How Customs and Border Protection hunt drug smugglers from the air
Lara Logan takes a ride with members of CBP's Air and Marine Operations on 'Lara Logan Has No Agenda: Return to the Border'
Fox Nation host Lara Logan took to the sky over the Gulf of Mexico to search for drug smugglers on the latest episode of "Lara Logan Has No Agenda: Return to the Border."
Logan accompanied a team from U.S. Customs and Border Protection's (CBP) Air and Marine Operations (AMO) out of Corpus Christi, Texas, onboard a P-3 Orion aircraft.
As the aircraft approached a suspicious plane, aviation flight engineer Les Fuqua explained to Logan their tracking method.
"What we're trying to do is catch them on radar," he explains. "We want to get nose-to-nose with them, and then when they get a certain distance, we will come around them, either [to the] left or right, out of distance at a wide range. But we can still watch over radar, but they can't see us, and then we'll come in behind them."
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On this occasion, the plane is another CBP P-3 Orion, standing in for the smaller crafts commonly used by smugglers.
"What we do is, we'll come up from underneath them," Fuqua explains. "Because if you look out the window, you can't see over the wing."
"A normal aircraft wouldn't know you're here?" Logan asks.
"They wouldn't," Fuqua responds.
"That's quite something that you can be that close," Logan says, "and they wouldn't know you're there."
"Exactly," Fuqua says. "Because you don't think somebody's going to come up on your butt like that."
According to CBP, over the 12-month period ending on Sept. 30, 2020, enforcement operations led by AMO resulted in the seizure of 194,220 pounds of cocaine; 278,492 pounds of marijuana and 15,985 pounds of methamphetamine, as well as 47,872 apprehensions of illegal aliens.
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