By Todd Bensman as published by Homeland Security Today
Few Americans know this, but for at least 15 years, the Sinaloa Cartel has orchestrated an unceasing reign of sophisticated train robbery terror on the California and Arizona side of the Mexican border.
In these heists, armed crews of mostly illegal Mexican immigrants have looted many hundreds of millions of dollars in easily fenced merchandise from the railcars, financially strengthening one of Mexico’s most murderous drug trafficking syndicates.
According to several federal court cases, the Sinaloa Cartel posts merchandise spotters at sea and airports to watch the trains load up with the likes of Nike shoes and electronics. They send notes about the valuable train cars to separate mobile robbing crews who drive ahead on the rail routes and wait.
The crews, usually Mexican illegal immigrants from Sinaloa State, Mexico, are often masked and armed and always equipped with burglary tools. At the slow spots are along the east-moving rail routes in the rural hinterlands of California or Arizona, some men hop up to the doors while others cut brake lines, prompting an emergency stop. Then they cut locks and empty the cars, tossing merchandise on the ground and later hiding it in the brush.
Later, still other crews drive up and fill their stolen box trucks with millions of dollars in loot and spirit it to associates in big cities like Los Angeles and Phoenix who launder it to cash in online and flea market sales.
U.S. law enforcement believe bosses associated with the Sinaloa Cartel then wire the cash back to Sinaloa State, the court records say.
After all these years, Congress finally seemed poised to end this outrageous scourge of the American economy. But alas, the train robbing industry has found a steadfast ally: Open borders, anti-ICE lobbyists in Washington.
Saving cartel defeat from jaws of American victory
The open borders lobbyists have worked overtime to derail the standalone Senate Bill 1404, the Combating Organized Retail Crime Act (CORCA), which would unleash a national unified law enforcement campaign to finally attack the problem and potentially end it altogether.
Upon seeing a potential win for President Donald Trump, who has declared the Sinaloa Cartel a Foreign Terrorist Organization and has marshalled a plan to eradicate it, the lobbyists are invoking the prevailing leftwing bogeyman: U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Trump’s mass deportations. They are falsely claiming the law would give ICE more ways to deport illegal immigrants.
The facts do not support this narrative even a little. But that hardly matters; the ruse appears to be working. CORCA had previously drawn overwhelming bipartisan support and every supply chain and retail trade association when it passed the House in May. (348-60) and was sent to the Senate Judiciary Committee.
But after the lobbying, progressive Democratic senators now refuse to advance the bill to a committee vote because anti-ICE sentiment matters to them this election cycle more than what CORCA would really do. Senate supporters have tried attaching CORCA as an amendment to a defense spending bill, but that has drawn the ire of open borders lobbyists too and is floundering.
“CORCA would put ICE at the center of local policing…supercharge the deportation pipeline and coerce cities that protect immigrants,” the liberal Action Network wrote in a plea urging a constellation of leftwing groups to demand Senators “Vote NO on CORCA – the Retail Crime Bill that Hands ICE Power.”
Other written letters strenuously weave around any mention of the justifying cartel train heist scourge to instead object on false grounds that ICE would use the bill’s enhanced federal penalties and surveillance technologies (like facial recognition and license plate readers) to target low-level “brown, black, and immigrant “shoplifters” in big-box stores so more can be deported.
“The only discernable purpose is for the creation of an information and surveillance pipeline that would feed directly into immigration enforcement operations,” the ACLU wrote in a June 29 letter to Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer and Majority Leader John Thune.
None of this is moored to truth.
The lobbyists have worked in a near total media blackout so far. Almost no U.S. media has covered the anti-CORCA campaign, and the few that have avoid mentioning its main mission really is to combat organized cargo lootings and a cartel.
Twisting facts for an unrelated progressive cause
Nowhere does the proposed law mention low-level shoplifting enforcement as a mission, only “large-scale organized theft rings” of the sort that YouTube audiences have seen clearing out big box store shelves and about which the FBI has issued reports.
This bill is not about ICE deportations, although who in their right mind would oppose deporting the many Mexican criminal illegal aliens from Sinaloa who are involved in such activity anyway, after they serve prison sentences?
A new approach to train heists became necessary because the tracks cross too many law enforcement jurisdictions with variable priorities, investigative resources, local statutes, and uncoordinated patchworked law enforcement coverage. All of this created permissive operating environments for robbery and forestalled the kind of unified law enforcement effort necessary to end it.
CORCA endeavors to fix all that with a multi-agency federal “Organized Retail Crime Coordination Center.” The center would use enhanced federal penalties and federal investigative technology resources to mount a dedicated national campaign against theft and sale of freight train cargo, which amounted to $200 million in losses just in 2025 and at least $100 million in 2024.
What triggered the open borders crowd was that ICE’s Homeland Security Investigations, which investigates complex immigration-related crimes and has experience busting train robbers, would lead it. ICE’s director would even appoint the center’s leadership.
But the coordination center’s main mission is explicitly described as targeting “organized supply chain crime” on “rails, roads, and distribution points across the Nation” as well as the “interstate transportation of stolen property or the sale or receipt of stolen goods.”
Another big clue is bill language explicitly stating that railroad police will be part of the new federal coordination center so they can attack the train robbery problem together, nationally.
And the real winner is?
But the open borders lobbyists, who believe that hurting ICE might politically benefit some Democratic senators in the short term, insist that the center will be used to deport low-level illegal alien shoplifters.
Senate Republicans and normal Democrats need to marshal a countereffort to push through CORCA while they still can. This legislative antidote to foreign-organized train robbery by illegal aliens portends net goods for too many important parts of the American economy, especially the thousands of people this supply chain employs and Americans exposed to poisoning by this cartel’s fentanyl, meth, and cocaine.
If the open borders progressives succeed, the only winner will be a rapacious Mexican cartel, strengthened by its US cargo-robbing income against Trump’s noble campaign to finish it off.
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