By Richard Hernandez and Mark Gutglueck
The Mexican Consulate in San Bernardino is among seven of the 53 Mexican consulates throughout the United States which are being considered for forced closure by the U.S State Department, the Sentinel has learned.
The San Bernardino consulate is contained on Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s list of facilities being considered for closure based on a multitude of factors, extending to what U.S. Government officials claim is the increase in tension and danger stemming from the Mexican government’s discontinuation of cooperation and withdrawal of support relating to FBI, CIA and DEA operations in the northern Mexican state of Chihuahua last month, suspicions that personnel with the San Bernardino Mexican consulate, along with consular officials elsewhere, are participating in a Mexican Government-sponsored program to interrupt U.S. Department of Immigration and Customs Enforcement operations to round up undocumented Mexican National aliens in California and what is said to be emerging evidence that elements of the Mexican Government and the administration of Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum, including consular officials assigned to Southern California, are either involved directly in or are offering shelter to Mexican nationals involved in both narcotics and illegal arms trafficking.
The U.S. State Department has made no official confirmation of any contemplated change in the status quo of what is numerically the largest contingent of a single country’s consulates in the United States. Nevertheless, the State Department acknowledges a review of both the activity at and surrounding several of the most heavily-used consulates in the country is taking place. While the provision of documentation, legal assistance, travel guidance and visitation permit application completion services is a routine function at consulates of all nations, the Trump Administrations intensification of immigration enforcement last year triggered the creation of a bevy of internet-based and cellular-system communication device programs including real-time input and algorithm-driven programs to track or predict the location and presence of U.S. federal agents, most particularly the Department of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, as they engage in undocumented migrant roundups preparatory toward deporting or expelling those taken into custody from the country. The Trump Administration considers those programs – such as the Panic Button app or Allert Button app – along with several crowdsourcing platforms such as ICEBlock, People Over Papers and ResistMap, to be illegal, as in the words of former Attorney General Pamela Bondi “an intolerable red line that cannot be crossed” which “put ICE agents at risk just for doing their jobs” and is thereby a violation of 18 U.S. Code § 115, which prohibits threatening, harming or assisting in the harming of, federal employees and agents.
In 2025, when Operation Alta California, the Trump Administration’s effort to find, detain, arrest, process, formally charge and ultimately deport as many of the more than 2.2 million illegal aliens in California, the use of the Panic Button, Alert Button, ICEBlock, People Over Papers and ResistMap apps, which to greater or lesser degrees were coordinated with personnel at the San Bernardino Mexican Consulate tremendously complicated that undertaking. The Trump Administration [cycled] through multiple strategies in seeking to deal with or otherwise handle the obstruction and resistance to the detention/deportation program, many of which resulted in adverse publicity. Those included targeting businesses known to employ unskilled labor and/or foreign workers, locations where foreigners were known to congregate, stopping individuals on the basis of their conversing in a foreign language, making surprise sweeps, into area’s heavily populated by Latinos, engaging in roving operations, the use of California National Guard Troops to provide operational security in and around areas of operation, and then, when California Governor Gavin Newsom objected to the use of the National Guard, vectoring over 700 Marines from the 2nd Battalion, 7th Marines stationed at the Marine Corps Air Ground Combat Center Twentynine Palms to specific locations in Los Angeles, San Bernardino and Orange counties to “protect federal personnel and federal property in the greater Los Angeles area.”
The American Civil Liberties Union and Public Counsel took up the cause of immigrants being detained and arrested byn the Department of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, which resulted in rulings in Federal Court in the Central District of California subsequently upheld by a panel with the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals that federal officials were engaged in a “racist deportation scheme,” by it use of those tactics.
The Trump Administration not only suffered adverse publicity as a consequence of the use of those tactics, but was forced to greatly de-intensify the effort to enforce immigration law in California for several months untilthe U.S. Supreme Court, essentially, signaled that federal agents working in Southern California, where 71 percent of the illegal immigrants originated in Latin America, were not engaging in discriminatory behavior by considering the speaking of Spanish to be a criterion distinguishing undocumented aliens from the native population or concentrating their patrols in or around businesses which have a demonstrated prior history of employing or attracting individuals in the country illegally.
