Frontline Against Fentanyl: An Interview with CBP's Top Official
Watch the full interview with Senior Official Performing the Duties of the Commissioner Troy A. Miller.
As the nation's border security agency, U.S. Customs and Border Protection is on the frontline against the transnational criminal organizations that threaten this nation and the health and safety of its citizens. We are using all of our resources and leveraging all of our partnerships to take this fight to those responsible for producing and bringing it across our borders and into our communities. We are unyielding in our pursuit of those people and organizations that threaten the safety and security of our people and our country.
While the agency has made great strides in the fight against fentanyl, there are still too many lives tragically lost to this killer drug. Over the last several years, the agency has continually evolved and adapted the counter-fentanyl strategy to match the sophistication, innovation, and relentlessness of the criminal organizations responsible for trafficking fentanyl across our borders. These efforts build on intelligence gathered from other operations from the previous year like Operations Blue Lotus and Four Horsemen, aimed at seizing finished fentanyl products, and Operation Artemis and Operation Rolling Wave, targeting and disrupting the fentanyl supply chain. CBP is constantly enhancing how - and where - to combat this issue because one death is simply too many.
In this interview with CBP Senior Official Performing the Duties of the Commissioner Troy A. Miller, he outlines the deliberate efforts of CBP's workforce to target fentanyl and it's precursors, and the people responsible.
Question:
So, Commissioner, we're here to talk about CBP’s efforts to fight fentanyl. When did CBP start seizing fentanyl?
Answer:
First and foremost, thank you for the opportunity to talk about what the men and women are doing to keep the poison off the streets of America.
So, we first started seeing fentanyl in the 2013/2014 time frame. Interestingly enough, back in 2013 and 2014, we didn’t really know what we were encountering.
We didn't have the right tools, technology, and we didn't even have the right fields within our systems to record fentanyl seizures. So, what we had to do during that time frame is, number one, identify the substance that we were dealing with. And then when we did identify what we were dealing with, we had to change our system so we could record what we were seizing. But first and foremost, we had to figure out how to keep our officers and agents safe from fentanyl.
So, when we first started encountering fentanyl in 2013 and 2014, there were some pill forms, some powdered forms, counterfeit pills, 100% pure fentanyl coming from China. And what we did is we looked at new and emerging technology to keep our officers and agents safe. Number one, naloxone. We were able to test naloxone at our ports of entry.
Number two, we were looking at ways to identify what fentanyl actually was. So, we looked at new and emerging technology. We began using a handheld device that could quickly identify the substance being encountered. And then, number three, we had to get the training to our officers. What are you dealing with, what are the health risks? How do you handle it? How do you identify it? And what equipment do you need to protect yourself, like the personal protective equipment? So, we got personal protective equipment off to our officers and agents quickly, we got naloxone to multiple ports of entry, and we deployed the Gemini devices. We started testing those at nine ports of entry.
And when we found out it was effective, we quickly acquired 90 of them and got them to the officers and agents around the country. But as we moved forward, we started seeing 100% pure fentanyl coming directly from China. We really started looking at our mail and our express facilities.
So, we got the naloxone, got the PPE – personal protective equipment – we got the handheld devices. And then what other tools do we have for our officers to identify the fentanyl? So now it's the canines. Historically, you're out in the southwest border, you're at your mail facilities, and you’ve got your canines. But our canines weren’t trained to identify fentanyl at that time.
So, we became the first agency that I know of in the world that trained dogs to identify fentanyl. That's what we were facing in 2013 and 2014. We really didn't know what we were dealing with until 2015, 2016. We had the personal protective equipment, the equipment to identify it, and we had our canines trained but we were missing a piece.
We were missing the prosecution piece, that “presumptive positive” in the field. So that's when we really started looking at the forward operating labs. We have always had our scientists that worked in the background where we could send substances like narcotics to determine where it's from. Our scientists are really the best in the world at what they do.
