The Sinaloa Cartel raked in hundreds of thousands of dollars stealing Nike shoes from a moving BNSF train in their latest railroad heist between California and Arizona, a pattern that has been on the rise, according to law enforcement.

Eleven members of the Mexican transnational criminal organization are in federal custody after stealing the merchandise from a train car traveling north of Phoenix with cut air brakes on Jan. 17, Homeland Security Investigations (HSI) said in documents filed Wednesday in the U.S. District Court in Arizona.

BNSF employees notified police after spotting a severed air hose on a cargo train near Perrin, Arizona. Railroad police noticed a box truck parked a few miles away and, later, several crates positioned near the tracks. 

Police said they stopped a Toyota Camry leaving the area of a Ford Econoline box truck and identified its occupants as Jaime Cota Peraza and Sadiel Martinez Soto. While the suspects were distracted, other authorities placed tracking devices into the waiting crates. 

Sinaloa Cartel members raided a BNSF train on Jan. 17, 2025, according to Homeland Security Investigations. (ROBYN BECK/AFP via Getty Images)

Typically, the agency said, the cartel sells its spoils on Amazon, eBay or other digital platforms or to amenable California retailers. 

Chris Swecker, the former assistant director of the FBI, told Fox News Digital that cartels have been robbing trains for at least a decade. 

“When I was an assistant director, we were dealing with this at that time. If you look back, there was an epidemic for a while, then law enforcement got a handle on it,” Swecker said. “What’s even more interesting is that when they do it, it’s almost like a retail theft where there’s no intervention during the time when it happens. Nobody comes in guns blazing trying to stop the theft.”

Michael Ricks, the metro Atlanta region director for the Georgia Gang Investigators Association, said train thefts are “a very lucrative activity for organized crime groups and cartels.”

“They can get hundreds of thousands if not over $1 million worth of merchandise to sell and launder through … one, two container hits,” he said. “So this is actually relatively common activity for transnational criminal organizations and cartels.”

President Donald Trump’s executive order to designate cartels as Foreign Terrorist Organizations could help curb train thefts along with other cartel operations, Swecker said. 

“You can punish anyone who provides a stash house, a car, cash, money laundering activities for providing material support to a designated terrorist organization,” Swecker said. “It just adds another set of tools to the toolbox.”

“Giving them that designation certainly would help in building something like a racketeering case [when handling train thefts],” Ricks told Fox News Digital. “It’s not a coincidence that they happened to hit the Nike car that has $202,000 of merchandise, and that’s some type of inside information was provided to them at some level.”