US Seizes Record 700,000 Pounds of Meth Chemicals from China Bound for Sinaloa Cartel

The United States announced Wednesday that authorities intercepted more than 700,000 pounds (300,000 kilograms) of precursor chemicals used to make methamphetamine, a shipment officials said was bound from China to Mexico’s powerful Sinaloa cartel.

“This is the largest seizure of precursor chemicals used to manufacture methamphetamine in US history,” US Attorney for the District of Columbia Jeanine Pirro told reporters at the Port of Houston, Texas.

Pirro delivered her remarks inside a warehouse stacked with 13,000 blue, plastic-wrapped barrels — cargo that had been shipped from Shanghai on two separate vessels. The shipments were intercepted “on the high seas” last week before reaching cartel-controlled labs in Mexico, she said.

According to Todd Lyons, acting director of US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), “foreign law enforcement partners” assisted in consolidating the seizures in Panama before transferring them to Houston.

Lyons added that the Trump administration’s decision to designate the Sinaloa cartel as a foreign terrorist organization gave federal agencies new authority to track and interdict precursor chemicals before they entered the United States.

Pirro accused Beijing of fueling the drug crisis, saying: “Every day, tons of chemicals that are used to create synthetic drugs like methamphetamine and fentanyl are shipped from China to Mexico in China’s undeclared war against America and their citizens.”

Officials estimated the chemicals could have produced 420,000 pounds of methamphetamine with a street value of $569 million in Houston.

The announcement came just a day after President Trump confirmed that US forces sank a drug-smuggling vessel off Venezuela, killing 11 “narcoterrorists” in international waters. The strike followed Trump’s recent executive order authorizing military action against drug cartels.

Meanwhile, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, visiting Mexico for talks with President Claudio Sheinbaum, pledged that the United States would intensify pressure on cartels but emphasized that Washington would continue to respect Mexican sovereignty.

Also this week, the US Treasury Department imposed sanctions on Guangzhou Tengyue, a Chinese chemical company accused of producing and selling synthetic opioids to US markets. Two of its executives, Huang Xiaojun and Huang Zhanpeng, were also sanctioned, freezing any assets they hold in the United States.

According to US officials, drug overdoses remain the leading cause of death for Americans aged 18 to 45, with Chinese companies cited as the primary source of chemicals used in manufacturing illicit drugs that flow across US borders.