Nearly two weeks after Mexican forces killed notorious cartel boss Ruben “El Mencho” Oseguera Cervantes, questions remain about how the powerful Jalisco New Generation Cartel (CJNG) will respond and whether the blow will meaningfully disrupt the flow of fentanyl into the United States.

Carlos De La Cruz, a 20-year U.S. Air Force veteran who deployed after 9/11 and later served along the southern border, told Fox News the cartel leader’s death marked a major victory, but warned Americans should not mistake it for the end of the fight.

“When I say that this is a significant win, I mean it,” De La Cruz said. “El Mencho ran one of the most violent cartels on the planet.”

Oseguera, who rose to prominence in the post–El Chapo era, oversaw CJNG’s aggressive expansion across Mexico and into key trafficking corridors feeding U.S. drug markets. Under his leadership, the cartel became a central architect of fentanyl and methamphetamine trafficking and drew a $15 million U.S. reward for information leading to his capture.

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But De La Cruz cautioned that removing a cartel kingpin does not dismantle the organization.

“Cartels don’t collapse when you just cut the head off — they fracture,” he said. “And part of that fracture is going to see a lot of short-term violence while all these factions fight over territory.”

Following Oseguera’s killing on Feb. 22, the U.S. State Department issued travel alerts in multiple Mexican states, citing road blockages and criminal activity tied to security operations, underscoring concerns about instability in the aftermath.

Drawing on his military background studying enemy command structures, De La Cruz described the cartel fight as a long-term campaign requiring sustained pressure.

“You don’t win a war with just one airstrike,” he said. “The goal is dismantling the networks and going after their financing.”

De La Cruz, who is running for Congress and is the brother of Texas Republican Rep. Monica De La Cruz, argued that CJNG’s Foreign Terrorist Organization designation gives U.S. law enforcement and intelligence agencies expanded tools to target cartel infrastructure and financial pipelines.

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But he stressed that the fentanyl crisis should be viewed as a domestic security emergency, not a distant foreign problem.

“For decades, they were using their territories as launching pads to pump chemical weapons into America — because that’s exactly what fentanyl is,” he said.

De La Cruz, who said he worked side by side with Customs agents while deployed to the border, warned that cartel networks are highly adaptive and that any gains could be temporary without sustained follow-through.

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“These networks, they’re going to adjust. They’re going to adapt and they’re going to adapt quickly,” he said. “We have to continue to go after the money launderers, especially on our side of the border, because that’s the full fight.”

While Oseguera’s death removes one of the most dominant figures in Mexico’s criminal underworld, De La Cruz said the mission is personal.

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“I took an oath to defend this country,” he said. “And I intend to stand by that oath.”

Fox News Digital’s Greg Wehner contributed to this report. 

Stepheny Price covers crime, including missing persons, homicides and migrant crime. Send story tips to stepheny.price@fox.com.

TUCSON, Ariz. — More than five weeks after the suspected abduction of Nancy Guthrie — the 84-year-old mother of “Today” co-host Savannah Guthrie — Arizona authorities say cadaver dogs used earlier in the investigation are not currently being deployed as the search continues.

The elder Guthrie is believed to have been kidnapped from her home in the Catalina Foothills in northern Tucson around 2:30 a.m. on Feb. 1.

While no suspects have been publicly identified, and she has not been found, cadaver dogs had been deployed earlier in the case, according to Pima County Sheriff Chris Nanos. They have not been visible in weeks.

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“They are available if needed in the future,” he told Fox News Digital.

There are a number of reasons not to be using cadaver dogs at this stage in the investigation, according to Betsy Brantner Smith, a retired police sergeant and spokeswoman for the National Police Association.

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One would be if there’s credible information that Guthrie is still alive.

“Anything is possible,” Nanos told Fox News Digital last week, adding that he would not discuss specific leads or evidence in the case.

DNA IS STILL PENDING AS VOLUNTEERS FIND ANOTHER GLOVE IN THE SEARCH FOR NANCY GUTHRIE

Brantner Smith, who is not involved in the case, said departments may hold back K-9 resources for several reasons. Those could be that authorities don’t have a good idea of where to search, they think she might be concealed in a place where dogs would have a hard time detecting her, or they believe she’s been taken to Mexico, according to Brantner Smith.

“I do believe that the sheriff’s department has much more information that they are not releasing to the public,” she told Fox News Digital. “And I’m not sure at this point why that would be, unless they have a solid suspect and don’t want to tip them off.”

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Most departments, including the Pima County Sheriff’s, don’t have their own cadaver dogs and borrow them from state and federal authorities or neighboring jurisdictions.

In Guthrie’s case, the sheriff’s department sought K-9 assistance from the local Border Patrol office earlier in the investigation.

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PCSD deferred further comment on the K-9s to Customs and Border Protection, which did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

The biggest lead so far has been Nest camera video showing a masked intruder on Guthrie’s doorstep the morning of her abduction.

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He is described as about 5 feet, 9 inches to 5 feet, 10 inches tall and of medium build.

He was wearing a black Ozark Trail backpack.

Authorities have said they won’t consider the case cold until they run out of viable leads to follow up on — and tens of thousands have come in so far.

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Savannah Guthrie has asked anyone with information to dial 1-800-CALL-FBI.

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There’s a combined reward of more than $1.2 million for information that leads to her mother’s recovery.

