The security tensions between Mexico and the United States marking the second Trump era appear to stem from Mexico’s failings, according to the logic of the rarely self-reflective northern neighbor. Fentanyl and migration are a problem, but arms trafficking is not. The U.S. sends around 200,000 weapons to Mexico each year, according to analysts’ estimates, a figure that demonstrates the lack of interest in combating illegal arms sales, much of which are destined for the drug cartels that have been classified as terrorist organizations by the Republican president himself.

The main arms trafficking routes identified by the Mexican government between November 2024 and May 2025 originate in the states of Arizona, California, and Texas, according to a report presented to Congress by the Ministry of Citizen Security. At least 74% of illicit weapons reach organized crime groups through these routes. These data are consistent with those of the U.S. Department of Justice, which, in its latest report on the subject, revealed the same points of origin and predominance, with one addition: New Mexico. A smaller budget north of the Rio Grande and greater laxity in security operations point to one conclusion, experts say: combating arms trafficking is not on the U.S. government’s agenda.

The knowledge that both administrations have regarding the illicit trafficking of weapons raises many questions. How many agents from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) have been deployed to the detected locations? How many inspection operations are U.S. authorities conducting? What are the seizure figures at these locations? What is the Mexican Security Cabinet’s strategy to combat this crime?

“When the United States tells Mexico that we have to do more against the cartels, the argument should be: we’ve been saying for five years that the weapons are coming from Texas, and we haven’t seen any beefing up of enforcement actions; there isn’t a bigger presence, or more checkpoints,” says Alejandro Celorio, the official who coordinated Mexico’s legal strategy to bring a dozen U.S. weapons manufacturers and distributors to trial. The lawyer hits the nail on the head. Information about the trafficking routes allows Mexico to support its narrative regarding the U.S. government’s failure to curb arms smuggling, and also to devise a strategy, but nothing more. Washington has the power to implement measures to prevent the passage of weapons into Mexican territory. The manufacturers, Celorio says, are protected by U.S. laws, which prohibit the use of information about the routes taken by illicit weapons in a lawsuit.

The U.S. Department of Justice revealed in its January report that from 2022 to 2023, trace data identified Arizona, California, and Texas as the distribution sources for 73% of the weapons recovered in Mexico that could be traced back to a buyer. The figures coincide with those of the report that the Ministry of Citizen Security submitted to the Mexican Congress on July 3, the result of information exchange between the Ministry of National Defense (Sedena) and the Attorney General’s Office (FGR). The Mexican report also revealed the seizure of 5,869 firearms, 31,000 magazines, more than 1.2 million rounds of ammunition, and 289 grenades.

The numbers remain unchanged. Since January, the Department of Justice has identified Texas as the main entry point for illegal weapons, accounting for 43% of the total, followed by Arizona, with 22% — exactly the same figure cited in the Mexican report covering a six-month period from November to May. Receiving states are no different. According to the U.S. report, 82% of the weapons seized between 2022 and 2023 were located in states where the Sinaloa and Jalisco New Generation cartels have a presence; organizations Trump has classified as terrorists. Baja California, Chihuahua, the State of Mexico, Guanajuato, Guerrero, Jalisco, Michoacán, Sonora, Tamaulipas, and Zacatecas are the most frequent destinations for the weaponry. “The U.S. government knows perfectly well [where the weapons come from] but doesn’t accept it,” says Celorio. The expert maintains that the information serves to keep the problem alive and, eventually, to inform other potential legal proceedings that Mexico may bring against the U.S. arms industry.

John Lindsay Poland, coordinator of the Stop US Arms to Mexico project, agrees: the location of arms trafficking routes reinforces Washington’s responsibility and negligence. “Fighting arms trafficking is not on their agenda,” says the activist. The decisions of Mexico’s main trading partner seem to have a deeper root. “If [Donald Trump] really wants to eliminate the cartels, he should focus on the flow of arms, and he’s doing the opposite,” Poland argues. The researcher elaborates: “[Trump] is reducing the U.S.’s ability to stop illicit arms trafficking reaching the cartels.” The Republican magnate has outlined a plan to cut the ATF’s budget. This includes simplifying background checks for gun purchases and making them more flexible. The U.S. president intends to eliminate approximately 540 inspectors from the agency — two-thirds of the total — and reduce the ATF’s budget by 25%. The plan includes revising a handful of regulations and destroying records of firearm owners that have been held for more than 20 years.

