That's such am inefficient, hands-on, loud and dumb way to smuggle drugs across a border this large, this cannot be true. Unless you they are talking about submarines and land RCs, in that case sure, probably.
The number of drones vs. the number of detections is ambiguous. How detections are counted is ambiguous. Whether drones are physically moving drugs or part of an intelligence network is ambiguous.
It would seem entirely unsurprising that cartels are monitoring border enforcement by drone. That's not great, obviously. But different from "thousands of drones are carrying contraband into the US".
"We have thousands of possible detections of an unknown number of possible drones that are possibly being used by cartels to surveil the border in order to smuggle"
That number breaks down to 6 detections per hour across the entire boarder.
That's actually more plausible. I knew one person in "import-export" of illegal substance (Afghan/Iranian cannabis, he is probably out of work since the US left Afghanistan tbh, his clan was heavily involved with the british/US in both country since at least the Shah coup) and he explained how easy it is to smuggle a few tons of drugs and how hard it is to detect it, it seemed inefficient. Now surveillance drones, i buy that way more
It’s not far fetched at all.
We don't understand the consequences yet... Ukraine is actively working on hunter drones that could operate on 10 km altitude to shot down enemy targets. Now, imagine that cartel, terrorists put their hands on such technology, endangering whole civilian air transport.
Sounds like the perfect distraction!