We understood that we needed to get that kind of expertise to the front line as opposed to getting the narcotics to the scientist. So we started implementing forward operating labs at our mail facilities and at our express facilities. So, number one, after that presumptive positive with the handheld device, the officer or agent could have the scientist verify it. It became increasingly important to understand what the substances were – the precursor chemicals as well as the fentanyl itself. Furthermore, the analogs changed over time.
So, we could quickly do that and we could get that information to our investigative partners who could use that for prosecutions. As we moved from that, that 100% pure fentanyl, and we got to that point where we're at in 2017, 2018, got our forward operating labs up and running, we really started looking at what we're going to do with China because it's 100% pure.
And that's when an “all-of-government" approach really came together to focus on getting China to schedule fentanyl [as a class of drugs] as well. That's when we saw the shift where more fentanyl began arriving at the southwest border in the 2019 time frame, and that’s where we are today.
Question:
So, we're talking about a decade of wholesale evolution of not just the problem, but of our response as an agency. How has our enforcement evolved in that time as well?
Answer:
That’s a great question. And I'd say, number one, no matter what the mission set is, our officers and agents, if you give them the tools, the resources and the information to do the job, they're going they're going to do the job. And that's what we've seen. We've been at the forefront of this fight against opioids, synthetic opioids, since the very beginning.
So, it has evolved over time as the narcotics moved to the southwest border. We saw that as China scheduled fentanyl in 2019 [as a class of drugs that are controlled and restricted], the fentanyl production moved to Mexico. The precursors started moving to Mexico, and we started seeing the pills and powder come across the southwest border specifically trafficked mostly by the Sinaloa cartel. Even today, they control that corridor between Mexico and Arizona and California.
In that land border environment, we've had to do the very same thing that we did in the mail and the express environments: We needed to ensure that our officers and agents had the training. We had enough of the handheld devices and enough personal protective equipment so they could remain safe, so we then focused on bringing all of our foreign and domestic partners together to attack this problem.
We also had to start looking at new technology to identify the narcotics as they came across the border. And that's when we really, looked at bringing more nonintrusive inspection technology – or NII – to the southwest border so we could scan more vehicles and people. Congress gave us money in 2019 to do just that, so we have started implementing that NII technology across the southwest border.
I think what's really exciting today is the artificial intelligence and machine learning that has caught up to that technology. So, we're starting to implement artificial intelligence and machine learning across the southwest border, which is going to allow that machine to get that information to our officers and agents quickly so they can make that decision. And why are we doing that?
As it is, it gives us multiple opportunities to attack the supply chain. This really is just like a supply chain of legitimate goods, only in this case what we face is a supply chain of illegitimate goods. So, as we surged resources to the southwest border in 2022 and 2023, and as we have launched operations such as Rolling Wave, Blue Lotus, and Artemis, we have been able to not only identify the narcotics coming across the southwest border, but we have also developed unique ways of gathering better intelligence about them.
As we surged all of Border Patrol, Office of Field Operations, Office of Trade, and Office of Intelligence resources, to these locations, and as we developed that intelligence and made those seizures and worked with our foreign and domestic partners, we really started looking at the role that precursor chemicals play in the pill process. And that led us to latter part of 2023, when we surged resources to our airports and express hubs to look for those precursors coming in to the to the U.S. as well.
As we started looking for precursors based on the intelligence we had garnered from our previous operations, we saw these substances coming into Los Angeles, JFK, and some of the other express hubs. And we also continued to see the pill presses, dies, and molds that are used for producing the fentanyl pills.
The interesting thing about the precursors is that they were coming in transit through the U.S., then down over the southwest border into Mexico, then being used to process the pills, and then being smuggled back north into the U.S. This gave us multiple opportunities to really hit these transnational criminal organizations that are moving the fentanyl.
As we looked at that problem it really highlighted the need to do more on the trade side.
