTLA-TV.

'I don’t want to die.'

She faces 36 years to life in state prison.

As Blaze News previously reported, 49-year-old Cal Fire captain Rebecca "Becky" Marodi was found stabbed to death at her home in Ramona around 9 p.m. on Feb. 17, 2025.

The arrest warrant said deputies from the San Diego County Sheriff’s Office found Rebecca Marodi with "several lacerations and apparent stab wounds on her body, including her neck area, her chest, and abdomen."

Days after the firefighter's death, an arrest warrant was issued for Yolanda Marodi.

The sheriff’s office said Yolanda "was seen on surveillance video earlier in the evening arguing with Rebecca and physically assaulting her," NBC News reported.

An affidavit said Rebecca Marodi could be seen with blood on her back and was heard on the video saying, "Yolanda! Please … I don’t want to die."

Yolanda Marodi, who was seen in the video holding a knife, replied, "You should have thought about that before," according to the affidavit.

Approximately 10 minutes later, Yolanda Marodi was "seen gathering pets, random items, and some luggage and loading it into a silver Chevrolet Equinox SUV," according to the affidavit.

Blaze News reported that Homeland Security later spotted the vehicle crossing the border into Mexico.

After 33 days on the run, Marodi was taken into custody after being located at a hotel roughly two miles south of the U.S. border in Mexicali — approximately 175 miles southeast of where her wife was found stabbed to death at her home.

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Rebecca Marodi served Cal Fire for 30 years and helped battle the devastating Eaton Fire.

"Becky was a beloved member of our community and department, and we miss her greatly," Cal Fire and Riverside County Fire Department said in a statement after her death last year.

In an eerie similarity, Yolanda previously attempted to flee from law enforcement with her two young children after the October 2000 stabbing death of her then-estranged husband, according to law enforcement.

As Blaze News previously reported, Yolanda is an ex-convict who went to prison for the stabbing death of 26-year-old James Joseph Olejniczak in San Bernardino County.

In January 2004, Yolanda pleaded guilty to voluntary manslaughter in the stabbing death of her first spouse and was incarcerated from 2004 to 2013 after her conviction for voluntary manslaughter.

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Invasion by delivery room: Texas hospital puts US citizenship on sale



After the shocking Supreme Court ruling on birthright citizenship, a Texas hospital is going viral for advertising childbirth packages for expectant mothers just miles from the U.S. border in Mexico.

“Here in Texas, you have these birth tourism hospitals openly advertising birth packages, and they’re not advertising to Texans,” BlazeTV host Sara Gonzales explains on “Sara Gonzales Unfiltered.”

“They’re not like, ‘Hey, Texans, come to our birth center. We’re really, really gentle.’ They’re actually advertising to Mexicans in Mexico. You have Mission Regional Medical Center; it’s within miles of the border. It’s advertising birth packages on billboards in Mexico,” she continues.

The billboard Gonzales shows is all in Spanish and boasts $3,950 for a natural birth and $5,525 for a C-section. Even more disturbing, the website the billboard pointed Mexicans to was “havemybabyinTEXAS.com.”


The website was taken down after the billboard went viral.

President Trump also called out the Texas hospital, writing in a post on Truth Social: “Signs and Billboards are being put up all over our Southern Border, and Mexico, advertising BIRTHRIGHT CITIZENSHIP, with ‘Deliveries starting at $4,000.’ Likewise, similar signs going up all over our Country. Billions of Dollars will be illegally made by this SCAM, with Citizenship going to anyone willing to pay."

Trump reiterated that “AMERICAN CITIZENSHIP IS NOT FOR SALE,” before warning that he will be asking for a “Rehearing by the United States Supreme Court.”

“This miscarriage of justice will destroy America if they don’t change their absolutely insane decision,” he added.

After it drew the ire of the president of the United States, Ross Patterson of the “Drinkin' Bros" podcast called the number on the billboard to find it was still working.

“They went through the packages and everything else, and you can press five to see what the dollar amount is to come to America and have this baby. Now, after you press the number, it goes to an operator and it turned busy,” Patterson tells Gonzales.

“They took the website down for a little bit and then put it back up. The number is still working,” he says, though the website has been removed again.

“Yeah, it’s getting pretty bleak out here in Texas,” Sara adds.

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Former judge who helped violent illegal alien escape ICE gets slap on the wrist



A former judge who helped an illegal alien elude federal immigration officials has been given a slap on the wrist, but she says she will still appeal the sentence.

Hannah Dugan resigned from the Milwaukee County Circuit Court bench after she was convicted for obstructing justice when she helped Eduardo Flores-Ruiz, an illegal alien from Mexico, flee from Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers.

'I have been cast as a scofflaw and as a hero. I am neither. I am a public servant who was just trying to do my job. Your honor, I will not let those minutes on April 18, 2025, define my life's work.'

Flores-Ruiz had been arrested for charges that included strangulation and suffocation, battery, and domestic abuse. He later pleaded no contest to the charge of battery and guilty to re-entering the U.S.

In Aug. 2025, Dugan was indicted on charges of obstruction of justice and concealing a person from arrest. She was convicted on the felony obstruction charge and found not guilty on the lesser misdemeanor charge.

On Wednesday, nearly a year after Dugan's indictment, U.S. District Judge Lynn Adelman ordered her to pay a fine of $5,000, but she will not serve prison time.

"I think this is a situation where an otherwise good person, upset by immigration policies in this country, made a bad decision in the moment," Adelman said.

Prosecutors asked the judge to sentence Dugan to prison time between 15 and 21 months.

Dugan remained defiant even in the moments just before Adelman issued the relatively lax sentence.

"My acts that day were consistent with community concerns at the courthouse," she said. "My judicial acts were not done with any malicious intent or to advance any personal interests."

She went on to say that she plans to return to public office after being being "forced" to retire.

"In January, I resigned from my office so the constituents would have a judge in my branch to begin the year," Dugan continued. "I have been cast as a scofflaw and as a hero. I am neither. I am a public servant who was just trying to do my job. Your honor, I will not let those minutes on April 18, 2025, define my life's work."

Dugan's attorneys indicated they plan to appeal the sentence.

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Adelman rejected an argument made by Dugan's attorneys that she was shielded from prosecution out of "judicial immunity" from her position as a judge.

Surveillance video from the courthouse showed the former judge confronting the federal officers and instructing them to go to the office of the chief judge before helping Flores-Ruiz exit through a side door.

Despite Dugan's actions, Flores-Ruiz was tracked down by federal authorities and removed from the U.S. in Nov. 2025.

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