Traceability information is scarce, but its presentation is a success, experts agree. The issue should remain alive because it confirms the origin of the weapons and contributes to a potential legal argument that could make it difficult for the U.S. Supreme Court to rule in favor of the gun manufacturers. All in all, the scenario is bleak. Celorio rules out a legal challenge from Mexico via Texas. “I don’t think the Mexican government will sue in Texas; it’s a very conservative state,” he notes.

Sign up for our weekly newsletter to get more English-language news coverage from EL PAÍS USA Edition

Fear is palpable on the boiling asphalt. Glass from broken bottles and smashed car windows is still scattered on the sidewalks of San Antonio. This neighborhood is the heart of the Moroccan community in Torre Pacheco, a Spanish municipality with a population of around 40,000 in the southeastern region of Murcia.

Everybody in town is talking about what happened last night. Older folks are sipping coffee on the terrace of the Istanbul café, which marks the entrance to the neighborhood. But the younger residents are preparing for another attack like the one they faced on the night of Saturday, July 12: dozens of burly men – dressed in black, some of them hooded – entered the neighborhood, carrying out what they themselves have called a “hunt” for North African immigrants… who, in reality, have been living in the town for three decades.

Three days of riots resulted in mild injuries and several people being arrested. Patrols from the Civil Guard law enforcement agency– which has deployed 75 officers throughout the municipality – and the local police are roaming the streets.

Everyone knows something is going to happen. The question is when.

The photograph of the face of Domingo, a 60-year-old resident of the town, went viral on Thursday, July 10. His face was stained with blood, while one of his eyes was completely swollen from a beating he had received the day before. There’s also a video circulating, in which a young man with a foreign accent allegedly assaults him. The incident is still under investigation, but the verdict of the streets has already been issued: a handful of Moroccan youths were the ones who beat him up, supposedly to make the video go viral on TikTok.

The next day, the City Council called for a demonstration to condemn the attack. Tempers were already running high. A handful of immigrant youths attended the event, with the intention to provoke. Youths from far-right groups, organized on Telegram, were already there and responded to the taunt by attacking the migrant youths and trying to lynch them, with the few law enforcement officers unable to contain them.

The fuse was about to be lit, and the fire came from outside. 25-year-old Omar – who has spent 20 years of his life in Spain – is firm in his opinion: “[The far-right assailants] came from outside the municipality to provoke, because they know we live here; otherwise, why would they come?” the young man asks.

Omar grew up and studied in Torre Pacheco. He says that those who came looking for them weren’t their former classmates or the town’s residents, but other men encouraged by extremist agitators on social media.

The call to “hunt” – that exact word has been used – targets a specific population: a generation of young people who were born in the town. Now in their twenties, they’re the children of immigrants. They spend their days on the streets. While they grew up in Spain, they’ve always been marginalized. “They’re foreigners back home and ”moros” [a derogative term for North Africans] when they’re in the streets,” says the journalist and sociology professor Paulino Ros, who teaches at Spain’s National University of Distance Education (UNED) in Cartagena. He also runs a blog titled Islam en Murcia (“Islam in Murcia,” referring to the region where Torre Pacheco is located. These young people, he points out, are neither studying nor working: they’re “absolutely neglected.” They don’t speak Arabic and they haven’t set foot in Morocco… yet they don’t feel like they fully belong in Spain.

Fátima – who prefers not to share her real name, for fear of reprisals – was once a child in this neighborhood. Today, she’s almost 30. A doctor by profession, she no longer lives in San Antonio, but her entire family still does. When she spoke with EL PAÍS, she was visiting, and afraid.

“I’m forbidding my nephews from going out. But one of them is almost 19; how do you tell him not to go out? How do you demand that he stay locked up out of fear?” she asks.

Like her, some of the young people raised here have managed to get an education, build a career and rise up. For many others, however, this hasn’t been an option. They’ve ended up being pushed out onto the streets, with some now involved in crime.

“It’s the violence of frustrated children. Why don’t they study or work? They’re children who are lost, but instead of addressing why they’re there, they’re singled out and persecuted,” she laments.