This interruption of the immigration enforcement program, a centerpiece of the Second Trump Administration, left the federal officials convinced that the Mexican Government, in particular certain elements of it such as personnel functioning out of the San Bernardino Mexican Consulate were engaged in activity both illegal and contrary to the interest of the United States.
Federal law enforcement had also ascertained that there were Mexican Nationals in the United States involved in drug trafficking, human trafficking and the transit of other contraband, including firearms and armament who had been assisted by personnel working out of the San Bernardino Mexican Consulate in avoiding apprehension by both Mexican law enforcement and U.S. federal agencies.
Despite those concerns, there was resolve to avoid an international incident over relatively minor considerations and any communication regarding those issues between U.S. officials and the Mexican Government was handled quietly between the State Department and the Mexican diplomatic corps.
In April, however, events overtook both countries when what might or might not have been a traffic mishap claimed the lives of two CIA officers who were on an assignment in Mexico to not only track Mexican drug cartel activity but actively engage in stemming it.
On April 17 and April 18, a huge counternarcotic operation into Mexico’s infamous Golden Triangle targeting a series of expansive and sophisticated methamphetamine labs in the area in and surrounding the small village of El Pinal, near Chihuahua’s border with the state of Sinaloa took place. The El Pinal District is host to extensive assets currently or once controlled by the Sinaloa Cartel, formerly headed by Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán, which consist of marijuana and opium poppy farms, airstrips to export drugs out of the region or accommodate flights coming in from Colombia and Ecuador carrying cocaine, as well as state-of-the-art synthetic drug labs. The raids were led by the Chihuahua State Investigation Agency and reportedly involved several agencies of the Mexican federal government.
On April 19, an SUV with four passengers returning from the site of those raids veered off a tortuous dirt road in a remote corner of the Sierra Madre near the municipality of Morelos, plunging more 600 feet down into a rocky ravine. All four, who were clad in uniforms of the Chihuahua State Investigative Agency, were killed. They were Chihuahua State Investigation Agency Director Pedro Ramón Oseguera Cervantes, Chihuahua State Investigation Agency Detective were Genaro Méndez Montes and Americans John Dudley Black, 44, and Richard Leiter Johnston, 36.
Black and Johnson were CIA agents functioning under diplomatic cover with the U.S. Embassy in Mexico.
The deaths of Black, Johnson, Cervantes and Montes brought what was for many unwanted attention to the raids that had taken place on April 17 and 18 and even worse, the revelation that the U.S. Government was involved. Over the next 24 to 48 hours a litany of statements, ones that were substantially true, incomplete, untrue, half-true, quarter-true and complete fabrications emanated from all involved.
President Sheinbaum in an initial statement offering condolences to the families of the four dead men seemed to indicate she knew about the CIA’s involvement. Shortly thereafter, she reversed herself, stating that the Mexican federal government had not participated in the raids, had no prior knowledge about them or that they were to take place and therefore was kept in the dark about U.S. Government or CIA involvement in operations on Mexican soil. She asserted she had not been aware that the U.S. Government was involved in either the intelligence gathering that preceded the operations around El Pinal or their planning.
The leaders of several Mexican federal agencies or departments were reluctant or unwilling to acknowledge that they had any part in the raid. The Army was uninvolved, its command insisted when news of the raids first broke, while the Mexican Navy admitted some of its personnel had been present.
Sheinbaum indicated the raids were carried out under sole by the Chihuahua State Investigation Agency and at the discretion/direction of Chihuahua State Attorney General César Jáuregui Moreno.
There was contradictory information with regard to the roles of Black and Johnson. It was suggested rather than stated that they were there merely as observers. One story that circulated was that Black and Johnson had been on hand to offer guidance and training in the use of drones. The story continued to change, even with regard to the terms of their presence in Mexico. It was not true that both, it was said, were functioning under diplomatic cover. According to the Mexican Ministry of Security, of the agents indeed had come to Mexico City utilizing a diplomatic passport, but the other had entered Mexico as a tourist.
Sheinbaum acknowledged after three days that that federal forces were involved after several of her underlings within the Mexican Government’s executive branch made statement to the effect that they had not been informed and therefore had not told the president that Mexico’s federal government was directly involved or that those agencies and departments that had taken place in the operation had cooperated with the U.S. government. It was at that point that the Mexican Army’s participation in the raids was acknowledged.
