Over the past two weeks, the American military has ramped up its surveillance of Mexican drug cartels, flying at least 18 missions over the southwestern U.S. and the Baja peninsula, CNN reported, citing three officials with knowledge of the flights and open-source data.
Current and former military officials told the outlet that the missions, which took place over a 10-day period from late January to early February, are a considerable increase in activity, coming as President Donald Trump deployed the military to the U.S.-Mexico border to halt the flow of drugs and foreign nationals into the country.
Typically, one surveillance mission per month has been flown around the border, according to a former military official. The official, with significant experience in homeland defense, said the advanced spy planes flown on these missions are usually used to collect intelligence on Russian or Chinese activities.
The shift reveals how the Trump administration has refocused the federal government’s priority on national security threats at the southern border instead of overseas.
According to CNN, at least 11 of the recent flights have been conducted by Navy P-8s, which possess high-tech radar systems capable of identifying submarines, as well as collecting imagery and signal intelligence.
A U-2 spy plane reportedly flew a nearly six-hour mission along the border on Feb. 3, and current and former military officials with substantial experience in counternarcotics told CNN that they were not aware of a U-2 being used in this manner previously. The U-2 was designed to obtain high-altitude imagery of the Soviet Union during the Cold War.
The surveillance aircraft have flown missions in Arizona, California and Texas, and CNN also found an Air Force RC-135 Rivet that swung around the Baja peninsula on Feb. 4 and passed by Sinaloa. That plane specializes in collecting communications that occur on the ground.
Looping around the Baja peninsula is a flight path that has been in use "for a long time," one defense official told the outlet, but is "getting more use now."
Former officials also said that these sophisticated aircraft have the ability to collect intelligence from deep within Mexico and not just from airspace over the border.
Trump has threatened to deploy special forces to assassinate cartel leaders and authorize missile strikes on fentanyl labs, and some current and former U.S. officials reportedly said the spy flights could be part of a larger mission to identify targets for the military in Mexico.
© 2025 Newsmax. All rights reserved.