On the other side of town, there’s also fear. A family that runs a bar finishes eating on the terrace. Lifelong residents of the town, they say that they’ve been living with the immigrants for decades. For a long time, their daily interactions have been on good terms: their customers are mainly of North African descent. They themselves shop at Moroccan stores. But when it comes to this group of kids – between 16 and 20 years old – they say that things are different, that these youths feel like they own the streets. The family claims that they take part in the drug trade and that they’re hostile.

There’s a general weariness with crime in the town. However, it wasn’t the residents who came looking for the youths, but rather people from outside the town, who showed up specifically to find them. “And now we’re the ones who’re going to [suffer] the consequences of whatever happens,” says one of the family members, who prefers not to give his name or appear in the press.

Mayor Pedro Ángel Roca, of the conservative People’s Party (PP), supports the feeling of being fed up with crime. And he doesn’t see a lack of attention for young people in marginalized neighborhoods.

“In the end,” he shrugs, “nerves are triggered by a long period of crime.” He associates the rise in crime with an exponential increase in the town’s population, which has grown by almost 200% in recent decades – from 15,000 inhabitants to almost 42,000 – driven mainly by immigrants who have come to work in the agricultural sector. He says that he sees no difference in the state support provided to immigrants and to people of Spanish origin, arguing that they’re quite integrated. However, a member of the city council who is responsible for the educational sector within the municipality acknowledges that, in secondary schools, in predominantly North African areas, the dropout rate stands at around 30%.

“Vox (the biggest far-right party in Spain) is waiting for an incident to happen so they can go on their summer rounds,” says Mariola Guevara, a central government delegate in the Region of Murcia, who accuses the extremist party of “encouraging violence.”

“Radicalized, xenophobic, racist political organizations – which constantly incite hatred and associate any type of crime with immigration – are being normalized and given a place in institutions. This generates social alarm among the population, she affirms, adding that “Torre Pacheco has always been a municipality with a very good [state of] coexistence.”

Guevara defends the actions of the security forces, which have reinforced their presence and are working in a “coordinated” manner. She notes that the police officers and members of the Civil Guard have prevented incidents from escalating. “We had maximum resources and much more availability and personnel activated, so that they could be deployed whenever necessary,” she points out.

The cafe owned by 55-year-old Allal Abbou, who has spent 15 years of his life in Spain – is called Al Karama in Arabic, which means “dignity.” Abbou – who runs an association that works toward the integration of the immigrant community – cannot believe what he’s seeing. “Right now, we have no security,” he laments. “But I’m not talking about Moroccans or Spaniards: there’s no peace for anyone. We’re all [residents of Torre Pacheco] and we breathe the same air,” he sighs.

He says that Moroccans don’t feel safe now. He adds that this has never happened before… that something external is fueling hatred on the streets. He watches the patrol cars move back and forth. “I hope nothing happens,” he sighs. Outside, officers are beginning to cordon off the streets.

Sign up for our weekly newsletter to get more English-language news coverage from EL PAÍS USA Edition

In 2023, an engineer went to an amusement park with his family. They had a stroller, and one of the parents stayed behind to keep an eye on it while the others went on a ride. When they got off, the park’s app detected that someone had been waiting, sent a notification, and let them in via the fast-track, skipping the lines. This anecdote is just a small example of the precise use of geolocation via Bluetooth and Wi-Fi on our cell phones.

But like all technologies that collect personal data, they can be abused. Similar incidents sparked investigations led by Spanish researchers, which will be presented at the prestigious Pets privacy conference in Washington D.C., which began on July 14. This research explores how some apps exploit Bluetooth and Wi-Fi permissions to track our location indoors, or that of users who don’t enable GPS for that purpose. Technically, it’s no secret that these antennas can detect which cells are passing nearby. What’s new in this research is the hidden ecosystem of those who extract this information, buried in thousands of apps, to target us with ads, profile us, or simply know where we are at all times.

“There are a lot of mysterious uses,” says Juan Tapiador, co-author of the article and a professor at Carlos III University in Madrid. “You can apply this to any anecdote, like the girl who went to an abortion clinic and then saw an ad that made her nervous, or the guy who traveled to a place without telling anyone and then came across an ad that shocked him. The most extreme case is if you go to a supermarket or a liquor store or to pick up a book and then see a related ad.” In cases like these, we often say that our cell phones are listening to us. But that’s not necessary. With this information and how it’s shared, many connections can be made about habits. It’s reasonable for an average citizen to feel suspicious about receiving very subtle advertising based on some intimate detail and not knowing where it originates from.

