Texas Dems Want Gun Safety Bill to Block Mexican Smuggling
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Last October in Laredo, a K-9 caught the scent of gunpowder. Following the dog’s lead, federal agents entered a trailer and pulled down a false wall of plywood. There lay hundreds of deadly weapons, stacked from floor to ceiling and bound in plastic wrap. Between two trailers, officers counted more than 300 pistols and rifles, plus ammunition, all headed toward the Mexican border, as the Laredo Morning Times reported.
Such discoveries aren’t rare. The Justice Department says its officers seized more than 4,000 firearms bound for Mexico between late January 2025 and February 2026. But many more guns are not intercepted, making their way across the border, where they arm cartels. Last month, Mexican authorities announced that nearly 80% of the 18,000 cartel firearms they’ve seized since 2024 were sourced from the United States. And Texas is one of the main states these guns come from. The DOJ found that, in 2023, the lion’s share of American guns used in Mexican crime came from the Lone Star State (more than 4 in 10).
For progressive Texas legislators, these stats create an opening. In a red state where conservatives generally oppose gun control but also wish to crack down on cartels, cartel-focused gun regulation seems feasible.
“The Republican message constant from this president and others is that we’re being overrun by cartels,” said Democratic state Sen. Roland Gutierrez. “Well, we’re feeding the damn cartels.”
It’s the off-season for Texas legislators, so they’ve got time to get creative about bills to file in the 90th legislative session, which begins next January. State senator and Democratic candidate for state comptroller Sarah Eckhardt has made cartel-related gun regulation one of her high priorities. She said, when she speaks with Republican colleagues, she asks a “common ground question: How do we prevent our legal gun market from arming the very criminal organizations that flood our streets with dangerous drugs, destabilize our largest domestic trading partner, and send terrified Latin Americans running for our borders?”
Like many, Eckhardt and Gutierrez both describe gun control as a long shot in Texas. Gutierrez has good reason to be discouraged. His district spans much of the Texas-Mexico border and includes Uvalde, where 19 students and two teachers were killed in a school shooting in 2022.
“Every time that we’ve moved away from that date in 2022, it has gotten harder and harder to even get hearings heard,” Gutierrez said.
State Sen. Roland Gutierrez Credit: Ben Aguillon / CC BY-SA 4.0
However, advocates for gun safety measures see some reasons for hope. Last session, Republican state Rep. Ryan Guillen authored a bill designed to prohibit ammunition smuggling to Mexico. It passed the House 126 to 10, with zero House Republicans voting against it. It didn’t make it to the Senate floor for a vote before the clock ran out. “The nature of the Texas Legislature is designed for legislation to fail, not pass,” said Roger Garza, the Texas state director for Giffords, a national gun safety organization. It sounds contradictory, but that’s exactly why he sees promise in smuggling-related gun safety legislation like last session’s failed bill. “It is not unusual for nearly every successful measure brought at the Texas Capitol to take multiple legislative sessions to become law,” Garza said.
For some gun safety advocates, the main goal of legislation is, curiously, not really legislative. John Lindsay-Poland, founder of the Stop U.S. Arms to Mexico Project, explained that he doesn’t expect gun control measures to become law in Texas, but he does see potential for cultural change. Because stats show both American and Mexican criminals use certain weapons and weapon accessories more than others, he believes Texas communities can pressure gun dealers to stop selling their most dangerous products. He said that filed legislation, even if it doesn’t become law, might help raise awareness about gun smuggling and turn up the heat on a cultural level.
Eckhardt sees things similarly: “Social messaging around intentions could ask, ‘Who are the good guys with guns?’ I’m pretty sure most would say that those who sell semi-automatics and pretend not to know where they’re going are not the good guys.”
For Gutierrez, his gun control efforts have been disappointing. He said he’s been deeply moved by conversations with the parents of Uvalde victims and bothered by what he sees as a central hypocrisy. He said the Trump administration clearly recognizes the issue – that’s why their DOJ puts out press releases about intercepting gun smuggling at the border. Yet, they don’t show a willingness to stop gun smuggling at the source: through regulation of gun sales.
“It’s pretty easy to police criminality on the back end,” Gutierrez said. “But for a Republican Congress that’s in control of the House, and the Senate, and the White House, it would also be pretty easy for them to create legislation – while not being lauded as safety legislation, but certainly as legislation that keeps guns out of the hands of criminals. Yet we don’t see them doing that, do we?”
So, what’s the plan? Eckhardt, in her list of priorities for the upcoming session, has officially asked Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick’s office to research “weakening the ability of cartels to cause violence on both sides of the border.” As a former prosecutor, she emphasizes the need for legislation to both discourage gun trafficking and prosecute people who participate in it. Gutierrez is also committed to filing what he considers necessary, life-saving legislation focused on cartel gun access when he returns to the pink dome in January, even if it is unlikely to become law.
“We are just in a situation where we are constantly fighting this same fight, where we’re constantly trying to do anything that we have within our power,” Gutierrez said. “But at the end of the day, it’s really a bigger question and the bigger issue right now: Does the Republican Party have your back on so many fronts? And does it have your back [on] gun issues? And I would argue that it doesn’t.”
This article appears in April 3 • 2026.
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