Still, Sheinbaum’s position was that the operation was largely an undertaking masterminded by Chihuahua State Attorney General Moreno and the Chihuahua State Investigation Agency.
All of this played out against a backdrop of fierce partisan rivalry between Sheinbaum’s leftist Morena Party, which at present is the ruling bloc dominating Mexico at the national level, and the center-right National Action Party, which holds sway in Chihuahua. It was under the Morena Party that, in years past, the Sinaloa Cartel flourished.
Indeed, information obtained by the U.S. Justice Department in the aftermath of the 2016 arrest of Joaquín Guzmán – El Chapo – in Los Mochis, Sinoloa and his 2017 extradition to the Unitied States where he was convicted in 2019 and is now incarcerated at the maximum security federal prison in Fremont County, Colorado, information obtained has resulted in the indictment of ten current and former Mexican officials, including Rubén Rocha Moya, the governor of Sinoloa. Moya, like Sheinbaum and most of those indicted in the United States, are members of the Morena bloc. At the same time, Chihuahua, at least at present, is one of the few National Action Party bastions in the country.
The indictment of Moya and the nine other Mexican officials, which was sought by the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York and presented to a down grand jury, was unsealed on April 29, 2026. Named in the indictment, in addition to Moya was a Mexican senator/former Sinaloa Secretary General Enrique Inzunza Cazarez, Former Secretary of Administration and Finance for Sinaloa Enrique Diaz Vega, Sinaloa Deputy Attorney General Damaso Castro Zaavedra, the former chief investigator for the Sinaloa State Attorney General’s Office Alberto Jorge “Cholo” Contrera Nunez, the former chief investigator for the Sinaloa State Attorney General’s Office Marco Antonio Almaza Aviles, Former Deputy Director of the Sinaloa State Police Jose Antonio “Tornado” Dionisio Hipolito, Former Secretary of Public Security for Sinaloa Gerardo Merida Sanchez, Culiacan Mayor Juan de Dios Gamez Mendivil and former Culiacan Municipal Police Commander Juan “Juanito” Valenzuela Millan.
While no realistic evidence exists to incriminate Sheinbaum herself in the cartel activity for which the indictments in the United States were handed down, there is indication – strong indication – that cartel money has fueled the successful election campaigns of Morena Party candidates who proceeded Sheinbaum. She has resisted American suggestions that the Morena Party is riddled with corruption and she is even more adamant in maintaining that the Mexican government will oppose any efforts at extradition of Mexican government officials to the United States to stand trial. What the United States is doing by indicting those officials, Sheinbaum and her political aides have said, is interfering in Mexico’s internal affairs. Sheinbaum has issued an executive order that Mexican federal authorities discontinue cooperation with FBI, CIA and DEA operatives known to be function in Mexico. It appears that Chihuahua State officials and National Action Party-affiliated politicians in
Chihuahua and elsewhere the Morena Party is not dominant do not consider themselves bound by Sheinbaum’s order.
Sheinbaum’s remarks to the effect that the United States is interfering in Mexico’s domestic affairs mirror what the United States officials in the Trump Administration have opined about activity emanating from Mexican consulates on American soil, such as the Mexican consulate in San Bernardino, interfering with America’s sovereignty.
The Trump Administration, convinced the conspiracy to import narcotics, possession of machine guns and destructive devices and conspiracy to possess machineguns and destructive devices charges and accusation contained in the indictment against
Moya, Cazarez, Vega, Zaavedra, Nunez, Aviles, Hipolito, Sanchez and Millan as enumerated by United States Attorney for the Southern District of New York Jay Clayton and assistant U.S. attorneys Jane Y. Chong, Sarah L. Kushner, and David J. Robles merit being heard in a court of law. Moya’s and Sheinbaum’s characterization of the indictments as an attempt to subvert Mexico’s sovereignty constitute, they believe, the international incident that overrides the custom of abiding by diplomatic courtesy which has heretofore prevented the State Department from acting to close the San Bernardino Mexican Consulate and the six other consulates from which the Trump Administration has grounds to believe individuals engaged in serious criminal enterprises are operating.