US authorities on Wednesday announced the discovery of the longest smuggling tunnel ever found on the southwest border, stretching more than 1.3km from an industrial site in Tijuana, Mexico, to the San Diego, California, area.
The tunnel featured an extensive rail cart system, forced air ventilation, high voltage electrical cables and panels, an elevator at the tunnel entrance and a drainage system.
While there were no arrests, no drugs found at the site and no confirmed exit point in the US, the length — more than 14 football fields — stunned authorities.
Photo: EPA-EFE / US CUSTOMS AND BORDER PROTECTION
“This one blows past [the second-longest],” said Lance LeNoir, a US Border Patrol operations supervisor. “We never really thought they had the moxie to go that far. They continue to surprise me.”
The tunnel exposes the limitations of US President Donald Trump’s border wall, which stretches several meters underground in the area and is considered effective against small, crudely built tunnels often called “gopher holes.”
The one announced on Wednesday was found about 21m underground, well below the wall.
Following the discovery in August last year, Mexican law enforcement identified the entrance and US investigators mapped the tunnel that extends a total of 1,313m.
The next longest tunnel in the US was discovered in San Diego in 2014. It was 904m long.
The newly discovered tunnel is about 1.68m tall and 0.61m wide, officials said.
Agents discovered several hundred sandbags blocking a suspected former exit of the tunnel in San Diego’s Otay Mesa industrial warehouse area.
It went under several warehouses in Otay Mesa, where sophisticated tunnels have typically ended, and extended into open fields.
US authorities said they are confident that the tunnel exited in San Diego at one time, based on its trajectory.
LeNoir, a veteran on the multiagency task force of tunnel investigators known as “tunnel rats,” said that he made his way through about 15m of sugar sacks blocking the tunnel, but could not go any farther.
An incomplete offshoot of the tunnel that extended 1,090m suggested to authorities that smugglers had plugged an initial exit point and were building another.
The suspected previous exit “became unsustainable for whatever reason, so they built a spur,” Border Patrol spokesman Jeff Stephenson said.
By federal law, US authorities must fill the US side of tunnels with concrete after they are discovered.
“The sophistication and length of this particular tunnel demonstrates the time-consuming efforts transnational criminal organizations will undertake to facilitate cross-border smuggling,” said Cardell Morant, acting special agent in charge of US Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s Homeland Security Investigations unit in San Diego.
Authorities have found 15 sophisticated tunnels on California’s border with Mexico since 2006, with hallmarks including lighting, ventilation, railway tracks and hydraulic lifts.
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