Found this interesting.............
Little known US Agency...........was title.............better would have been ....Citizens know little about this agency....
MEXICO CITY—In a spectacular high-wire takedown in late July, U.S. authorities arrested Mexico’s notorious drug lord Ismael “El Mayo” Zambada on the tarmac of a tiny airport near El Paso, Texas, after he had evaded capture for more than four decades.
The operation was hailed as one of the most important captures in the history of the war on drugs. It also shed light on a little-known U.S. law-enforcement agency with an outsize global reach involved in the arrest: Homeland Security Investigations.
Created under the U.S. Department of Homeland Security after the 9/11 terrorist attacks, HSI has built a large presence around the world in recent years. With more than 7,000 field agents, it is the second-largest federal law-enforcement agency in the U.S. after the Federal Bureau of Investigation. It has the largest international footprint in U.S. law enforcement with offices in more than 50 countries, and its biggest international outpost in Mexico.
“HSI has become absolutely mammoth,” said Vanda Felbab-Brown, a counternarcotics expert at the Brookings Institution. “And with its growth and maturity, its ambitions for global operations have also increased.”
President George W. Bush gave HSI a wide remit at the time of its creation: from sex trafficking to financial crime, terrorism, human smuggling and art theft. Training for some agents includes classes at the Smithsonian Institution to learn how to track art smugglers. Agents have customs authority to inspect computers and search cargo without warrants. They have access to U.S. banking records and Treasury data on international money-laundering schemes and the ability to issue U.S. visas to informants facing danger abroad.
In 2018, the U.S. banned imports of cotton from Turkmenistan after HSI and other agencies found forced labor practices there. Earlier this year, HSI helped Colombian authorities crack down on sex-trafficking rings exploiting underage girls in Colombia, including the arrest of one American citizen. In June, it helped repatriate stolen pre-Hispanic artifacts to Mexico from Seattle.
But it is south of the Rio Grande where HSI has quietly led the charge with Mexican law enforcement to take down high-profile criminals, from major drug traffickers to human smugglers and weapons traffickers.
Its role in fighting organized crime in Mexico expanded significantly under the Trump and Biden administrations as its focus turned toward the southwestern border. A surge in illegal migration prompted the U.S. government to target criminal groups that run human smuggling rings and traffic drugs such as fentanyl, the highly addictive opioid that has killed hundreds of thousands of Americans since it was introduced on U.S. streets more than a decade ago.
DEA’s growing isolation in Mexico
HSI has quietly helped take down some of the biggest U.S. security targets in Mexico in recent years, U.S. and Mexican officials say. The emergence of HSI as a major player in Mexico comes as the Drug Enforcement Administration, once the leading agency fighting the war on drugs, has been hobbled by leftist President Andrés Manuel López Obrador. He has called the DEA agents rogue actors in Mexico who don’t respect the country’s sovereignty.
The DEA’s greatest reversal of fortunes came after it detained a former Mexican defense minister at the Los Angeles airport on drug trafficking charges in 2020. The surprise arrest infuriated López Obrador and Mexico’s armed forces. In an unprecedented move, the Trump administration released Gen. Salvador Cienfuegos after López Obrador threatened to stop security cooperation with the U.S. Still, he revoked diplomatic immunity for foreign agents and slow-walked visa applications for new DEA agents.
At the same time, HSI officials in Mexico City were deepening their ties with their Mexican security counterparts, Mexican and U.S. government officials say. HSI strengthened its relationships by sharing intelligence on criminals.
“There’s very much the sense that DEA was left in the freezer while HSI is accumulating all kinds of activities,” Felbab-Brown said.
A DEA spokeswoman didn’t return requests for comment.
“The DEA would embrace any opportunity to collaborate with the Mexican government for the greater good of both countries,” said Ray Donovan, the DEA’s former chief of operations.
“Chinese organized crime is rapidly growing in Mexico. Chemicals are flooding the country,” Donovan said. “There are mutual interests where Mexico and the U.S. can openly work together.”
HSI now works with the largest vetted unit of Mexican security officials of any U.S. law enforcement agency in the country, U.S. and Mexican officials say. Members of Mexican units are screened for cartel ties via polygraph and trained in the U.S.
Bilateral security cooperation remains strong, officials from both countries say. There were more extraditions of U.S. security targets from Mexico this past year than almost any other time in the past two decades, many of them HSI targets.
“It’s a lesser-known agency with a bigger punch,” said Oscar Hagelsieb, former deputy director of organized crime at HSI. The agency’s low profile abroad is intentional. “It works when you are in Mexico,” said Hagelsieb, now a private investigator.
‘El Nini,’ ‘El Ratón’ and the man-eating tigers of Sinaloa
In 2023, HSI provided intelligence to Mexican law-enforcement officials that led to the capture of Néstor Isidro “El Nini” Pérez Salas, the top hit man for the sons of Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán, collectively known as “Los Chapitos.” They inherited their father’s drug-trafficking empire—a faction of the Sinaloa cartel—after he was captured in 2016 and sent to a maximum-security prison in the U.S. three years later.
