Last month, the Department of Homeland Security executed a criminal search warrant at Ikon Midstream’s Houston headquarters as part of a probe into an alleged fuel-smuggling scheme tied to Mexico. In a separate case, federal prosecutors in the Southern District of Texas charged James and Maxwell Jensen of Arroyo Terminals with conspiring to support the Cártel de Jalisco Nueva Generación in another alleged fuel-smuggling operation.
The Jensen case and the Ikon probe are “just two examples of how the Trump administration’s focus on cartels and designating cartels as FTOs has had a broader influence beyond just the members of the cartels,” Bracewell’s Alamdar Hamdani told Law360.
“It’s creating a challenge for multinational companies in that they face a patchwork of overlapping, sometimes even contradictory, legal obligations across jurisdictions,” Hamdani said.
