Mexican cartels are armed with American guns. The government is spending a mountain of cash to stop the southward flow of firearms, but a watchdog warns that there’s no real measure to say whether it’s working.
Advocates say America’s gun laws contribute to Mexican cartels acquiring some heavy weapons.
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A new report from the U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO) found U.S. federal agencies are spending time and money trying to stop the flow of those guns into Mexico, but it’s not clear if any of those efforts are actually working.
All this comes during a presidency in which the Trump administration has made targeting Mexican cartels a focal point, including the controversial tactic of blowing up alleged drug smuggling ships.
“The United States government is taking a real look at organized crime in the Western Hemisphere and seeking to crack down, especially on cartels in Mexico,” Henry Ziemer, fellow with the America’s Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, told Straight Arrow. “I think an underrated dimension of that is the firearms traffic question. The fact that many of these kings and cartels are armed with weapons that come from the United States.”
Gun trafficking
It’s not difficult to get a gun in most states in the U.S., including the two U.S. states that share the biggest border with Mexico.
“In many states, including Arizona and Texas, you do not have to pass a criminal background check,” John Lindsay-Poland, coordinator of the Stop U.S. Arms to Mexico project of Global Exchange, said. “So, the business is very decentralized for the business of illicit gun trafficking.”
All federally licensed firearms dealers must run gun purchasers through the FBI’s National Instant Criminal Background Check System. Known as NICS, the check will flag any potential buyer who is a convicted felon, a fugitive, a person under a domestic violence restraining order, someone deemed mentally unfit or a known user of controlled substances.
A report from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) found most of the guns being trafficked from the U.S. to Mexico originate from those two states.
“We have seen data on where guns are being purchased that are trafficked into Mexico, and for those that are recovered within a year of their purchase, which is a strong indicator of the intent to traffic the weapon, a majority of those in the last two years were purchased in one county in the United States, Maricopa County, where Phoenix is,” Lindsay-Poland said.
It’s a process known as straw purchasing.
Essentially, someone with no or little connection to a cartel buys firearms legally and then hands them off to someone affiliated with the cartel.
Then it’s not exactly challenging to move them south of the border.
“The border security infrastructure is really focused on things and people going from south to north into the United States, right?” Lindsay-Poland said. “It’s to protect the United States, but the infrastructure is not really very strong to keep weapons that are going from north to south.”
The most popular guns according to the GAO are AR-15s, AK-47 style models and .50-caliber rifles. Data shows crimes involving assault rifles actually happen more often in Mexico than in the U.S.
“The cartels have massive stockpiles of AK, AR and .50-cal sniper rifles,” Ziemer said.
New report
The new report from GAO found that between 2020-2024, American authorities recovered nearly 83,000 firearms in Mexico that originated from the U.S.
Border Patrol also seized nearly 5,000 firearms that were on the move from the U.S. to Mexico between 2020 and 2025.
While that seems like a lot, the report also says hundreds of thousands of firearms are believed to be trafficked every year, which means those numbers are just a small dent in the problem.
Part of the issue GAO found is a lack of any real goals, outcomes or performance measures.
“That’s definitely a big problem,” Ziemer said.
The efforts from these federal agencies also come with a price tag: roughly $126 million over the last five years. The report found it’s unclear whether that money has made a difference because of the lack of performance metrics. That includes an ATF program called Operation Southbound, which discontinued performance measures several years ago.
“The report shows how multiple federal agencies are doing some things against trafficking of weapons, but they are not well coordinated,” Lindsay-Poland said. “They’re not well measured. There’s not really any kind of strategy. And when you look at the numbers that are presented in the report and compare those with the scale of gun trafficking into Mexico, as well as the scale of criminal use of those weapons in Mexico, the efforts of the United States are minimal.”
What can be done?
In 2004, U.S. lawmakers allowed the federal assault weapons ban to expire. Data shows that allowing that to happen put more of these guns, favored by cartels for their killing power, on the streets.
Experts that Straight Arrow spoke with say putting that ban back in place would help not only the U.S., but would make it tougher for cartels to get their hands on these weapons.
“A federal assault weapons ban is probably the single most important measure that the United States could take to reduce violence in Mexico,” Lindsay-Poland said. “Another example is .50-caliber rifles. .50-caliber rifles have no real conceivable civilian legitimate use within the United States. They fire over a mile away. They penetrate armor. You can down a helicopter with them.”
The Second Amendment of the U.S. Constitution guarantees Americans’ right to own firearms won’t be infringed upon, although it was written before the advent of high-capacity semiautomatic rifles.
The Supreme Court has found that many state and local gun control laws run afoul of that, including restrictive firearm owners’ identification card programs that required applicants to have special reasons why they should be granted the right to own firearms. Another ruling found that firearms and components that are in common use qualify for Second Amendment protections. Any new federal weapon ban would have to pass those tests.
The U.S. has also cracked down on some of those doing the trafficking, including a case in March where a Mexican national was convicted and sentenced to seven years in prison.
In August, the Justice Department charged 28 people with firearms offenses, including trafficking in Arizona.
“If the federal government focused its efforts to stop gun trafficking from Maricopa County, it would make a big dent in violence in Mexico,” Lindsay-Poland said.
The Trump administration has also designated several cartels as terror organizations, which opens up some other options to combat them.
“It’s more of a permissive statute for the DOJ to potentially go after straw purchasers, bad apple gun dealers, folks who are facilitating firearms trafficking,” Ziemer said. “That’s another tool in the toolkit.”
As for the GAO report, the agency made four recommendations.
Those include collecting better data on what kind of guns are being seized, establishing tangible goals and measurements, restarting measurements for Operation Southbound, and tracking where the money being spent is going.
“They should be done, but they are really kind of a small effort,” Lindsay-Poland said. “They’re marginal in the overall problem, which really does have to do with the ways in which guns are so militarized and so easy to get in the U.S. and so easy to get over the border. Those are things that need to be addressed at a broader level in legislation and in priorities.”
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