Jan. 26 (UPI) — The Justice Department announced on Friday an operation that led to drug arrests of nearly 200 people across 10 states from Texas to Alaska to disturb far-reaching crime rings, officials said.
Attorney General Merrick Garland said in a statement that the drug trafficking operation covered the country and required the coordination of agents nationwide to build cases and arrests over the past three days.
“These cases represent just a fraction of the work our agents and prosecutors are doing every day to target, disrupt, and dismantle the cartels and drug trafficking organizations that are poisoning the American people,” Garland said in his statement.
The cases were made under the Justice Department’s Violent Crime Reduction Strategy developed by Garland to bring federal prosecutors, agents and investigators together with crime justice experts and grant programs to work in unison to fight violent crime.
Justice Department officials said many of the cases that saw arrests this week are ongoing and that other developments can emerge as cases move through the court system.
“Every year, tens of thousands of Americans die from illicit drugs trafficked into our communities, including fentanyl and other synthetic opioids,” Deputy Attorney General Lisa Monaco said in a statement.
“This wave of indictments and arrests — stretching from Alaska to Mississippi and from Nebraska to West Virginia — shows the reach of the Justice Department and our partners across the country and around the world when it comes disrupting narcotics trafficking.”
The Justice Department said one case out of the district of Alaska led to 54 defendants connected by a California inmate named Heraclio Sanchez-Rodriguez. Prosecutors accused Sanchez-Rodriguez of using contraband phones in prison to run his drug operation, connecting suppliers in Mexico to brokers in California and Oregon to distributors in Alaska.
The drug trade has caught the attention of the Treasury Department, which handed down sanctions to Chinese companies last October for their involvement in drug trafficking, including fentanyl.
