Recently, the Justice Department talked about its new task group. The Justice Department says that they have caught almost 200 drug dealers who are connected to large-scale drug crime groups.
They were able to arrest people in 10 states and take 50 kg of Fentanyl and 70 kg of Meth from them.
Attorney General Merrick Garland said, “These cases are only a small part of the work our agents and prosecutors do every day to go after, disrupt, and break up the drug cartels and organizations that poison the American people.”
Before these arrests, the US had been working to stop a rising Fentanyl disaster that had been going on for years. In fact, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention say that 109,680 people died from drugs in 2022, which was a new high.
Since the Justice Department created this new task force about a year ago, there have been more and more drug busts by police.
The District of Alaska charged 54 people on January 25 with being part of a large-scale drug trafficking operation. A 57-year-old California prisoner named Heraclio Sanchez-Rodriguez is said to be in charge of this group. People say that Heraclio talked to his suppliers in Mexico, California, Oregon, and Alaska on cell phones while he was in jail.
Police took 36 kg of Fentanyl, 23 kg of Meth, 11 kg of Heroin, and 118 grams of Cocaine from the same drug trading ring between February 2022 and July 2023.
A drug trafficking operation in the Eastern Panhandle was also charged by the Northern District of West Virginia on January 24. The suspects were all involved in the operation. People say that Gary Bernard Brown was giving other people a lot of Fentanyl to give to other people.
A lot of people from Nebraska and Mississippi were arrested on January 23. They were reportedly part of a drug trafficking organization.
Law enforcement officials say that these arrests were made possible by the new Organized Crime Drug Enforcement Task Force. The task force’s goal is to “identify, disrupt, and dismantle the highest-level drug traffickers, money launderers, gangs, and transnational criminal organizations that threaten the United States by using a prosecutor-led, intelligence-driven, multi-agency approach that leverages the strengths of federal, state, and local law enforcement agencies against criminal networks.”
