Oklahoma Cartel Operations: CJNG, Sinaloa, Fentanyl, and Meth

Mexican cartels operating in Oklahoma include the Cartel Jalisco Nueva Generación (CJNG), the Sinaloa Cartel, and La Familia Michoacana, all of which use the state’s interstate crossroads to push fentanyl, methamphetamine, cocaine, and heroin into markets across the country. Chinese criminal networks have built a separate, multibillion-dollar footprint inside Oklahoma’s medical marijuana industry. The result is a poly-drug crisis that has drawn in federal task forces, the state Attorney General, the Oklahoma Bureau of Narcotics, and, more recently, the Legislature.

Why Cartels Target Oklahoma

Interstates 35 and 40 cross in Oklahoma City. That intersection connects the Southwest Border to the Midwest, Northeast, and Southeast, and the federal Texoma High Intensity Drug Trafficking Area designation treats Oklahoma City and the Dallas-Fort Worth metroplex as the region’s two major drug market areas. Product arrives from Mexico for local sale or is consolidated at stash houses and moved on; cash flows back south the same way.¹

The Oklahoma Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs Control has called the state “uniquely positioned to be a major distribution center for the rest of the United States.” Its 2024 Drug Threat Assessment describes a “poly-drug crisis” driven by trafficking organizations moving fentanyl, methamphetamine, and cocaine through Oklahoma highways.² When interstate patrols intensified, traffickers moved to secondary state roads and leaned on residential stash houses for repackaging.³

The Cartels Active in the State

Cartel Jalisco Nueva Generación

The DEA considers CJNG one of the most powerful transnational criminal organizations operating in the United States and a primary supplier of illicit fentanyl. OBN says it has traced the cartel’s fingerprints on Oklahoma-bound shipments through ongoing investigations, packaging analysis, and information from people arrested in the state.⁴ The bureau attributes “hundreds of thousands of pounds” of methamphetamine, fentanyl, and cocaine moving through Oklahoma to CJNG.⁵

The killing of CJNG leader Nemesio Rubén Oseguera Cervantes, known as “El Mencho,” in a Mexican military operation in late February 2026 did not slow the cartel’s Oklahoma operations. OBN spokesman Mark Woodward said in March 2026 that “there may be some disruptions with the leadership side, but on the distribution and trafficking side, they’re not going to let that stop.” The U.S. government had maintained a $15 million bounty on El Mencho before his death.⁶ In February 2025, the Trump Administration designated cartels including CJNG as Foreign Terrorist Organizations.⁵

The largest CJNG-linked case in the state, “Operation Smack Dragon,” produced a May 2019 federal indictment of 29 people accused of importing and distributing roughly two kilograms of heroin per week from Mexico into Tulsa. Prosecutors identified Stille Giovanni Gutierrez Vivanco as directing the operation from Mexico, with José García Solís and Edson Garcia-Velasquez running the Tulsa cells. The group laundered proceeds through Tulsa money remitters using fake recipient names. García Solís, Oseil Serafin Calderón, and Rudolph Gorniak each pleaded guilty to drug conspiracy in September 2020.⁷⁸

Sinaloa Cartel

Sinaloa has also planted cells in Oklahoma. Alberto Gallegos, a 35-year-old Mexican national described by prosecutors as a cell leader who supervised at least five others and dealt directly with Mexico-based cartel bosses and money launderers, was sentenced on November 17, 2023, to 40 years in federal prison after pleading guilty to possession of methamphetamine with intent to distribute. The original October 2022 indictment named three co-defendants and included charges of drug conspiracy, possession of fentanyl with intent to distribute, and possession of firearms in furtherance of drug trafficking.⁹

La Familia Michoacana

Attorney General Gentner Drummond has identified La Familia as a third cartel with rising activity in Oklahoma.¹⁰ The Northern District of Oklahoma was among 19 federal districts where arrests or charges came out of “Project Coronado,” a 44-month federal investigation into La Familia’s distribution network announced in October 2009.¹¹

