Border Patrol Drug Seizure Statistics by Drug and Location

Border drug seizure statistics for fiscal year 2025 show U.S. Customs and Border Protection intercepted 255,243 pounds of illicit drugs along the Southwest border, roughly three-quarters of it at official ports of entry rather than in the open desert or river zones between them.¹²³ The numbers describe what was caught. They do not describe what got through, and that distinction matters for every debate the figures get pulled into.

Where Drugs Are Actually Seized

The single most counterintuitive fact in the data is that hard drugs mostly come through legal crossings. In FY 2025, 192,701 of the 255,243 pounds seized at the Southwest border were seized at ports of entry.¹ For every drug except marijuana, ports of entry accounted for more than 85% of seizures.²

Fentanyl is the most concentrated of all. In FY 2025, 96% of fentanyl was seized in California and Arizona, with 86% intercepted at ports of entry, 5% at Border Patrol highway checkpoints, and 9% elsewhere in border zones.² A separate analysis of CBP data from FY 2015 through FY 2024 found that 88% of all fentanyl seizures happened at ports of entry.⁴

Cocaine and methamphetamine cluster in two CBP field offices. San Diego and Laredo together accounted for about 70% of cocaine seizures and 72% of methamphetamine seizures in FY 2025.²

Marijuana is the outlier. Because it is bulky and hard to conceal in a vehicle, 88% of marijuana seized at the border in FY 2025 was found between ports of entry. Texas accounted for 91% of those between-port seizures, and the Rio Grande Valley Border Patrol Sector alone accounted for 54%.²

FY 2025 Drug-by-Drug Totals

CBP publishes seizure figures on a fiscal-year basis running October 1 through September 30. Trends across drug categories diverged sharply in FY 2025:

CBP fentanyl seizures peaked at roughly 27,000 pounds in FY 2023 before declining steadily. By March 2025, monthly seizures had dropped to 760 pounds.⁵

Why Fentanyl Seizures Have Dropped

Researchers caution against crediting any single cause. A study published in Science pointed to a Chinese government crackdown on precursor chemical production, launched after a November 2023 agreement with the United States, as creating what the authors called a “massive supply shock.” The DEA reported declining fentanyl purity throughout 2024, suggesting Mexican producers were struggling to source key ingredients from China.⁶

Internal conflict within the Sinaloa cartel, the primary producer of U.S.-bound fentanyl, has also weakened production and disrupted routes to the border. Jonathan Caulkins of Carnegie Mellon University noted that user complaints about fentanyl shortages began appearing on Reddit as early as July 2023, tracking the initial decline in overdose deaths.⁶

On the demand side, some researchers argue the user population has contracted because many previous users died and younger cohorts have been deterred by awareness of the drug’s lethality. A senior U.S. drug enforcement official offered a different reading of the seizure numbers specifically: the Trump administration’s reassignment of thousands of FBI, DEA, and Homeland Security agents from narcotics work to immigration enforcement may have simply reduced the number of seizures being made.⁶

The drop in seizures has coincided with fewer overdose deaths. Provisional CDC data estimates total U.S. drug overdose deaths fell to about 69,973 in 2025, a nearly 14% decrease from the estimated 81,313 in 2024. Deaths involving opioids specifically fell from 55,296 to 44,564.⁷ The fentanyl overdose death rate had already fallen about one-third between its mid-2023 peak and the end of 2024.⁶

Who Is Actually Caught Smuggling Fentanyl

The profile of the typical fentanyl smuggler runs against common assumptions. Between October 2018 and June 2024, roughly 81% of people caught smuggling fentanyl at Southwest border ports of entry were U.S. citizens. Most of the rest had visas, border-crossing cards, or other legal authorization to enter the country. The median age of U.S. citizens arrested for fentanyl smuggling at southern ports was 30. Criminal networks recruit these couriers, often people in financial need, with promises of $1,000 to $10,000 per trip.⁵

Passenger vehicles are the most common smuggling method, followed by pedestrian traffic and commercial vehicles. Concealment ranges from hidden vehicle compartments and modified gas tanks to drugs strapped to a person’s body or hidden internally. CBP noted an increase in August 2025 in attempts to smuggle drugs inside car batteries. In one notable case, nearly 800 pounds of fentanyl was concealed in a commercial shipment of green beans.⁵ According to DHS, more than 90% of interdicted fentanyl is stopped at ports of entry, typically in vehicles driven by U.S. citizens.⁸

