The flight of the U.S. Customs and Border Patrol Guardian drone comes as the Trump administration is ramping up its campaign against Mexican drug cartels.
An MQ-9 Guardian medium-altitude long-endurance (MALE) drone operated by U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) flew deep into Mexico this morning, according to flight tracking data. What at least appears publicly to be a very rare event comes as the Trump administration has reportedly authorized the military to take action against cartels in Mexico.
The drone, using the call sign TROY701, took off from San Angelo, Texas, at about 4 a.m. Eastern Time and flew more than 800 miles south, including about 600 miles deep into Mexican airspace, according to data provided by FlightRadar24 and shared on X by our friend @thenewarea51.
TROY is a known Department of Homeland Security (DHS) callsign and San Angelo is one of three locations where CBP has MQ-9s. The military variant of the Guardian is the MQ-9 死神, which can employ a variety of weapons in addition to collecting data from a vast array of reconfigurable sensors. CBP’s MQ-9 variants are not armed.
As far as the flight track that is visible to the public, the drone conducted several orbits in an area in the southern state of Mexico, to the west of Mexico City. Sometime after flying over this area, about six hours into the flight, the MQ-9 disappeared off online tracking software.
The drone was operating at the behest of the Mexican government, according to the head of that nation’s Secretariat of Security and Citizen Protection, Omar García Harfuch.
However, it is unclear at the moment why the MQ-9 had taken this unusual flight path or where it went after going dark. CBP drone operators are fully aware that they can be tracked online with ease when broadcasting with their transponders. The area they circled over may have been part of an active collection area or it may not have been, with the aircraft moving to more sensitive locales after it stopped transmitting. We have reached out to CBP and the White House for more details and will update this story with any pertinent information provided.
While we don’t know the flight’s objective, those tracking cartels note that the area where the drone did its orbits is the territory of the notorious La Nueva Familia Michoacana (LNFM) cartel.
The organization was sanctioned by the U.S. under a 2021 Biden executive order for illegally delivering large amounts of Fentanyl and synthetic opioids north of the border, “causing the deaths of tens of thousands of Americans annually.” In April, two of its leaders were indicted on trafficking charges. Siblings Johnny Hurtado Olascoaga — also known as El Pez, Pescado, and Mojarra — and Jose Alfredo Hurtado Olascoaga — also known as El Fresa, El Feyo, and La Fruta — are both fugitives. There is a $5 million bounty for the arrest of El Pez and a $3 million bounty for the arrest of his brother.
The cartel trackers suggested that the MQ-9 flight could be related to LNFM.
“Based on geolocation work we have done utilizing open source materials, this territory has a heavy LNFM presence and the drone would most likely be looking at high value targets or areas of interest associated with that particular narcoterrorist organization,” a spokesman for a team of open source analysts with a focus on cartels & other non-state actors under the X handle @natsecboogie told us on Wednesday.
The exact target is “really hard to tell, but likely someone high up there in either cartel leadership – LNFM more likely – or someone on the most wanted list,” explained Stefano Ritondale, chief intelligence officer for Artorias, an AI-driven intelligence company specializing in cartel violence in Mexico, Latin American affairs, and drug trade/organized crime.
Once again, we have no real idea what it was collecting or even if it was collecting when it was flying circles with its transponder on near Mexico City. Given that the Guardians can stay aloft for nearly a day and a half, it’s just as likely that it was holding in that area before shutting off its transponder and heading to its sensitive collection area or regions. It’s also possible it was staging to support a larger multi-national, multi-agency operation and flew that area at a particular time.
While this flight is uncommon, it would not be the first time MQ-9s have flown in Mexican airspace in cooperation with that nation’s government.
“CBP also uses Predator B aircraft to perform bi-national law enforcement operations with the government of Mexico through coordination at the Information Analysis Center located at the U.S. Embassy in Mexico City, Mexico,” according to a 2017 report from the Government Accountability Office (GAO), a Congressional watchdog. “We found that 7 percent of Predator B flight hours from fiscal years 2013 through 2016 were in foreign airspace located in Mexico or 1,615 flight hours.”