Chinese Networks Inside the Marijuana Industry

Oklahoma’s 2018 legalization of medical marijuana came without caps on dispensaries or grows, and transnational criminal groups moved in fast. At the peak, roughly 9,400 grows were licensed. State investigators identified more than 3,000 illegal grow sites, and DEA figures cited in congressional testimony attribute over 80 percent of them to Chinese nationals.¹² Estimates of illegal marijuana production in Oklahoma range from $18 billion to $44 billion a year. The state produces about ten times what its licensed dispensaries need; the surplus feeds the black market.¹³

Operators typically use straw owners to secure state licenses, then ship product out of state. Jeff Weng and Tong Lin, two Chinese nationals, ran a licensed grow in Wetumka while sending an estimated 56,000 pounds of marijuana to the East Coast over seven months in delivery vans disguised as Amazon vehicles. Each received 10 years in federal prison.¹⁴ In Pawnee County, a DEA raid on a former horse racing track near Maramec in January 2023 turned up more than 17,000 plants, $45,000 in cash, and a pistol; manager Jiubing Lin pleaded guilty to federal conspiracy charges tied to a Chinese money laundering group.¹⁵

The single largest case came in April 2026, when a federal grand jury indicted 51 defendants on 67 counts in a nationwide black-market marijuana conspiracy run out of Oklahoma. At least 29 are from China. The indictment names Li Shun Chen and Ying Wang of Oklahoma City as the main conspirators and describes a network of grow owners, brokers, transporters, and distributors operating in Stillwater, Hennessey, and Paden. Investigators seized about 61,000 plants and 550 kilograms of processed marijuana, and the indictment seeks forfeiture of real property at 19 Oklahoma locations. At announcement, 28 defendants were in custody and 23 were fugitives.¹⁶

Fentanyl and Methamphetamine on the Ground

Fentanyl overdose deaths in Oklahoma climbed nearly sixfold from 2020 to 2023, rising from 127 to 730. Deaths fell 34 percent to 487 in 2024, though fentanyl was still involved in 86 percent of opioid-related overdose deaths that year. Methamphetamine remains more pervasive: it was involved in roughly two out of three drug overdose deaths in 2024, with 760 fatalities, down slightly from 813 in 2023.¹⁷

Federal prosecutors have pushed a string of cartel-linked fentanyl cases. In May 2026, Jose Amadeis Sanchez Sanchez, a Mexican national working as a courier for a Mexico-based cartel in the Tulsa area, was sentenced to 37 months in federal prison for drug conspiracy. He admitted breaking down bulk fentanyl for local distribution and collecting cash for transport back to Mexico to repay a $25,000 smuggling fee. Agents recovered nearly 2.5 pounds of fentanyl and $38,000 in cash from two East Tulsa drug houses tied to him. The wider investigation yielded roughly 30 kilograms of fentanyl, 11 kilograms of methamphetamine, four kilograms of heroin, $250,000 in cash, and more than 35 arrests.¹⁸

In March 2025, the Oklahoma Highway Patrol seized 2.2 pounds of fentanyl in Tulsa County, an amount officials said was enough to kill half a million people. The suspect, Alfredo Sandoval, was arrested on aggravated drug trafficking charges, and intelligence pointed to ties with a Mexican cartel.¹⁹ A six-month OBN investigation in Enid produced the seizure of about 17,000 fentanyl pills in January 2026, tied to a woman accused of smuggling drugs from Mexico.²⁰

Methamphetamine cases run in parallel. A 2011 multi-agency operation in the Oklahoma City area convicted 21 Mexican nationals and produced more than 128 combined years of prison time.²¹ In 2023, Ke’Andre Dewayne Wilson of Oklahoma City was convicted in a nationwide meth distribution operation after agents seized 133 kilograms of methamphetamine from a southwest Oklahoma City body shop and intercepted another 100 kilograms bound for Chicago. Six co-defendants drew a collective 600 months of imprisonment.²² In June 2026, 11 people pleaded guilty in a southeastern Oklahoma meth conspiracy involving 550 or more grams of methamphetamine distributed between June 2024 and October 2025.²³

