EL PASO, Texas (Border Report) – Much has changed since Omar Arellano was busting drug dens in northern New Mexico as part of the Drug Enforcement Administration’s Mobile Enforcement Teams.

Things were simpler back then. Suspects cooked methamphetamine inside their mobile homes and dealers stayed out in the open at local hotels. Marijuana was still the most widely used illicit drug and a fifth of state and local law enforcement agencies nationwide identified it as their principal drug threat.

Fast forward two decades and the newly appointed special agent in charge of the DEA’s El Paso Division is now facing challenges unimaginable during his rookie year in federal law enforcement.

“It’s no longer plant-based drugs that we’re dealing with; now they’re synthetic based. Their limit to how much drug they can make is how much precursors they can get and how many chemists they can get on board,” Arellano said on Tuesday from his new office in El Paso.

Wads of cash are no longer changing hands in back alleys.

“We no longer see the bulk cash. Now we’re seeing cryptocurrency, Bitcoin; they’re getting more intricate in terms of finding these individuals who are good at moving money, billions of dollars, from wallet to wallet,” he said.

And shady characters don’t have to look for clients near the school playground anymore, even though teens remain a prime target for drug dealers.

“It’s this phone,” Arellano said pointing to a smartphone on the table. “It’s the social media aspect of it that criminal organizations are exploiting. They’re pushing everything to our kids that are vulnerable on their iPhone.”

Traffickers in Juarez, Mexico, and in El Paso are befriending American teens, selling them dangerous and highly addictive fentanyl under the guise of M-30 blue Oxycodone pills, even pitching that they’re “FDA approved.”

They’re also using social media group accounts on platforms like WhatsApp and TikTok to recruit couriers.

“Cartels are trying to flood our market with whatever there is — whether it is cocaine, heroin, meth — but now they’re masking it. They’re deceiving people by making the think they’re getting a legitimate pill that is medically approved but it’s not,” Arellano said. “They’re making them high-grade, importing pill presses from different parts of the world. We have seen super labs in Mexico and other countries like Canada and in Europe, but we’re also seeing them in mom-and-pop operations.”

A drug warrior with the credentials to prove it

Arellano earlier this month took over leadership of a federal office along a highly coveted drug superhighway at the geographical center of the U.S.-Mexico border. Three drug cartels — Sinaloa, Juarez and the Jalisco New Generation Cartel, or CJNG — have staked a claim to the region and are using any imaginable method to get their product into the United States.

Couriers have been stopped with drugs in hidden vehicle compartments, strapped to their bodies, under wigs and even under their “apron” belly.

The drugs don’t stay in El Paso; they’re on their way to the wealthy suburbs of North Texas, regional hubs like Phoenix, Denver and Albuquerque, and ultimately big cities like Chicago and Los Angeles.

The drug trafficking organizations operating across the border from El Paso have proven as violent as any in Mexico. Chihuahua state police officers in the past three months have pulled nearly 100 bodies from clandestine graves near Casas Grandes, Mexico. Juarez just ranked as the 13th most dangerous city in the world.

“At the end of the day, what drives these organizations is the money, the greed. What happens when you have two or more criminal organizations fighting for territory is the violence starts. The less people in their territory, the more money they will make,” he said.

Arellano last served as the DEA’s chief of foreign operations overseeing drug enforcement efforts in 91 foreign offices in 68 countries. He previously was assistant special agent in charge of the Bogota, Colombia office, supervisory agent at the Dallas Division, executive assistant to the director of the El Paso Intelligence Center and resident agent in charge of the Juarez Resident Office.

The new assignment is a homecoming for the El Paso native who grew up in the Lower Valley and graduated from the University of Texas at El Paso. He is married to an El Pasoan and has two grown adult children.

It was his children who inspired him to stand up to the illicit drug threat that has claimed tens of thousands of lives through overdoses in each of the past several years.

“They have been my inspiration, my drive, if I can do it for them, I can do it for other children in the United States and everywhere else because the cartels are children at every aspect,” he said, referring to the drug sales in this country as well as the recruiting of youths as couriers and sicarios abroad.

Arellano on Tuesday admitted that the U.S. cannot “arrest its way” out of the overdose fentanyl crisis he says until recently was claiming 300 lives per day — a catastrophe equal to the 9/11 terrorist attacks, every 10 days.

That’s why one of his priorities during his stint in El Paso will be to involve parents and the rest of the community in prevention and awareness.

“Educate your children, your loved ones because this fentanyl, this synthetic drug crisis that we are in doesn’t discriminate. It will touch all aspects of ethnicity, socio-economics,” he said. “It’s everywhere. So, the more we educate the public, the better we will be.”

Arellano and DEA El Paso spokesman Carlos Briano said the combined law enforcement efforts across the country and the awareness raised through public education campaigns such as “One pill can kill” and “One conversation can save a life” appear to be making a dent in the crisis.

Fentanyl deaths are starting to fall across the United States including in El Paso County. And the lethality in excess of 2 milligrams of fentanyl detected in seized pills also is going down.

“Is it working? Absolutely. Three years ago, seven out of 10 pills contained a lethal dose of fentanyl. A year later we went down to five our of 10. Now it’s down to four. We are seeing a significant decline in drug poisonings and overdoses that is indicative of everyone’s collective work,” he said.

But the cartels aren’t taking U.S. law enforcement efforts lying down. Cocaine seizures are up lately along the Southwest border. And transnational criminal organizations faced with international restrictions on precursor chemicals that allow them to make fentanyl are modifying their product.

Cartel chemists are busy altering other chemicals that are not on the export-prohibited lists to match what they need to manufacture their signature product, Arellano said.