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The arrests are part of a federal task force initiative targeting criminal gangs and transnational organisations.
The United States Department of Justice has indicted 81 people over alleged drug and weapons violations, as part of a crackdown on a Puerto Rican criminal group called Los Baja Deo or LBD.
Attorney General Todd Blanche announced the charges on Thursday during a visit to Puerto Rico. A day earlier, the US Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and Puerto Rico Police Department arrested 70 of the defendants.
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“Let this be a warning to those that are terrorizing our communities,” Blanche said in a statement.
“Our Homeland Security Task Forces around the country are unified to end the presence of criminal cartels, foreign gangs, and transnational criminal organizations throughout the United States.”
The mass indictment arrives as part of an effort under US President Donald Trump to weaken and dismantle criminal organisations across the Western Hemisphere.
His administration has called the hemisphere “America’s neighborhood“. It has pledged to take hardline, and sometimes lethal, action in the region against those it considers to be “narco-terrorists”, a word it frequently applies to suspected drug-traffickers.
Thursday’s indictment alleges that, starting in 2021, members of LBD began distributing drugs in and around public housing projects and neighbourhoods in Mayaguez, a city in western Puerto Rico.
They are also accused of using the US Postal Service to send drugs from the island, which is a US territory. Among the substances allegedly trafficked were heroin, fentanyl, cocaine and marijuana.
According to the Justice Department, LBD distributed at least 340kg of fentanyl or fentanyl-laced narcotics and at least 2,200kg of cocaine in the last five years. The operation generated more than $49m in proceeds.
The indictment also accuses members of using violence, like murders and kidnappings, to protect their drug-trafficking conspiracy.
The defendants facing drug-related charges alone face the possibility of at least 10 years in prison. Those accused of both drug and firearms charges could face a minimum of 15 years. The maximum penalty in both cases is life imprisonment, if the defendants are convicted.
The Justice Department also said it is seeking to seize $49.7m in assets as part of the criminal case.
In Thursday’s announcement, FBI Director Kash Patel praised law enforcement work in the case as “outstanding” and touted the large-scale arrests as a blow to drug trafficking into the US mainland.
“These arrests disrupted one of western Puerto Rico’s most violent drug‑trafficking organisations, dismantled its leadership and distribution networks, and cut off yet another key pipeline of dealt drugs flowing into our country,” Patel said.
The arrests were conducted as part of Trump’s Homeland Security Task Force, which was established by executive order in 2025 to target cartels, foreign gangs and transnational criminal organisations.
The task force network has over 9,000 federal agents, task force officers and analysts.
Since taking office for a second term, Trump has sought to beef up government efforts against drug traffickers.
Early in his term, his administration began designating Latin American criminal groups as “foreign terrorist organisations“, allowing US authorities to pursue those groups under counterterrorism laws.
But critics have warned that such designations have been used to justify extrajudicial killing and other abuses of power.
Since September 2, 2025, for instance, the Trump administration has repeatedly bombed small boats in the Caribbean Sea and eastern Pacific, on the basis that they transported drugs. Some 227 people have been killed in that bombing campaign.
No evidence has been presented in the cases, and the victims’ identities remain largely unknown.
