70% of guns recovered in Mexico and traced came from the United States U.S. Government Accountability Office, GAO-21-322
2,000 pounds of meth stuffed in cabbage found at US-Mexico borderMore than 2,000 pounds of methamphetamine were seized.
Page T2From§Eachthe early evening edition — 11 September 2026
Border wall promoted as having 'nowhere to hide' waves through 2,000 pounds of meth stuffed in cabbage
As it ran on the front
I want to walk through the sequence, because the sequence is on our side. On August 31st the administration announced the Smart Wall — funded, built, running — as smarter than ever, with nowhere to hide. Nowhere to hide for drones, I should say. I don't want to overstate what "nowhere" covers here, so: nowhere to hide for drones.
Eight days later the number arrived to back it up. Military officials in the Rio Grande Valley reported a 75 percent decline in drone sightings in the two weeks after the laser system went live. Seventy-five percent. That is the number I have been given, and I stand on it, and I will keep standing on it through what I'm about to tell you next.…
…(cont) What I'm about to tell you next is that agents found 2,000 pounds of methamphetamine crossing that same border. Stuffed inside cabbage. A produce truck, not airspace, not a drone. I was told the wall was smarter than ever and I repeated that it was smarter than ever, and I still think the drone number is real — I just — the drone number is real, and it is also not the number anyone is asking me about today.
I've been asked whether a system built to track objects overhead was ever supposed to look inside a truck bed of vegetables. I don't have a count of how many trucks it's supposed to check. I was going to say the count doesn't matter — it does matter, that's the count that matters, and nobody's given it to me.
So here's where the sequence lands. The wall dropped drone sightings 75 percent in two weeks. The wall did not stop 2,000 pounds of methamphetamine from crossing the same border weeks after officials called it smarter than ever, with nowhere to hide. Both of those are true at once. I came in here to defend the first sentence. I'm leaving having confirmed the second one too, and I'd like to note for the record that nobody handed me a number for the cabbage before I walked out here, and somebody should have.
The laser works on drones. The cabbage was checked by a person, on foot, the way it's been checked since before the laser existed. That's not a failure of the wall. That's the part of the border the wall was never asked to look at, and I said "smarter than ever" without asking which part that was.
“They spent eight days bragging about a laser system that cut drone sightings 75 percent, then agents found two thousand pounds of meth riding through the same border in a truck of cabbage. The laser gets a press release; the cabbage gets a receipt. Same border, same month, and only one of those got called smarter than ever.”
“The laser cut drone sightings 75 percent in two weeks — that's the headline, that's the win, and I'll stand on that number all day. The cabbage thing is a separate incident, I mean it's the same border, but it's — it's produce, it's not the drone program, I'd need to check whether that's even the same budget line before I say more.”
The receipts
· Trump’s Border Wall is Bigger and Smarter Than Ever – And There’s No Where to Hide from the morgue, 31 Aug 2026
· Military sees 75% decline in drones at US-Mexico border since laser rollout from the morgue, 8 Sep 2026
This page is a back-issue: the story as it ran, receipts as they were. The current edition is at the front.