President Donald Trump claimed that 98.2% of drugs entering the U.S. by sea have been stopped under his administration, but the figure misrepresents federal data and cannot support the conclusion, according to drug trafficking experts and government officials. The statistic reflects a month-to-month drop in seizures at coastal locations, not a measure of total drug trafficking or policy effectiveness.
The discrepancy underscores a fundamental problem in evaluating anti-trafficking policy: because it is impossible to know how many drugs enter the country undetected, changes in seizure figures alone cannot prove drugs have been stopped or that policy has changed outcomes.
President Donald Trump claimed in a Truth Social post this week that 98.2% of drugs smuggled into the United States by sea have been “stopped.” But the statistic is a misrepresentation of federal data that cannot actually measure whether drug trafficking has declined, according to government officials and drug-trafficking experts interviewed by the Associated Press.
The White House, when asked to source Trump’s claim, directed the AP to Customs and Border Protection data on drug seizures in coastal and interior regions. According to CBP records, seizures in those areas totaled 223,923 pounds in July 2025 but fell to 4,463 pounds in November 2025—a difference of 98.2%.
But experts say this selective snapshot obscures the real limitations of using seizure data to evaluate policy outcomes.
Why Seizure Data Misleads
“Drug seizure data measure interdiction activity, not actual trafficking volume,” said Dessa Bergen-Cico, a professor of public health at Syracuse University who studies drug trafficking. “As drug policy researchers have noted, no one knows how much goes uncaught, and changes in seizure data are insufficient to make definitive claims about policy outcomes.”
The same figures can be cited to support opposite conclusions because they reflect only intercepted drugs, not the total amount of drugs being trafficked. Jonathan Caulkins, a professor of operations research and public policy at Carnegie Mellon University, said that the “ignorance of what are the correct figures for either of these important concepts” gives rise to misinterpretation.
Multiple factors beyond policy effectiveness can shift seizure numbers. Shifts in enforcement strategy, changes in trafficking routes, agency jurisdiction transitions, or fluctuations in drug supply and demand can all alter the volumes intercepted at any given time, Bergen-Cico said.
The Numbers Contradict Trump
The volatility in the data itself undermines Trump’s framing. Drug seizures continued to fall in December 2025 to 2,268 pounds, then began rising again at the start of 2026. March 2026 data showed 28,500 pounds seized—far above the November low but still substantially below July 2025 levels. The trend does not suggest the steady elimination Trump’s statistic implies.
Bergen-Cico noted that cocaine seizure quantities have not been substantially different between the Biden and Trump administrations. While there was a 79% drop in cocaine seizures from August 2025 to January 2026, she attributed this primarily to Trump administration military boat strikes on vessels suspected of trafficking drugs in Latin American waters. These strikes have killed 178 people across at least 51 vessels since September.
A Jurisdictional Shift, Not Success
The distinction matters because the boat-strike campaign represents a shift in agency responsibility, not necessarily a reduction in drugs reaching American shores. Bergen-Cico said the decline in coast and interior drug seizures “do not straightforwardly indicate reduced drug flow. Rather, they reflect a jurisdictional and operational transition in which traditional CBP maritime interdiction has been partially displaced by U.S. military and Coast Guard operations.”
Without knowing how many drugs enter undetected—a figure that cannot be calculated—it is impossible to determine whether Trump’s seizure-based claims reflect actual changes in trafficking volume or simply reflect changes in where interdiction activities occur and who conducts them. This measurement problem is not unique to the Trump administration; it has long prevented drug-policy experts from definitively linking seizure trends to policy outcomes.