Grounded: Inside the Government Warehouses Holding 34,000 Seized Cartel Drones

McALLEN, TEXAS / NOGALES, ARIZONA — ProPublica / Texas Tribune

The bins are white, the size of laundry baskets, and they are stacked twelve rows deep in a climate-controlled warehouse on the outskirts of McAllen. Each bin holds a drone.

Most are DJI Mavics, still in their cases. Some have been modified — foam removed, battery compartments widened, crude mounting brackets welded to the frames with propane torches. One of them, a supervisor tells me, was carrying a payload of fentanyl pressed into a sheet thin enough to look like foam padding. The dog found it. The drone is evidence now. The evidence has nowhere to go.

As of October 2025, US Customs and Border Protection has seized or documented the wreckage of 34,682 cartel-operated drone flights along the southern border since the start of fiscal year 2025 — a 340% increase from FY2022. The drones are piling up in federal facilities from Brownsville to San Diego. And because of an interagency dispute involving the Department of Commerce, the Pentagon’s DJI ban, and three separate congressional holds on drone-related asset disposition, virtually none of them can be repurposed, auctioned, destroyed, or returned.

“We have the largest single collection of confiscated commercial drones in the history of any government, anywhere in the world,” said Marco Villanueva, a former CBP intelligence analyst who now advises border security contractors. “And we are legally prohibited from doing anything with them.”

The Policy Trap

The warehouse problem is a direct consequence of the DJI ban.

In 2023, the Department of Defense designated DJI, the Chinese drone manufacturer that commands 70% of the global consumer drone market, as a “Chinese military company” under the National Defense Authorization Act. Federal agencies were prohibited from purchasing DJI equipment. Law enforcement was prohibited from operational deployment of existing units. The FAA declined to certify new DJI aircraft for commercial airspace.

The ban was designed to protect US telecommunications infrastructure from potential backdoor surveillance. It succeeded in removing DJI from US government operations. It did not remove DJI from cartel operations. The cartels don’t comply with NDAA procurement rules.

“We seized it, so we own it, so we can’t use it, and we can’t sell it to a foreign government, and we can’t sell it to a domestic entity because that would be transferring a banned device,” Villanueva explained. “So it sits.”

CBP has requested emergency guidance from the Department of Justice on eleven separate occasions since January. The most recent response, dated September 4th, remains “under review.”

What’s Flying Instead

While the government debates the disposition of 34,000 DJI Mavics, the cartels have moved on.

Three Jalisco New Generation Cartel (CJNG) drones recovered in separate operations in August and September were not DJI. They were not any commercial manufacturer. They were assembled from bare circuit boards with firmware signatures that CISA analysts described, in an internal alert obtained by ProPublica, as “functionally identical to Ukrainian-designed loitering munition control systems, adapted for payload delivery.”

The boards appear to originate from third-party suppliers in Shenzhen who produce components sold openly as “FPV racing drone electronics.” The CJNG variants have been ruggedized — conformal coating on the boards, motor controllers rated for dust and heat — and paired with commercial FPV racing motors and custom-fabricated carbon fiber frames. The airframes are not identifiable as any production model. There is nothing to seize that carries a serial number traceable to a manufacturer with a US legal presence.

Two of the three recovered drones were equipped with fiber-optic control tethers.

Fiber-optic control is the answer to the $100,000 question. Over the past 18 months, CBP has deployed counter-UAS jamming systems from four different vendors at high-traffic crossing points. The systems work by disrupting radio frequency communications between the drone and its operator — GPS jamming, RF spoofing, signal hijacking. They are effective against commercial consumer drones. They are not effective against a drone flying a half-mile of fiber-optic cable behind it.

“Electronic warfare doesn’t touch it,” said a CISA official who asked not to be named. “There’s no RF to jam. The signal travels through glass.”

The jammers cost between $80,000 and $120,000 per installation. The fiber-optic drone costs under $400 in parts, assembled by hand. The counter-UAS vendors are aware of the gap. Several have proposed upgraded systems at significantly higher prices.

The Ukrainian Curriculum

In March, Mexican authorities arrested a 34-year-old dual national identified in court documents as “Águila-7” — a cartel logistics coordinator with documented connections to CJNG’s technical division. His phone contained photographs from Zaporizhzhia Oblast, Ukraine, dated to a nine-week period in mid-2024. In the photographs, Águila-7 appears in what investigators describe as informal technical training sessions — small groups around workbenches, circuit boards, drone frames in various stages of assembly.

Ukrainian military officials denied any knowledge of the sessions. The photographs could not be authenticated to a specific organization. Águila-7’s attorney characterized the trip as personal travel.

The implication, nonetheless, is straightforward: the most battle-tested drone warfare curriculum in the world is, or was, available for the price of a plane ticket and the right connections. Ukraine developed loitering munition doctrine under live fire conditions that no simulation replicates. The knowledge doesn’t stay on the battlefield.

“The circuit board doesn’t know who’s flying it,” said Villanueva. “The doctrine is the doctrine.”

The Gray Market Downstream

The 34,682 drones sitting in federal warehouses represent something beyond an administrative problem. They represent a supply of components — GPS modules, optical flow sensors, brushless motors, high-density LiPo batteries, ESCs — that is currently frozen by policy, being slowly degraded by time, and watched with interest by secondary markets.

Battery degradation is already a documented issue in the longer-held units. CBP has no official battery management protocol for drone evidence. Several units in the McAllen facility have swelled. At least four bins have been quarantined after thermal incidents.

What doesn’t degrade: the sensors, the motors, the navigation boards, the RF modules. These are the same components that, in a different regulatory environment, might have found their way into agricultural operations, surveying companies, small manufacturers, or the gray-market channels that feed into informal supply networks across the Americas.

The bins are still full. The policy dispute continues. And the drones that replaced them — the ones the warehouses don’t hold — are getting smarter.

[Reporter’s note: CBP declined to comment on specific disposition policies. DJI did not respond to requests for comment. CISA confirmed the existence of the internal alert described in this article but would not confirm specific technical details.]