The Trump administration has stopped more than 4,000 firearms from going to Mexican drug cartels over the last year, and estimates it kept about 1,600 rounds of ammunition per day away from drug gangs.
The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives announced that since President Donald Trump’s second inauguration in January 2025, it seized 4,359 guns bound for Mexico to be used by cartels and gangs.
Further, the ATF says it seized 648,975 rounds of ammunition bound for Mexico, averaging about 1,600 rounds per day.
“Illegal crime guns increasingly originate from every state in the country. This is not a southwest border problem, it is a national threat,” ATF Deputy Director Robert Cekada said in a public statement.
Trump nominated Cekada as the director of the bureau to replace outgoing Director Steven Dettelbach.
“ATF agents are aggressively targeting gangs, cartels, and transnational criminal organizations that illegally traffic firearms and turn American streets into war zones,” Cekada added.
“We will dismantle these networks at every level, cut off their access to weapons, and hold every criminal fully accountable under the law.”
Overall, the ATF said it has seized 36,277 illegal crime guns and 2.3 million rounds of ammunition from gang members, suppliers for transnational criminal organizations, and others, during Trump’s second term.
The 2025 numbers are higher than previously announced seizures of Mexican-bound guns and ammunition during President Joe Biden’s administration.
In May 2024, the Biden Justice Department announced that the ATF’s Operation Southbound stopped more than 2,600 firearms and 115,000 rounds of ammunition headed for Mexico in 2023.
That represented a 65% increase in gun seizures from 2022, and a 19% increase in ammunition seizures, according to the DOJ report.
