Media Contact: Georgia Seltzer, (202) 822-8200 x104, gseltzer@vpc.org
Campaign Research Notes – October 29, 2026
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In September the United States Government Accountability Office (GAO) released a new report, Firearms Trafficking to Mexico: Better Data and Performance Monitoring Would Help Agencies Direct Resources to Counter Cartels. The report reviews U.S. efforts to combat firearms trafficking to Mexico and offers recommendations for the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF), the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), and the State Department’s Bureau of International Narcotics and Law Enforcement Affairs (INL) to improve data collection and monitoring to assess and support such efforts.
The GAO report found that:
Transnational criminal organizations (TCO) in Mexico seek to acquire semi-automatic firearms—AR-15s, AK-47s, and .50-caliber rifles—which they often convert to fully automatic firearms, according to agency officials. Armed with these weapons, TCOs pose a serious threat to Mexican law enforcement and military. TCOs acquire firearms from the U.S. primarily through straw purchasers—third parties who buy them on the TCOs’ behalf—and middlemen who smuggle the firearms through ports of entry on the border.
These findings confirm research conducted by the Violence Policy Center through our Cross-Border Gun Trafficking project—an ongoing analysis of the types of firearms illegally trafficked from the United States to Mexico and other Latin American and Caribbean countries. The project utilizes indictments and other documents filed in U.S. courts primarily in the southwest United States that detail the make, model, caliber, manufacturer, and retail source of firearms seized in criminal trafficking cases. The documents tally more than 4,000 semiautomatic assault weapons and 1.4 million rounds of ammunition seized in criminal trafficking cases.
The weapons seized in the trafficking cases cited by the VPC represent just a small portion of the guns trafficked from the United States to Mexico. The GAO report found that from 2020 to 2024, “ATF completed traces for 122,084 firearms recovered in Mexico, 68 percent (82,785) of which had a U.S. source.”
The GAO report found that while U.S. government agencies conduct various efforts to combat firearms trafficking, they do not assess the effectiveness of those efforts, concluding, “As a result, the agencies do not know the extent to which their efforts are meeting objectives and cannot determine whether they are directing resources to the most effective programs.”
The GAO report offered recommendations to improve data collection, develop objectives, goals, and desired outcomes of firearms trafficking programs, and to measure performance of such efforts to meet goals and outcomes.
Not surprisingly, even these modest recommendations have been met with resistance from the Administration, with the Department of Homeland Security arguing “that it does not believe collecting data on types of firearms would fulfill its mission or provide sufficient operational benefit to justify the costs associated with the recommended action.”
What a surprise.