There are public databases listing the GPS coordinates of Bluetooth beacons or Wi-Fi antennas. With that information, if they detect a cell phone, it’s obvious that its owner has been there. It’s not very complex. But that information should only be available to apps that have permission from their users, not to unknown marketing companies that profile millions of citizens. “Eighty-six percent [of the 9,976 Android apps analyzed] collect at least one sensitive data type, including device and user identifiers such as AAID (Android Advertising ID), email, along with GPS coordinates, Wi-Fi and Bluetooth scan results,” the scientific article says.

Location reveals a lot about our tastes and habits. The precision of this information confirms whether we buy oat or cow’s milk at the supermarket, if we like to linger in the window displays of cheap clothing stores, or whether we are more interested in true crime or science fiction on the shelves of a bookstore. If someone has received a promotional offer from Burger King when walking into one of its restaurants, now they know why. But the commercial use of this information goes much further. It’s one thing to allow Burger King to make us an offer when we download its app, and another to have thousands of apps containing pieces of code that capture this information and send it to unknown marketing companies that traffick that data.

In addition to unsolicited advertising, there are other potentially more delicate uses. “The most serious issue is that it can be used to identify your movements and who you’re with,” says Narseo Vallina, co-author of the paper, a researcher at the Imdea Networks Institute and co-founder of the privacy firm Appcensus. Location data isn’t just used to track where someone goes, but can also be used to determine whether they enter a mosque or a sauna, or even the speed of a vehicle or the location of an undocumented immigrant. These data merchants can sell information not only for commercial purposes, but also, for example, concerning who was on Jeffrey Epstein’s island.

Prefabricated tools

Apps aren’t usually programmed from scratch. They use so-called SDKs (software development kits), which are prefabricated tools that are taken as is and save a lot of programming work. SDKs perform functions that the app needs, and others that are more hidden. “This is an SDK ecosystem that no one has studied,” says Vallina. “Many previous studies of Bluetooth and Wi-Fi abuse data were at a theoretical level. But there were no empirical studies of what types of SDKs implement this, and we started looking for SDKs that advertised themselves as location services and that also provided Bluetooth and Wi-Fi services.”

If you speculate about the possibilities of this system, the hypotheses are unimaginable: “You install a dating app, and you give it access to Wi-Fi. Then you connect to a Wi-Fi hotspot at a location, and at the same time, your dating app scans nearby Bluetooth devices. That way, they know who your date is and where you are,” Vallina explains. The problem isn’t that your dating app, to which you’ve given permission, knows this, but rather a third-party app that has an SDK installed.

“We identify 52 SDKs with Wi-Fi and Bluetooth scanning features integrated into at least 9,976 apps with an estimated cumulative install count [historically] on around 55 billion devices,” the study says. These apps are widespread, from banks to football clubs, hotels, academic centers, and media outlets.

“On a subway, there may be a Bluetooth beacon whose purpose is to count passengers. But nothing prevents an SDK in an app from doing what we’re suggesting, which is to say, knowing precisely that you are on the subway,” says Tapiador. “This means you can then re-identify that person and associate whoever passed through here with whoever passed through there,” he adds. The impossible challenge of these investigations is figuring out exactly where that data ends up and what use it makes of it: knowing what data an SDK extracts is one thing, but knowing how it’s then processed is quite another. “They’re associated with the Android Advertising ID, which is a marker that identifies you and your device, which suggests they’re using it to track the user. They can send you an email, an alert, or aggregate it on a server to create a profile of you with that information,” says Vallina.

This method is designed to obtain something as valuable as a user’s location, avoiding the entire process of obtaining their consent. “If you were to ask a company that thrives on tracking what interests them most about a person and they could only choose one thing, they would probably say location,” explains Tapiador. “It’s not surprising that, technologically, a large part of the tracking effort is geared toward obtaining location data. This way of using beacons is simply the umpteenth derivative of how to obtain a location with something no one has ever looked at before.”

Sign up for our weekly newsletter to get more English-language news coverage from EL PAÍS USA Edition