(COLORADO) — The Drug Enforcement Administration’s Rocky Mountain Field Division (DEA RMFD) gave FOX21 News a glimpse behind the scenes of its recent operations in the Denver Metro Area.
The DEA RMFD revealed its top 10 most significant arrests made over two weeks, including those with alleged ties to a Mexican cartel and Venezuelan gang. The suspects’ charges range from Kidnapping to Fentanyl Distribution to Child Sexual Assault—just to name a few—and the alleged criminals were predominately from Central and South America.
Courtesy: DEA RMFD
“All of the people that are being taken into ICE custody and that are being targeted by DEA investigations are serious criminals,” said DEA RMFD Special Agent in Charge Jonathan Pullen.
In one of the recent busts, at a makeshift nightclub, several members of the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua (TdA), were taken into custody.
“Of the 90 people in the last couple of weeks, a number of those folks were tied to TdA, both from the nightclub a few weeks ago and from some of the activity we’ve done in subsequent operations,” explained Pullen. “About 10 days ago we also took 130,000 fentanyl pills off the streets from Sinaloa Cartel-affiliated targets.”
In addition to the arrests and drugs seized, Pullen said agents also found guns and confiscated a fake DEA badge from an alleged drug trafficker, who they believe was using it to steal drugs from other criminals.
Courtesy: DEA RMFD
“This is not 100% unusual, we do see this from time to time, and what we believe was happening here was that a drug trafficker was using that fake DEA badge to convince other drug traffickers that he was the police and steal their drugs from them,” he explained. “So pretty dangerous game on his part, especially if you’re not going to take them to jail after taking their drugs… so we did confiscate that and it’s pretty serious.”
As far as the new push for collaboration among the federal agencies goes, Pullen said it’s going to do a couple of things: “It’s going to keep some of these folks who are in our community selling drugs, they are going to go home, so they won’t be selling drugs anymore,” he said. “So, there are fewer people that the cartels can use to sell those drugs, and also because the border is going to be tighter and more controlled, fewer drugs are going to be making it up here, so overall, we are going to have a safer community.”
With the Department of Homeland Security granting Title 8 authority to Department of Justice agencies, Pullen said they can now track and target these criminals differently.
“Instead of taking a year to investigate an entire network, where one of the people in the network is a fentanyl distributor, we can now take that person out of our city, send them to their home country in lieu of prosecuting and incarcerating them in the United States, and we save a lot of taxpayer dollars by doing it that way and guess what? They are not selling drugs in our city,” he continued.
Acting DEA Administrator Derek S. Maltz recently said he would work daily with law enforcement partners to build an “Army of Good to Defeat the Evil” to keep Americans safe, and in response, here’s what Pullen had to say:
Americans want safer communities and I can tell you when he says an “Army of Good to Defeat the Evil,” I feel like that is what we’re doing; some of these people are evil, child sexual predators, fentanyl distributors that are killing our kids, that’s evil, it’s pure evil, and so, we are going to use every tool in our toolbox to go out and find these people and either put them in custody into state or the federal prison system and send them home.
Special Agent in Charge Jonathan Pullen, DEA RMFD