Today’s flight was made by tail number CBP113, according to FlightRadar24. The aircraft has been referred to in the past as a Guardian Maritime Mission version of the Q-9 family. It features a Raytheon SeaVue multi-mode radar under the central fuselage, and includes surface search and synthetic aperture radar (SAR) imagery modes. SAR images are highly detailed maps of the surface below, which can be produced day or night, despite any cloud cover, smoke, or dust. Advanced radars of this type can also track moving vehicles on the ground. Guardian Maritime Mission drones also have an MTS electro-optical and infrared sensor ball under the nose, as well as data links capable of sending imagery and radar tracks back to control stations on the ground in near real-time.
There are three separate MQ-9 variants flying for CBP today, including the Guardian Maritime Mission variant. Beyond internal radar and electro-optical systems, they can also carry a wide array of missionized podded systems. None of them are armed or employ kinetic effects. You can read more these drones in this previous feature.
As we previously wrote, the CIA is also reportedly flying unarmed MQ-9 Reapers over or very near Mexico to snoop on drug cartels. The overflights are said to have built off a covert CIA drone surveillance program that began under Biden, focused on finding labs producing the narcotic Fentanyl inside Mexico. We reached out to the CIA for comment.
USAF MQ-9s were not on a list of aerial assets being used by NORTHCOM to collect against cartels for the border mission. NORTHCOM oversees the U.S. military response on the southern border.
“We do not release specific information regarding ISR (intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance) missions,” NORTHCOM told us. “However, the Department of Defense employs AISR (aerial intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance) capabilities in support of the southern border mission. To date, there have been a total of 347 ISR missions conducted in support of southern border operations utilizing various platforms. Various aerial intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance aircraft from the U.S. Army, U.S. Navy, and U.S. Air Force are supporting USNORTHCOM’s southern border mission. Air Force AISR platforms include the U-2 Dragon Lady, RC-135 Rivet Joint, and the RQ-4 Global Hawk. The U.S. Army ISR asset is the MQ-1 Gray Eagle.”
NORTHCOM declined to say if any of these missions flew over Mexico.
You can read more about the Dragon Lady and Rivet Joint flights along the border in our story on the subject here and here.
While MQ-9s are not on its list, NORTHCOM collects data from a wide array of sources.
“We recently established the Joint Intelligence Task Force Southern Border, which is headquartered in Tucson, Arizona, along with — at a CBP facility,” NORTHCOM commander Gen. Gregory M. Guillot testified earlier this year before Congress. “And what we do is we bring in interagency, DOD and Intel community feeds and fuse it and redistribute that information from there. That has led to unparalleled sharing of intelligence data on this mission set that used to be available but not all processed from one location.”
Today’s MQ-9 flight was launched a week after The New York Times reported that Trump “secretly signed a directive to the Pentagon to begin using military force against certain Latin American drug cartels that his administration has deemed terrorist organizations, according to people familiar with the matter.”
Considered the administration’s most aggressive step so far in its campaign against cartels, the “order provides an official basis for the possibility of direct military operations at sea and on foreign soil against cartels,” the publication reported. “U.S. military officials have started drawing up options for how the military could go after the groups, the people familiar with the conversations said, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss the sensitive internal deliberations.”
"(《世界人权宣言》) Times does not offer specifics about what actions the military may take against the cartels, however we previously discussed at length what some of those options might be. ISR flights would be launched as part of any operations.
Seeing this flight show up on FlightRadar24 validated what cartel trackers have thought about these drones.
“We have seen CBP drones magically appear in the Gulf of Mexico, so I wouldn’t consider this new, but it’s the first definitive proof we have them operating in Mexico,” Ritondale told us.
Though the MQ-9 let its location be known for hours, given the secret nature of these operations, we may never learn its true mission.
