Top federal drug and border enforcement brass descended on the Sunland Park border wall on Thursday, using a heavily choreographed backdrop to highlight the administration’s campaign against cartel smuggling and fentanyl flowing into the region. The event mixed policy talking points with made-for-TV visuals, including uniformed soldiers, Border Patrol vehicles and family members who have lost loved ones, all set just across the line from El Paso.
Sara Carter, the White House’s newly confirmed director of the Office of National Drug Control Policy, appeared alongside U.S. Customs and Border Protection Commissioner Rodney S. Scott and Chief Patrol Agent Jesse D. Muñoz, where the group laid out enforcement priorities and the consequences they say will follow illegal entry and large narcotics loads, as reported by KVIA. Speakers cast the Sunland Park stop as one piece of a coordinated, multiagency push to choke cartel supply lines and reduce overdose deaths.
Photos from the scene published by the El Paso Times show U.S. Army personnel stationed near the wall, with Mexican soldiers visible on the south side. Family advocates stood shoulder to shoulder with officials, including Lorrie Randazzo, identified in the gallery as a mother who lost her son to a fentanyl overdose. The same gallery identified Victor Avila among those in attendance at the news conference.
What Officials Emphasized
Carter used the border visit to press a whole-of-government approach that focuses on disrupting organized crime networks and cutting the supply of illicit fentanyl. She was confirmed by the Senate earlier this month, the White House says, and she linked the on-the-ground message in Sunland Park to the administration’s broader National Drug Control Strategy. Officials at the wall stressed coordination among federal agencies and portrayed the effort as targeting both high-level trafficking operations and large drug loads moving through the corridor…