It was the largest drug bust at California’s Port Hueneme in 25 years. The port is in Ventura County, northwest of Los Angeles. According to the Los Angeles Times, federal officers found two stashes on two ships.
“The first stash, about 204 pounds, was discovered on Jan. 22 by U.S. Customs and Border Patrol officers who boarded a refrigerated ship that had arrived from Ecuador. Agents found 80 bundles of the drug wrapped and hidden under the boat’s floorboards.
“Six days later, agents found seven more bundles weighing more than 17 pounds under the floor of a cargo ship from Guatemala.”
This is the second major bust in recent weeks involving large amounts of drugs coming through a port of entry. From The Times:
Earlier this month, Border Patrol officials in Los Angeles announced they had found more than 1.7 tons of methamphetamine, cocaine and heroin in two containers being shipped from the Los Angeles-Long Beach port to Australia.
Yesterday, at his announcement for making the border wall a “national emergency,” President Trump said drugs weren’t coming through ports of entry.
“A big majority of the big drugs, the big drug loads don’t go through ports of entry,” Trump said. “They can’t go through ports of entry. You can’t take big loads because you have people. We have some very capable people, the Border Patrol, law enforcement, looking.”
From The Washington Post:
“This is, to put it bluntly, nonsense.
“First of all, we know that drugs flow through ports of entry because Trump’s own administration has repeatedly said they do. His former chief of staff John F. Kelly testified before Congress in 2017, when he was the Homeland Security director, saying that most drugs come through ports of entry. Paul A. Beeson of U.S. Customs and Border Protection said points of entry are “the major points of entry for illegal drugs” in testimony that same year. The Drug Enforcement Administration released a report indicating that only a “small percentage” of heroin that crossed the border was seized between ports of entry.”