Question:
And so, when you think about CBP in the fentanyl fight, you think of folks at the ports of entry. You think of maybe our folks in green between the ports, but it sounds like it's much broader than that?
Answer:
It's every aspect of this organization.
Question:
The public knows a little bit about what CBP's mission is. What do you think they don't know about what we're doing here? There's so much good work. What's your one message to the public?
Answer:
I think they understand that we are interdicting drugs at the border. I don't know that the public understands that we have a stake and a presence in every single aspect of fighting fentanyl. We're working with our foreign partners. We're working with our state and local partners. I don't think people understand the relationships we have with the sheriffs in Southern California, Arizona, or that we've worked with the state of Virginia through an operation called Free Virginia from fentanyl.
I don't think they understand the amount of information that our organization collects – information that we can use to fully identify these transnational criminal organizations and bring them to justice. Let's face it, every aspect of a transnational criminal organization crosses our border, whether it's the people, whether it's the drugs themselves, whether it's the money, or whether it's the weapons going southbound to support the transnational criminal organizations bringing the narcotics into our communities.
Question:
So, you brought up the transnational criminal organizations. We know that there's been a lot of work, obviously, by CBP in so many ways, to go after the TCOs. How are we focusing on the TCOs in the final fight, specifically?
Answer:
That's a great question.
Question:
Do you know who those people are? Who those plaza bosses are?
Answer:
We do. Our Office of Intelligence, working with the operators, have been working specifically on the plaza level for years and years and years. What we've done is we've put that all together, across the southwest border to identify the plazas and those responsible – the plaza bosses – through our own research and through coordination with our investigative partners.
Question:
I heard you recently announced Operation Plaza Spike. Want to talk a little bit more about that? Specifically, where is this stuff coming in?
Answer:
Ninety percent of the fentanyl we're seizing is arriving at two locations, Arizona and California. So, we've specifically focused our efforts over the last year or so there. When we announced our new counter-fentanyl strategy in October of 2023, we really were talking about a couple of things we've already talked about. We were talking about keeping our people safe, educating our communities, training, PPE, and the like. But we were also talking about developing information, partnerships, and most importantly, having a campaign where we bring everybody together, to operationalize everything we just talked about.
Operation Apollo did just that in Southern California. We brought our federal partners together. We brought our state partners together. We flattened out information sharing. And we started going after those networks and those supply chain logistics all the way from the southwest border up to Los Angeles, where the precursors and the pill presses are coming together. Then we took Operation Apollo and we moved it over to Arizona, to the place where we're now actually seeing the most fentanyl come through, which is in Nogales, Arizona.
We are also bringing our partners together there through Operation Apollo. At the same time, we wanted to take it one step further and start working with our foreign partners in denying access to the border.
We're going to expand that effort in the near future. He owns that geographic area. His lieutenants have the logistics networks. They come into the U.S., and these are the same people that are facilitating the violence in Mexico. As a result, we see weapons go back through those same plazas. As we put all that together, we can put more pressure on that particular plaza boss and that particular plaza.
Question:
And a common theme I keep hearing is partnership. So, what does it mean to have partnerships in the final fight?
Answer:
We can’t do it without partnerships. We can't do this alone at the border. And I'll go back to it time and time again: we need to get the men and women of CBP the resources, the tools, and the information they need to do the job that they're more equipped to do than any other agency in the U.S.
But we can't do without the partnerships; we can do our part, but we need the information to operationalize that and to help with the prosecutions. We can help with the extraditions. We can help with the relationships with our foreign partners. We can do all that. But we can't do it alone. We need our partners to be in the fight with us. And they are.
Question:
Does that look like state, state and local law enforcement? How are they contributing to the shared work here?