Violence and Labor Trafficking in Rural Oklahoma

On November 20, 2022, Wu Chen, a 45-year-old Chinese national, killed four people in an execution-style shooting at an unlicensed marijuana grow near Hennessey in Kingfisher County. The victims were Quirong Lin, Chen He Chun, Chen He Qiang, and Fang Hui Lee. According to an OSBI affidavit, Chen demanded $300,000 he said was his share of an investment in the facility. He fled to Florida and was arrested two days later. In February 2024, he pleaded guilty to four counts of first-degree murder and received four concurrent life sentences without parole.²⁴²⁵

The state Organized Crime Task Force reports that nearly every case involving illegal foreign-run grow operations includes some level of undocumented labor trafficking, with workers subjected to forced labor, confiscated passports, and threats of violence. The sites also strain rural infrastructure, sometimes consuming hundreds of thousands of gallons of water per month, and a fire at one illegal grow destroyed more than 10,000 acres and required National Guard intervention.¹⁰

The Los Zetas Horse Farm

Not every Oklahoma cartel case runs on drugs. Jose Trevino Morales, a U.S. citizen and bricklayer who reported an annual income of $20,000, bought a 140-acre farm in Lexington in 2011. The farm served as a laundering front for his brothers, Miguel Angel Trevino Morales and Omar Trevino Morales, leaders of Los Zetas. Through a shell company called Tremor Enterprises, the operation funneled at least $16 million over three years through the American quarter horse industry.²⁶

An FBI investigation opened on a 2009 tip found the cartel was also rigging races by bribing gate openers. One horse tied to the scheme, “Mr. Piloto,” won the 2010 All American Futurity and its $1 million purse. On June 12, 2012, more than 300 FBI agents raided the Oklahoma farm and seized about $28 million in assets, including two private jets, cash, the ranch itself, and hundreds of championship quarter horses. Nineteen people were indicted. Jose Trevino Morales was convicted of conspiracy to commit money laundering and sentenced to 20 years in September 2013. Ten were ultimately convicted, one acquitted, and seven fugitives remained at large as of the last available reporting.²⁶²⁷

How Law Enforcement Is Responding

The federal response layers several task forces. The Texoma HIDTA, funded by the Office of National Drug Control Policy, coordinates federal, state, and local agencies across Oklahoma and North Texas. A two-month HIDTA-funded initiative called “Operation Sonic Boom” in Oklahoma City in September 2024 produced charges against 50 people and the recovery of more than 63 kilograms of narcotics, including 53 kilograms of methamphetamine, 1.5 kilograms of fentanyl, and over five kilograms of cocaine.²⁸

A regional Homeland Security Task Force, established under Executive Order 14159 in 2025, brings together the FBI, Homeland Security Investigations, U.S. Marshals, DEA, ATF, Oklahoma Highway Patrol, Oklahoma City Police, and the IRS. Since going operational in the summer of 2025, it has reported nearly 100 arrests, the seizure of close to 300 firearms, and the confiscation of 20 kilograms of fentanyl.²⁹

At the state level, Attorney General Drummond stood up the Oklahoma Organized Crime Task Force in October 2023 to target illegal marijuana, fentanyl distribution, and organized crime inside the medical marijuana industry. Through its first two years, the task force ran 73 operations, closed more than 7,000 illegal operations, and seized over 329,000 marijuana plants and more than 152,000 pounds of processed marijuana. It made 79 arrests and facilitated 27 deportations, while the Attorney General’s Office filed 153 criminal cases and opened civil asset forfeiture actions against numerous properties.³⁰ Licensed grows have dropped from over 9,000 to fewer than 2,100.³¹ OBN’s Marijuana Enforcement Teams, created in 2021, continue to work between 1,500 and 1,700 grow investigations at any given time.¹⁵

