A wide range of items get seized at Louisville’s Customs port. Drug shipments are frequent
The U.S. Customs and Border Protection office in Louisville routinely makes headlines for seizing tons of fake items — like pharmaceuticals, watches and other jewelry — but the agency’s breadth is much wider despite the fact that many don’t know what it does.
Take its role in thwarting drug trafficking, which often involves seizures coming from around the globe.
The Louisville U.S. Customs office, which is located at the Louisville Muhammad Ali International Airport, seized nearly one package of meth every day between September and November. Three meth seizures were made in one day on Nov. 29. Those packages were headed to different countries, including Great Britain, New Zealand and Australia, the Customs office said.
While meth is one of the more common illegal items seized at the Customs port in Louisville, it’s just a fraction of the operations at the port. Officers at the port comb through thousands of packages and pages of intel reports daily looking to stop the shipment of illegal and counterfeit products.
“This is just a really large operation here,” said Phil Onken, port director at the U.S. CBP Office in Louisville and a longtime official in the agency. “I can tell you, 20 years later, a lot of people still don’t know what we do. We enforce more laws than any other agency.”
The U.S. Customs agency was founded in 2003 at the recommendation of the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States. The organization has four legacy agencies – the customs service, immigration inspection, enforcement functions and the plant protection and quarantine inspection programs.
The agency’s mission is to keep terrorists and their weapons out of the U.S. while also facilitating lawful international travel and trade.
How Ky. Customs officers find illegal shipments
The Louisville port of entry has about 40 team members and four narcotics detection dogs, according to Onken. Their jobs are to identify targets and coordinate with carriers to inspect shipments.
Methods to identify illegal contents in packages vary from “cold targeting” — in which narcotics dogs scan packages, agents x-ray items, or officials inspect irregularities — to more complex studies of manifest data and intel reports to identify trends in drug smuggling. Onken said the data reports make it easier to notice packages with illegal drugs that might otherwise fly under the radar.
“They are true professionals and they do everything from the beginning to the end,” Onken said about his team. “They’re not just a simple takedown team, they’re not a simple inspection team, all my officers are fantastic at what they do.”
As helpful as intel reports can be, criminals are constantly adapting their practices in smuggling drugs in packages, making the jobs harder for the Customs officers, Onken said
“They do change up the trend, and as soon as we figure out the trend they change it again,” Onken said. “If it’s the liquid inside the bottle and we find it out, now all of a sudden the tube is loaded with dope and that’s the only thing that’s loaded. We figure that one out then the label is now secreted in cocaine, and they slide it off, they melt it and it’s cocaine.”
On the morning of Nov. 29, when officers seized three meth shipments, they found the meth in those shipments weighed between 7 and 20 kilograms. The product came from Mexico, Onken said, and the 7-kilogram shipment had been discreetly packaged: the meth was hidden in lead blocks.
“There are times where narcotics are secreted in certain things where you can’t physically take it out, like there’s a chemical process to take it out,” Onken said.
Marijuana is most-seized product at Louisville port
Between September and November, the Port of Louisville seized 579 shipments of marijuana, which averages out to roughly six seizures a day.
Onken said marijuana is the most commonly-seized product at the Port of Louisville. The legalization of marijuana in other states and the lower value of the drug has been a contributor to the increase of marijuana seizures.
“They usually don’t conceal any of that. It’s just thrown into a box,” Onken said. “Most of the time, any one of us could walk through and you can probably smell it. Like it’s not a difficult thing.”
The confiscation of marijuana, meth and other drugs often leads Customs officers to collaborate with other agencies to launch investigations.
“We can seize drugs, but drugs don’t move themselves, people and money do,” Onken said. “You need to figure out those two things, so the only way to do that is to pay it forward, utilize other agencies, other abilities to go out and maybe knock on somebody’s door.”
The reach of the Louisville office can stretch quite far.
“Something that we find as simple as liquid cocaine in hand sanitizer, that might be useful to a state police officer in North Dakota when he does a vehicle stop and there’s a case of this stuff in the trunk,” Onken said.
