Customs and Border Protection sent out an alert to all personnel this week warning agents that Mexican cartels may be plotting to assassinate them, the Washington Examiner reported Friday.
The Examiner said it reviewed the alert, which said that "cartel groups were discussing killing U.S. law enforcement personnel along the border near Fronton, Texas, between Miguel Aleman and Los Guerra, Tamaulipas, Mexico."
Another CBP official confirmed the alert to the Examiner and said that area is a "high-traffic area for drug smuggling as it is just across the Rio Grande from Miguel Aleman, one of the more dangerous cities in the Mexican state of Tamaulipas."
CBP officials said agents in the Rio Grande region should wear body armor and carry long-arm guns and work in groups directly along the border to increase safety, the report said.
The report also said that cartel members dressed in military outfits, carrying AK-47 rifles, "taunted" U.S. soldiers assigned to the border in October.
"What's been happening actually this past week is we see a group of individuals that are coming across — they're smuggling people — but what they're doing is they come across the river into the U.S. and smuggle people, they go back into Mexico, and they get their weapons," Texas Department of Public Safety spokesman Lt. Christopher Olivarez told the publication at the time.
According to CBP, the number of encounters along the border decreased 14% from December to 153,941 in January, including 26% of those encountered having a prior encounter with the agency.
Just over half, 78,486 of those individuals, were processed for expulsion under Title 42.
According to ABC News, Title 42 is part of the 1944 Public Health Services law that stops immigrants from coming into the country during public health emergencies.
Although the measure is rarely used, the administration of then-President Donald Trump activated it early in the COVID-19 pandemic to rapidly deport illegal immigrants coming across the southern border.
President Joe Biden is continuing to use the restriction despite reversing several other Trump border policies his first day in office in January 2021.
According to the report, some 938,045 illegal migrants were deported under Title 42 between October 2020 and August 2021.
Another 75,455 of the illegal immigrants encountered by CBP in January were processed under Title 8, which sets limits on the number of immigrants the United States will accept during the year, according to Ballotpedia.
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