New Laws Targeting Cartel Activity

In May 2026, Governor Stitt signed House Bill 3764, authored by Representative Tim Turner. The law enhances penalties for anyone convicted of a felony committed while acting on behalf of or providing material support to a foreign terrorist organization as defined under federal immigration law; the enhancement doubles both the maximum prison sentence and the maximum fine for the underlying felony.³² The bill passed the House 76-11 and the Senate 38-6.³³

A companion measure, House Bill 3765, would create a felony offense for non-U.S. citizens who unlawfully acquire land in Oklahoma and use that property to commit a felony, with all such property subject to forfeiture.³³ Other proposals would lower the threshold for a 15-year mandatory trafficking sentence to 100 pounds of marijuana, ban out-of-state ownership of grow operations, and prohibit foreign nationals with ties to designated adversary nations from owning Oklahoma farmland.¹⁵

1
Texoma HIDTA. About Texoma HIDTA
2
News9. Cocaine Comeback: Oklahoma’s Drug Threat Expands Beyond Fentanyl, Meth
3
U.S. Department of Justice. National Drug Threat Assessment – Oklahoma City
4
KOCO. Oklahoma Bureau of Narcotics on CJNG Presence
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News9. Oklahoma Authorities on Drug Trafficking
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KOCO. El Mencho Death and Oklahoma Impact
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KJRH. Operation Smack Dragon: 29 Indicted
8
U.S. Department of Justice. Local Cell Head and Two Others Plead Guilty to Drug Conspiracy
9
Fox23. Leader in Oklahoma Cell of Mexican Drug Cartel Sentenced to 40 Years
10
Oklahoma Governor’s Office. Attorney General Drummond Congressional Testimony
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U.S. Department of Justice. More Than 300 Alleged La Familia Cartel Members Arrested
12
U.S. Congress. Congressional Testimony on Chinese TCOs and Marijuana
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KTUL. Authorities Warn of Cartel-Linked Marijuana Grows
14
U.S. Department of Justice. Chinese Nationals Sentenced to 20 Years Collectively
15
The Frontier. Criminal Networks Continue to Thrive in Oklahoma’s Marijuana Industry
16
U.S. Department of Justice. Homeland Security Task Force Investigation Results in 51-Defendant Indictment
17
Oklahoma State Department of Health. Drug Overdose Data
18
U.S. Department of Justice. Foreign National Drug Courier Sentenced for Conspiring With Cartel to Distribute Fentanyl
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Oklahoma Governor’s Office. Governor Stitt Applauds State Law Enforcement on Fentanyl Bust
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KOCO. Oklahoma Drug Bust: Fentanyl Pills Seized in Enid
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U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Joint Law Enforcement Operation Dismantles 2 Methamphetamine Drug Rings
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Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives. Federal Jury Convicts Oklahoma Man in Nationwide Methamphetamine Trafficking Organization
23
KXII. 11 Plead Guilty to Federal Drug Charges in Southeastern Oklahoma Meth Trafficking Conspiracy
24
Kingfisher County District Attorney. Man Sentenced to Life Without Parole for Murders at Unlicensed Marijuana Grow
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Kingfisher Press. Chen Pleads Guilty to Murders
26
NBC News. How a Drug Cartel Hid Millions Through a Horse Farm
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FBI. Equine Crime: A Horse Farm of a Different Color
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U.S. Department of Justice. Federal and State Violent Crime Initiative Receives National Award
29
KOCO. Oklahoma Cartels: New Homeland Security Task Force
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Oklahoma Attorney General. Drummond’s Organized Crime Task Force Marks Two Years of Success
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Oklahoma Attorney General. Organized Crime Task Force Confiscates 15,000 Marijuana Plants
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Oklahoma Legislature. HB 3764 Bill Information
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Oklahoma House of Representatives. Rep. Turner Introduces Bills Targeting Foreign Threats