Answer:
The state and local partnership is essential. You know, I like to explain that simply: if 10 pounds of fentanyl ended up in Kansas and the state and local partners seized it, from a car, a house, a person, a business, or whatever – it didn’t just show up there. Where did the fentanyl come from? It came from Mexico. So it was that intelligence information that we can use to keep that fentanyl off the streets. If we can figure out how to flatten out the information sharing, when we see something we can share it with the state and locals, and when the state and locals see something they can share with us through our vast holdings.
We can actually expand that network; identify who brought it up here, how it got there, and share that intel back with the state and local partners who can take action to bring these folks to justice.
Question:
It seems like there's a lot of parallels between the fight against fentanyl and with our counter-terrorism fight in that early 2000s. Am I right in that’s the parallel there?
Answer:
I'm glad you brought that up. One of the most important things CBP did is evolve. As we've evolved in our fight against fentanyl, we have really started leveraging our National Targeting Center and our analytic capability, our information-sharing capability, and our partnerships that we've established over the years through counter terrorism. The one thing we've learned is that if we have the information, we can operationalize it quickly, we can share and deconflict with our partners, and we can take action.
But we need the information. We need to be able to analyze that. We need to be able to get it to our frontline officers. That's what we've been perfecting for the last 20 years, and we can do it in the classified, the unclassified, and the sensitive environment, and we can get that information quickly to our agents and officers on the southwest border.
And we really took it one step further this time around, by the creation of the Southwest Border Intelligence Center. The Center works very closely with our intelligence community partners, so we do the analysis at the National Targeting Center and share that information with the Southwest Border Intelligence Center. Then the Center can synthesize that information and work with our partners across the southwest border.
So those are the two things we created: the fentanyl cell at the National Targeting Center, which works with our partners in D.C., and the intelligence center in Tucson, which is looking specifically at the southwest border in particular. Through these efforts we are able to develop things like Operation Plaza Spike and identify those individuals smuggling or controlling those plazas, those networks, and then we work with our investigative partners and our foreign partners to identify what actions we're going to take to disrupt those activities.
Question:
So, in the enforcement context, it's starting way before the border, it's really centralized on information sharing, on strong partnerships. That's got to be the scene in the trade context, right?
Answer:
Oh, absolutely. I mean, when you're talking about trade, if we can't figure out how to share information, it's our foreign partners, right? If we identify that precursors are transiting through Southeast Asia, which we did, then what are we going to have to do? Of course, we want to work with the carriers, the brokers and the like, but if it's transiting through a partner country, why wouldn't we get over to the partner country, share that information with them, tell them what we know, and talk about some of the technology we're using, some of the systems we're using and help them develop that same capability so they can ensure that those illegitimate goods aren’t coming into their country, which they certainly want to do. So, you know, as far as whether it's terrorism or there's narcotics, whether it's transnational criminal organizations moving people, it's all the same. We want to take those organizations out as far up the supply chain as we can with our partners so it never reaches a border.
Question:
It sounds like there needs to be some sort of legislative change or new tools in the fight. Can you talk about that? What do you mean?
Answer:
Certainly. So, let’s start with trade. We do have a package that we put together, called the 21st Century Customs Framework. That's an overarching trade package that would update, modernize our trade laws for the first time in 30 years. To put it in context, our trade laws have not been modernized since I started at U.S. Customs in 1993. And when you think about the de minimis environment – where we went from 685 million packages in 2022 to 1 billion in 2023, which translates to 4 million packages a day today – our current laws are not equipped to deal with that kind of volume. So, what we're seeing in the de minimis environment in particular, is that we're not getting enough truly accurate data. We need to determine where the material is coming from, where it's going, and what's in the package.
And we don't have the laws we have in place for summary forfeiture. Consider this: if we seize one shirt, it's the same as seizing one container – the same amount of paperwork. Imagine that. We don't have the appropriate mechanisms in place right now to share information with our trade partners so they can help us in the fight.
So there are some additional legislative changes we need to make. Additionally, we need some penalty provisions within our trade laws so that we can fine individuals appropriately when they bring in narcotics, fentanyl, or the tools and precursors to make it.