Federal authorities had already raided three ranches belonging to Pérez Salas in Sinaloa state, confiscating a cache of tank-piercing weapons and three white tigers that he occasionally fed with informants, Mexican and U.S. authorities said.
Mexican law-enforcement agents engaged in covert operations that pressured Pérez Salas into thinking that he was being betrayed by informants in his inner circle. Local news outlets exposed his closest confidants. YouTube videos identified his girlfriends, according to Mexican federal officials who investigated him.
On edge, Pérez Salas ordered his gunmen to stay blocks away. Mexican special forces captured him alone at a safe house. President Biden thanked the Mexican government for the high-profile detention.
More recently, Biden highlighted the importance of the capture of Zambada—a target with a $15 million price on his head who was on the DEA’s most-wanted list. The DEA filed the indictments against Zambada and Guzmán López, but didn’t take part in their capture, U.S. officials said.
Zambada had never set foot inside a prison and kept a low profile, evading capture numerous times throughout his reign in the Sinaloa cartel. But El Chapo’s second-youngest son, Joaquín Guzmán López, turned to the FBI and HSI offering to self-surrender, according to U.S. officials familiar with the case.
Conversations lasted for months. Along the way, Guzmán López offered to bring in Zambada, the officials said. In a letter released by his lawyer, Zambada said he was betrayed and kidnapped by the son of his longtime associate. Zambada could potentially offer a gold mine of information about cartel operations and government corruption, analysts say.
One of HSI’s biggest drug-trafficking targets in Mexico was Ovidio Guzmán López, another son of El Chapo known as “El Ratón,” or “The Mouse.” Ovidio had become a pioneer in the fentanyl business in Sinaloa, according to Mexican and U.S. officials, and a Sinaloa drug lab operator.
In 2019, Mexican army special forces, using HSI intelligence, captured Ovidio at a house in a swank neighborhood of Culiacán, the Sinaloa state capital and cartel stronghold. But hundreds of gunmen mobilized by his brothers besieged the city, threatened to execute captured soldiers and shot up a housing complex for military families. Within a few hours, López Obrador was forced to release Ovidio to avoid a “blood bath,” the president said.
In 2023, also with HSI intelligence, the Mexican military struck again in an operation that had been planned for months, Mexican officials said. Hundreds of Mexican special forces using Black Hawk helicopters attacked Ovidio’s holiday compound in a town close to Culiacán. About 100 cartel gunmen and 10 Mexican soldiers were killed in the battle, according to people familiar with the operation.
Little known US Agency...........was title.............better would have been ....Citizens know little about this agency....
MEXICO CITY—In a spectacular high-wire takedown in late July, U.S. authorities arrested Mexico’s notorious drug lord Ismael “El Mayo” Zambada on the tarmac of a tiny airport near El Paso, Texas, after he had evaded capture for more than four decades.
The operation was hailed as one of the most important captures in the history of the war on drugs. It also shed light on a little-known U.S. law-enforcement agency with an outsize global reach involved in the arrest: Homeland Security Investigations.
Created under the U.S. Department of Homeland Security after the 9/11 terrorist attacks, HSI has built a large presence around the world in recent years. With more than 7,000 field agents, it is the second-largest federal law-enforcement agency in the U.S. after the Federal Bureau of Investigation. It has the largest international footprint in U.S. law enforcement with offices in more than 50 countries, and its biggest international outpost in Mexico.
“HSI has become absolutely mammoth,” said Vanda Felbab-Brown, a counternarcotics expert at the Brookings Institution. “And with its growth and maturity, its ambitions for global operations have also increased.”
President George W. Bush gave HSI a wide remit at the time of its creation: from sex trafficking to financial crime, terrorism, human smuggling and art theft. Training for some agents includes classes at the Smithsonian Institution to learn how to track art smugglers. Agents have customs authority to inspect computers and search cargo without warrants. They have access to U.S. banking records and Treasury data on international money-laundering schemes and the ability to issue U.S. visas to informants facing danger abroad.
In 2018, the U.S. banned imports of cotton from Turkmenistan after HSI and other agencies found forced labor practices there. Earlier this year, HSI helped Colombian authorities crack down on sex-trafficking rings exploiting underage girls in Colombia, including the arrest of one American citizen. In June, it helped repatriate stolen pre-Hispanic artifacts to Mexico from Seattle.
But it is south of the Rio Grande where HSI has quietly led the charge with Mexican law enforcement to take down high-profile criminals, from major drug traffickers to human smugglers and weapons traffickers.
Its role in fighting organized crime in Mexico expanded significantly under the Trump and Biden administrations as its focus turned toward the southwestern border. A surge in illegal migration prompted the U.S. government to target criminal groups that run human smuggling rings and traffic drugs such as fentanyl, the highly addictive opioid that has killed hundreds of thousands of Americans since it was introduced on U.S. streets more than a decade ago.
