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A New Mexico congressman has proposed blocking Border Patrol from using federal money to conduct seizures of legal cannabis from state-licensed operators.
Rep. Gabe Vasquez (D-NM) filed the amendment to the fiscal year 2025 DHS appropriations bill, which provides funding to the agency. It will have to go before the House Rules Committee before it can receive floor consideration.
The amendment reads: “None of the funds made available by this act may be used to seize cannabis or products containing cannabis that are possessed, sold, or transferred by a cannabis distributor, licensed by a state, or a business in a state where cannabis has been legalized for recreational or medicinal use.”
It’s similar to a Department of Justice (DOJ) spending bill rider that has been renewed every year since fiscal year 2015 and protects state-licensed medical cannabis companies and legal patients from federal prosecution.
“The federal government must focus their border enforcement resources on dangerous activities, such as fentanyl smuggling, which kills hundreds of thousands of Americans each year,” Vasquez tells The Paper. “Nearly half of U.S. states have legalized cannabis, the DOJ is removing it from Schedule I, and yet DHS is continuing to target legal New Mexican small business owners. My amendment requires the federal government to respect New Mexico’s state law and stop this unacceptable targeting of small businesses.”
The amendment was presumably made in response to Border Patrol seizures in which agents seized hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of products from state-licensed cannabis operators as they passed through internal border checkpoints.
The Border Patrol, which answers to the DHS’s Customs and Border Protection (CBP), has authority up to 100 miles inside the nation’s borders. With that authority, the agency has set up a number of interior checkpoints to stop traffic on all major routes heading north from the state’s southern border, a move that the New Mexico ACLU called “cruel and pointless.”
These checkpoints supposedly serve the purpose of halting the flow of illegal immigrants and stamping down human trafficking. The DHS also claims that one of its main concerns is stopping fentanyl from crossing the border into the U.S. However, a 2022 report from the Government Accountability Office (GAO) found that about 75% of drug seizures from U.S. citizens at checkpoints involved only weed. About half of all the seizures involved personal use amounts of the drug. Amazingly, 91% of all drug busts involved only U.S. citizens.
Industry insiders previously told The Paper. that operators used to be allowed to pass through the checkpoints unmolested as long as they showed their manifests and proved that they were licensed by the state. But something changed earlier this year.
New Mexico Cannabis Control Division Director Todd Stevens told The Paper. that he spoke to regulators in other border states that have legalized weed only to find that they haven’t been experiencing similar problems, meaning Border Patrol authorities in New Mexico might be targeting weed businesses on purpose.
This may be unsurprising to some. The GAO published another 2022 report that found Border Patrol had not established clear roles and responsibilities for its headquarters management office and that staffers weren’t always knowledgeable about the agency’s policies. It also found that Border Patrol headquarters “does not have complete information about where and how checkpoints operate or about their activities.”
Nevertheless, the agency says its policy is to enforce federal laws, and it will continue seizing cannabis at the checkpoints, whether it’s state-legal or not. That means any state-licensed cannabis business located south of Hatch, New Mexico are trapped there unless they are willing to risk having their products seized and destroyed by federal agents.
In April, a coalition of cannabis business leaders called on the Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham and the state’s congressional delegation to step up and help stop Border Patrol from seizing their goods.
But talks over amending the agency’s policies between Lujan Grisham and Border Patrol appear to have been fruitless. In April, a phone call between the governor and an unidentified Joe Biden administration official was leaked, revealing that the governor was frustrated with the agency’s response. During the call, Lujan Grisham said she was “cranky” with U.S. Secretary of Homeland Security Alejandro Mayorkas and that the Border Patrol’s policy needed to be changed, “or I have to send you a letter saying you’re persecuting a state.”
The governor’s office confirmed that the call had taken place and that Mayorkas told Lujan Grisham that the policies had not changed.
As for the state’s congressional delegation, most have publicly come out against the seizures, but Vasquez’s proposed amendment marks the first visible effort by a representative to push for a legislative answer to the issue.
“The amendment proposed by Rep. Vasquez is a big step in the right direction to change the overreaching Border Patrol policies,” says Matt Kennicott, CEO and co-founder of cannabis industry association The Plug. “He’s also stepped up and met with DHS staff.”
Kennicott says the battle is still not over, though.
“While this is a positive development, we will keep fighting for change until cannabis is accepted by the feds,” Kennicott says.