Totoaba fish bladders are a delicacy in China. Nets used in Gulf of California have brought vaquita porpoise close to extinction.
The alleged crimes involved shipments of goods smuggled across the U.S.-Mexico border. They involved confidential informants, undercover federal agents and secretly recorded transactions with hundreds of thousands of dollars switching hands. But the goods at the center of these operations were not drugs — they were highly sought bladders of endangered fish.
This month, federal prosecutors in San Diego have charged three people in two separate cases with crimes involving the importation and sales of the bladders from the totoaba, a critically endangered fish species found only in the Gulf of California.
San Diego prosecutions expose a different sort of trafficking at the border
The alleged crimes involved shipments of goods smuggled across the U.S.-Mexico border. They involved confidential informants, undercover federal agents and secretly recorded transactions with hundreds of thousands of dollars switching hands. But the goods at the center of these operations were not drugs — they were highly sought bladders of endangered fish.
This month, federal prosecutors in San Diego have charged three people in two separate cases with crimes involving the importation and sales of the bladders from the totoaba, a critically endangered fish species found only in the Gulf of California.
San Diego prosecutions expose a different sort of trafficking at the border