DEA’s growing isolation in Mexico
HSI has quietly helped take down some of the biggest U.S. security targets in Mexico in recent years, U.S. and Mexican officials say. The emergence of HSI as a major player in Mexico comes as the Drug Enforcement Administration, once the leading agency fighting the war on drugs, has been hobbled by leftist President Andrés Manuel López Obrador. He has called the DEA agents rogue actors in Mexico who don’t respect the country’s sovereignty.
The DEA’s greatest reversal of fortunes came after it detained a former Mexican defense minister at the Los Angeles airport on drug trafficking charges in 2020. The surprise arrest infuriated López Obrador and Mexico’s armed forces. In an unprecedented move, the Trump administration released Gen. Salvador Cienfuegos after López Obrador threatened to stop security cooperation with the U.S. Still, he revoked diplomatic immunity for foreign agents and slow-walked visa applications for new DEA agents.
At the same time, HSI officials in Mexico City were deepening their ties with their Mexican security counterparts, Mexican and U.S. government officials say. HSI strengthened its relationships by sharing intelligence on criminals.
“There’s very much the sense that DEA was left in the freezer while HSI is accumulating all kinds of activities,” Felbab-Brown said.
A DEA spokeswoman didn’t return requests for comment.
“The DEA would embrace any opportunity to collaborate with the Mexican government for the greater good of both countries,” said Ray Donovan, the DEA’s former chief of operations.
“Chinese organized crime is rapidly growing in Mexico. Chemicals are flooding the country,” Donovan said. “There are mutual interests where Mexico and the U.S. can openly work together.”
HSI now works with the largest vetted unit of Mexican security officials of any U.S. law enforcement agency in the country, U.S. and Mexican officials say. Members of Mexican units are screened for cartel ties via polygraph and trained in the U.S.
Bilateral security cooperation remains strong, officials from both countries say. There were more extraditions of U.S. security targets from Mexico this past year than almost any other time in the past two decades, many of them HSI targets.
“It’s a lesser-known agency with a bigger punch,” said Oscar Hagelsieb, former deputy director of organized crime at HSI. The agency’s low profile abroad is intentional. “It works when you are in Mexico,” said Hagelsieb, now a private investigator.
‘El Nini,’ ‘El Ratón’ and the man-eating tigers of Sinaloa
In 2023, HSI provided intelligence to Mexican law-enforcement officials that led to the capture of Néstor Isidro “El Nini” Pérez Salas, the top hit man for the sons of Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán, collectively known as “Los Chapitos.” They inherited their father’s drug-trafficking empire—a faction of the Sinaloa cartel—after he was captured in 2016 and sent to a maximum-security prison in the U.S. three years later.
Federal authorities had already raided three ranches belonging to Pérez Salas in Sinaloa state, confiscating a cache of tank-piercing weapons and three white tigers that he occasionally fed with informants, Mexican and U.S. authorities said.
Mexican law-enforcement agents engaged in covert operations that pressured Pérez Salas into thinking that he was being betrayed by informants in his inner circle. Local news outlets exposed his closest confidants. YouTube videos identified his girlfriends, according to Mexican federal officials who investigated him.
On edge, Pérez Salas ordered his gunmen to stay blocks away. Mexican special forces captured him alone at a safe house. President Biden thanked the Mexican government for the high-profile detention.
More recently, Biden highlighted the importance of the capture of Zambada—a target with a $15 million price on his head who was on the DEA’s most-wanted list. The DEA filed the indictments against Zambada and Guzmán López, but didn’t take part in their capture, U.S. officials said.
Zambada had never set foot inside a prison and kept a low profile, evading capture numerous times throughout his reign in the Sinaloa cartel. But El Chapo’s second-youngest son, Joaquín Guzmán López, turned to the FBI and HSI offering to self-surrender, according to U.S. officials familiar with the case.
Conversations lasted for months. Along the way, Guzmán López offered to bring in Zambada, the officials said. In a letter released by his lawyer, Zambada said he was betrayed and kidnapped by the son of his longtime associate. Zambada could potentially offer a gold mine of information about cartel operations and government corruption, analysts say.
One of HSI’s biggest drug-trafficking targets in Mexico was Ovidio Guzmán López, another son of El Chapo known as “El Ratón,” or “The Mouse.” Ovidio had become a pioneer in the fentanyl business in Sinaloa, according to Mexican and U.S. officials, and a Sinaloa drug lab operator.
In 2019, Mexican army special forces, using HSI intelligence, captured Ovidio at a house in a swank neighborhood of Culiacán, the Sinaloa state capital and cartel stronghold. But hundreds of gunmen mobilized by his brothers besieged the city, threatened to execute captured soldiers and shot up a housing complex for military families. Within a few hours, López Obrador was forced to release Ovidio to avoid a “blood bath,” the president said.
In 2023, also with HSI intelligence, the Mexican military struck again in an operation that had been planned for months, Mexican officials said. Hundreds of Mexican special forces using Black Hawk helicopters attacked Ovidio’s holiday compound in a town close to Culiacán. About 100 cartel gunmen and 10 Mexican soldiers were killed in the battle, according to people familiar with the operation.
