Tijuana’s municipal police have confiscated 107 illegal firearms since the start of 2025, according to the city’s public safety department. The seizures, which include handguns, rifles, and assault-style weapons, resulted from routine patrols and security operations across the city’s delegations. The numbers point to a sustained enforcement effort in a city where gun violence remains a daily reality.
Tijuana Logged Over 1,400 Homicides in 2024
Tijuana has ranked among Mexico’s most violent cities for years. In 2024, the municipality recorded more than 1,400 homicides, a figure that, while lower than the peak of roughly 2,500 in 2018, still places it among the deadliest cities in the Western Hemisphere. Most of the violence is linked to disputes between organized crime groups competing for drug trafficking routes into the United States through the San Ysidro and Otay Mesa ports of entry.
Illegal firearms are central to this violence. Mexico has only one legal gun store in the entire country, operated by the military in Mexico City. Yet tens of thousands of weapons flow south across the U.S. border each year. A 2020 study by the Mexican government and the University of San Diego estimated that roughly 200,000 firearms are trafficked from the United States into Mexico annually. Tijuana, sitting directly on the border, is a primary entry point for these weapons.
The 107 firearms seized so far in 2025 represent a small fraction of the weapons circulating in the city. But local authorities frame the confiscations as part of a broader disarmament strategy. Tijuana’s Secretaría de Seguridad Ciudadana, the city’s public safety department, said officers recovered the weapons during vehicle checkpoints, foot patrols, and responses to emergency calls. Some seizures occurred during arrests for other crimes, including drug possession and domestic violence.
Seizures Span All Nine Tijuana Delegations
The confiscations have taken place across all nine of Tijuana’s administrative delegations, from the central zona urbana to eastern communities like La Presa and Cerro Colorado. The weapons recovered include 9mm pistols, .38-caliber revolvers, AR-15-style rifles, and AK-47 variants. Officers also seized ammunition and loaded magazines during many of these operations.
Tijuana’s municipal police force has around 3,000 officers serving a metropolitan area of roughly 2 million people. That ratio of approximately one officer per 667 residents falls well below international policing standards. The Mexican nonprofit Causa en Común has documented that Tijuana’s officers are among the most at-risk in the country: dozens of municipal police have been killed in the line of duty over the past five years.
The city has also cycled through multiple public safety strategies in recent years. In 2022, the Mexican military and National Guard deployed additional forces to Tijuana as part of a federal security agreement. The state of Baja California, under Governor Marina del Pilar Ávila Olmeda, launched a “Mesa de Seguridad” coordination table that meets weekly to align municipal, state, and federal policing efforts. Gun seizures are one metric tracked at those meetings.
Cross-Border Gun Trafficking Complicates Local Enforcement
Local seizures do little to address the supply side of the problem. The Mexican government filed a lawsuit against major U.S. gun manufacturers in 2021, arguing that American companies facilitated the flow of weapons into Mexico through negligent sales practices. A U.S. district court dismissed the case, but Mexico’s appeal succeeded in January 2024 when the First Circuit Court of Appeals reinstated the lawsuit. That case remains in litigation.
At the federal level, Mexico’s government under President Claudia Sheinbaum has continued to press Washington for stronger enforcement against southbound weapons smuggling. U.S. Customs and Border Protection screens only a fraction of vehicles heading into Mexico at ports of entry like San Ysidro, which processes roughly 70,000 northbound crossers daily but conducts far fewer southbound inspections.
If you live in Tijuana or cross regularly, the practical reality is that gun violence remains concentrated in specific colonias tied to drug distribution. Areas popular with foreign residents and visitors, including Zona Río, Playas de Tijuana, and the Gastro Art food corridor, see lower rates of armed crime, though no neighborhood is entirely exempt.
Tijuana’s public safety department said it will continue checkpoint operations and targeted patrols through the summer months. The next Mesa de Seguridad review is expected before the end of June. This story was first reported by Cadena Noticias.