Maritime Seizures Set a Record

CBP handles land and air port seizures. The U.S. Coast Guard is the lead federal agency for maritime interdiction, and its FY 2025 numbers dwarf the land border totals for cocaine. The Coast Guard seized over 511,000 pounds of cocaine in the Eastern Pacific and Caribbean, more than triple its annual average of 167,000 pounds and the largest annual maritime drug interdiction in service history.³ Officials estimated the seized cocaine represented 193 million potentially lethal doses.⁹

Operation Pacific Viper, launched in August 2025, surged Coast Guard cutters, aviation, and tactical teams to the Eastern Pacific and produced over 100,000 pounds of narcotics interdictions in under three months.¹⁰ Detection and monitoring are coordinated by U.S. Southern Command’s Joint Interagency Task Force-South in Key West, Florida, with the Coast Guard assuming operational control for interdiction once a target is identified.⁹

The Northern Border

Seizures along the Canadian border draw far less attention but are not zero. CBP seized 60,000 pounds of drugs at the northern border in the year preceding March 2023 congressional testimony, with 98% of those seizures occurring at ports of entry. That testimony cited a 596% increase in northern border drug smuggling and a 26% increase in northern border fentanyl seizures, including one case of smugglers using drones in the Buffalo sector.¹¹

What the Numbers Cannot Tell You

Seizure statistics measure enforcement output, not drug flow. A Congressional Research Service report has described seizure data as “often estimated, incomplete, imperfect, or lack nuance,” and noted that no central database aggregates drug seizures across federal, state, local, and tribal law enforcement. The CRS framed drug flows as a funnel in which the total amount produced, the portion reaching the border, and the share that successfully enters the country are all fundamentally unknowable.¹² The Department of Homeland Security itself estimated in 2023 that CBP stops less than 3% of cocaine smuggled through land ports of entry.⁵

The category structure of the data is also a known weakness. A 2022 GAO report found that between FY 2016 and FY 2021, 23% of total drug seizures were placed in an “other drugs, prescriptions, and chemicals” catchall, limiting what the numbers can support. Intelligence officials told GAO that the lack of specificity required time-consuming manual searches to analyze trends.¹³ Published statistics are also drawn from live CBP systems and are subject to change from corrections or pending reviews, with final figures set at the close of each fiscal year.¹⁴

How Political Claims Use These Numbers

Because seizure data is easy to cite and hard to interpret, the distinction between what was caught and what got through often disappears in political messaging. President Trump has repeatedly claimed a 97% reduction in the flow of illegal drugs into the country by water and a 59% reduction in fentanyl flow across the border. Administration officials said these figures came from comparing seizures in July 2025 with seizures in November 2025.¹⁵

The underlying numbers are real but the comparison is misleading. CBP Air and Marine Operations interdicted 224,805 pounds of drugs in July 2025 and just 4,476 pounds in November 2025, a 98% drop. But the July figure was itself a 1,140% spike over June 2025, making it an extreme outlier rather than a baseline. Across the first 15 months of Trump’s second term, AMO seized 547,603 pounds of drugs, an 81% increase over the 302,548 pounds seized in the final 15 months of the Biden administration.¹⁵

CBP fentanyl seizures did fall, from 26,398 pounds in the last 15 months of the Biden administration to 13,216 pounds in the first 15 months of Trump’s second term, roughly a 50% decrease.¹⁵ Whether that reflects less fentanyl reaching the border, less enforcement capacity aimed at finding it, or some combination is exactly the question the seizure data alone cannot answer.

1
U.S. Customs and Border Protection. Testimony of Diane J. Sabatino, Acting Executive Assistant Commissioner, CBP Office of Field Operations
2
WOLA. Weekly U.S.-Mexico Border Update: Drug Seizure Data
3
U.S. Coast Guard. Coast Guard Sets Historic Record With Amount of Cocaine Seized in FY25
4
Cato Institute. U.S. Citizens Were 80% of Crossers With Fentanyl at Ports of Entry
5
American Immigration Council. Fentanyl Smuggling Fact Sheet
6
The Dialogue. The Surprising Factors Behind the Decline in the Fentanyl Epidemic
7
CDC/NCHS. Provisional Drug Overdose Death Counts
8
U.S. Department of Homeland Security. Fentanyl
9
Military.com. Major Drug Busts: U.S. Coast Guard Seizes Record Amount of Cocaine
10
U.S. Coast Guard. Coast Guard Achieves Historic Operational Success in 2025
11
U.S. House Committee on Homeland Security. House Homeland Security Committee Hearing Testimony
12
U.S. Congress. Illicit Drug Flows and Seizures in the United States: What Do We (Not) Know?
13
U.S. Government Accountability Office. GAO-22-104725
14
U.S. Customs and Border Protection. Drug Seizure Statistics
15
FactCheck.org. Trump Makes Unsupported Claims About Drug Flows