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GOP Land Chief Targets Smuggler Tunnels
that El Chapo Inspired with Own Networks
Capitol Inside
November 11, 2025
As Texas recorded the first increase in migrant apprehensions since the spring, Land Commissioner Dawn Buckingham launched a search on Monday for subterranean passageways that Mexican cartels use to smuggle narcotics and people into the state as a strategy that the kingpin called El Chapo conceived.
Buckingham, who's seeking re-election in 2026, announced that the General Land Office will work with federal authorities to pinpoint areas that are ripe for tunnel digging on properties that the agency she leads controls on the southwestern border.
The Republican statewide official said that staff inspectors will be deploying drones and other sophisticated aerial technology for surveillance with an eye out for holes in the ground that could be entrances and exits for smugglers and other physical signs of possible tunnel construction on agency land at the Rio Grande.
“Texas stands on the front lines of America’s fight for border security,” Buckingham said in an agency news release. “The cartels are constantly adapting, moving from the skies and waterways to underground networks of tunnels, and we will not cede an inch of land to these violent illegal criminals."
Buckingham, however, did not reveal what percentage of land along a 1,240-mile stretch of the Rio Grande that hooks El Paso to Brownsville will be tunnel hunting grounds for the GLO staff.
But the land commissioner noted that the GLO purchased 1,402-acre ranch on the border in Starr County a year ago in a move that made it possible for the state to erect a wall at the river there.
The tunnel detection program should make it harder for traffickers to move drugs and migrants under the new state-funded barricade at the Rio Grande on that particular piece of property. But Buckingham could find the mission hampered by the fact that the lion's share of cartel tunnels connect warehouses or other structures on private property to locations on opposite sides of the river in major border towns that aren't on property on which the GLO has authority.
More than 200 makeshift tunnels have been discovered in the San Diego and Tucson sectors in the past 35 years. The Border Patrol rooted out a tunnel in January that linked the Mexican city of Juarez to El Paso with the modification of municipal storm drains. The BP shut down a tunnel in June that tied San Diego to Tijuana.
Buckingham said she plans to focus the effort on "high-risk areas that could be vulnerable to cartel tunnel activity" with a particular interest in the sparsely-populated strip of the Rio Grande in Hudspeth County on the border southeast of the El Paso area.
But Buckingham's announcement on the cartel tunnel quest eliminated the element of surprise that such an initiative might require to be effective. Drug lords will know now to simply go around GLO-controlled land in Texas.
The land commissioner's cartel tunnel pursuit would bring an end to an era that Joaquin Guzman initiated with the development of an underground network for moving drugs into the U.S. where demand has always been unquenchable. Guzman, who formed and led the cartel in Sinaloa where he was born and raised, smuggled more narcotics into the U.S. than any trafficker ever has with the use of distribution centers that relied on tunnels between border towns.
While the flow of drugs into the U.S. from the south is a function of demand and supply, the movement of people from Mexico into the country through Texas illegally has slowed to a crawl with Republican Donald Trump back in the White House.
The number of migrants who BP agents apprehended in Texas fell 200 percent in September compared to the mark in January when Trump returned for a second term. But the number of people who the Border Patrol recorded in Texas in September was 27 percent higher than it had been a month before and 35 percent higher than the amount reported here in June.
The federal agency logged 5,395 migrant apprehensions in September in five regions in the Lone Star State. The Rio Grande Valley had the highest counts of migrant encounters in the U.S. in September and August after the El Paso sector had that distinction for several months before.
more to come ...
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