Today we have the overall 21st Century Customs Framework. And we have the de minimis package – the de minimis package being part of the larger legislative package. We need to modernize our trade laws, especially on the southwest border. There was a lot of talk about the national security bill and the bipartisan bill. One of the things that, that bill did for us is that it got us the appropriate resources for the Southwest Border. In particular, it gave us enough money to finish deploying our nonintrusive inspection technology in large scale to our ports of entry along our southwest border, and it got us the officers that we needed there – a thousand additional officers.
It also helped us get our information into a place where we can use it – into the cloud where it can unlock that artificial intelligence and machine learning, giving us everything we need to help our officers get the information quickly to make informed decisions. It also gave us money for our operations at express mail facilities so we can start to act on information at the speed of operations. That helps our officers and agents make informed decisions while legitimate trade and travel continue to move.
Question:
Is nonintrusive inspection technology going to help solve the fentanyl crisis?
Answer:
Nonintrusive inspection technology is a tool in the toolbox. It's going to help us really bring all the pieces together, seize more narcotics, get more information to our investigative partners, exploit the transnational criminal networks, and go after more. I think about nonintrusive inspection technology every single day. I will see a seizure somewhere in the country where there's an inconclusive image, right? So, what that means is that there may be something, there may not be something. What does that officer or agent need? They need the information to make an informed decision. Maybe a canine, maybe a Gemini handheld device, something to identify what that substance is. Certainly, screening more containers or more shipments is extremely important, but I also need artificial intelligence and machine learning to help identify any anomalies within that shipment, so I can quickly determine whether I'm referring that shipment or that that passenger vehicle for further inspection not.
To take it one step further, when you're talking about a place like San Diego, there is a lot of legitimate trade. There is a lot of legitimate travel. We cannot stop legitimate trade or travel. But if we do what we've been doing for the history of this organization – which is to make informed decisions based on risk analysis – we can continue to move forward in our fight against fentanyl.
Question:
So, you have been with CBP for over 30 years?
Answer:
Long time.
Question:
You’ve seen a lot of things here, been through a lot of pivotal moments in the agency's history and in the country's history. How does the fentanyl crisis stack up against some of those challenges?
Answer:
For me, the fentanyl crisis is probably the biggest challenge I've faced in my career, because it is so multi-dimensional, right? We're talking about precursors in China. We're talking about Mexico, where the drugs are being manufactured. We're talking about pill presses, dies, and other equipment. And we're talking about demand. We're talking about a demand on a scale that we've really never experienced before. You know, 100,000 overdoses, 100,000-plus overdoses, 70 percent of those being from opioids. Again, it's going to take an all-of-government approach.
We're going to do our part at the border and beyond. But we also need to do something about demand. We need to continue our educational campaign to get in schools and hammer home the message that "one pill kills” and really surge our resources at the state level and the national, federal level. So, it's unlike any problem I've ever seen.
Question:
We can't seize our way out of it?
Answer:
We cannot seize our way out.
Question:
So, you know, it's no secret that, as an agency, we're experiencing a really challenging time right now on many fronts, so what's the most important thought you’d like to finish with here today?
Answer:
The first thing I would like the public to know is that the men and women of CBP are up to the task. This is what they hired on to do. If we can give them, as I said before, the tools, the resources, the information, to fight fentanyl, they're going to do so and they're going to be the best in the world in doing that.
But they do need the resources. They do need the tools – things like additional officers at the southwest border, intelligence information, expanding and modernizing our enforcement systems, getting the information up into the cloud. And new laws and regulations. All of these are things that our officers and agents need to do the job.
They're going to go out there and do it every single day. I have utmost confidence that they will continue to do that, and it is my job to get them the resources that they need to do it.
Question:
Do you have a message for the workforce?
Answer:
Thank you for what you're doing. You do a great job every single day, and I'm going to continue to fight here in Washington to get you what you need to do it.