TUCSON, Ariz. — The task force investigating the February abduction of “Today” co-host Savannah Guthrie’s mother has reportedly begun asking neighbors about a potential internet outage the morning of her abduction, prompting speculation that the kidnapper may have used a Wi-Fi jamming device or some other means to tamper with internet connectivity.

A move like that would add a layer of sophistication for the masked suspect who appeared on 84-year-old Nancy Guthrie’s front steps carrying a Walmart backpack and oddly placed holster.

“It shows an astounding amount of planning if they were used,” said Joshua Ritter, a Los Angeles defense attorney and Fox News contributor.

Neighbors told Savannah’s network, NBC, that a team of investigators sweeping the neighborhood Thursday asked specifically about internet outages.

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According to NBC News, a couple who live adjacent to Guthrie’s home said they have four cameras on their property, noting the one closest to the missing 84-year-old’s home was “not available” during the overnight hours of Feb. 1 when she disappeared.

The neighbor said it seemed “uncanny” that the security video wasn’t available during that timeframe. 

“That’s really weird, isn’t it?” the neighbor said.

That prompted speculation about the so-called Wi-Fi jammers, which are illegal in the United States under Federal Communications Commission guidelines.

They’re not particularly high-tech. And they can be obtained online, which is potentially something investigators could track.

A Pima County Sheriff’s Department spokesperson also told Fox News Digital that investigators were aware of a damaged utility box around the corner from her home and looking into it as part of the investication. 

“The junction box damage matters here too, because if connectivity was cut externally, it may have prevented devices from logging activity during the most critical window — which may have been the point,” said Jason Pack, a retired FBI supervisory special agent and the CEO of Media Rep Global Strategies.

The fact that the FBI and Google were able to recover video from Guthrie’s Nest doorbell camera, when the device was physically missing, and she did not have a cloud subscription, indicates a Wi-Fi jammer may not have been deployed at her front door, experts have explained.

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“If they were using Wi-Fi jammers, then I would expect that we would not be able to see any video from the front door cameras,” said Morgan Wright, the CEO and founder of the National Center for Open and Unsolved Cases. “I took a look at some of the videos with the other gangs that use Wi-Fi jammers, and had one been up and running and persistent, you wouldn’t have gotten the clear pictures that we did from the front.”

Guthrie’s router wouldn’t detect the presence of a signal jammer, either, unless its internal logs recorded the sudden disconnects of multiple devices at the same time, like Guthrie’s exterior cameras, Wright said.

“The router won’t see the jammer as a device,” he told Fox News Digital. “It’s not attempting to connect. … All an RF (radio frequency) jammer does is flood a frequency band with noise so legitimate signals cannot be decoded.”

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So, unless the router in Guthrie’s home logged the disconnects, which not every make and model does, the jammer wouldn’t have a digital footprint for investigators to uncover, he said.

“Whether investigators could detect a jammer, the answer is almost certainly no,” Wright said. “It operates at the radio layer. The router records events at the network layer.”

Jammers function by spamming the airwaves on the same frequencies as Wi-Fi devices, interrupting their connections to the internet.

DNA IS STILL PENDING AS VOLUNTEERS FIND ANOTHER GLOVE IN THE SEARCH FOR NANCY GUTHRIE

Early adopters to home Wi-Fi may have seen similar interruptions if they took a call on a wireless landline phone while surfing the internet. People who live in densely populated apartment buildings can also face interference from their neighbors. More advanced routers are more resilient to conflicting signals.

Commercial jammers have a range of about 10 to 30 yards, Wright said, and they get more effective the closer they are to the victim’s router. From a distance, they can cause lag and glitching but might not black out a camera’s signal entirely.

While devices used by the military and the U.S. Secret Service have a much greater range, they’re larger and use more power.

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For that reason, he said it’s unlikely that neighbors saw an impact from a jamming device deployed at Guthrie’s home.

“If they say, ‘Well, I had an internet outage,’ it’s got nothing to do with an RF jammer,” he said of the neighbors. “That RF jammer would have to be high-powered, military-style stuff to affect a neighbor.”

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Wi-Fi jammers have no effect on wired security cameras or alarm systems. Some wireless cameras can store video locally and upload once an interrupted connection is restored. It depends on the make and model.

Jammers have been used by organized burglary rings to overcome home security systems in recent months, including a South America-linked group busted in Houston, Texas, last month. The same gang has ties to similar theft operations in California, New York, Florida and Wisconsin, according to authorities.

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“We all know the South American theft groups have been using them in burglaries across the country,” said Lisa Miller, a retired detective and law enforcement executive at the Colorado Attorney General’s Office.

“I find it to be a plausible theory but not as likely,” she told Fox News Digital. “Here’s why. The video of the porch monster released by the FBI didn’t appear glitchy. At all. I mean, even police car laptops have glitched during traffic stops of someone with a jammer.”

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The apparent antenna seen in the suspect’s pocket on that Nest video could more likely be part of a handheld radio, she said.

“I think it’s smarter to use that than a burner phone,” she said. “The criminals know what the FBI … can do. Of course, I’m opining based on experience, and it fits my theory that porch monster had an accomplice.”

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Other experts are also skeptical based on the added level of sophistication a jammer would bring.

“If they were forward-thinking enough to purchase and use one of those jammers, I think they would have done better than what we saw at the front door,” said Betsy Brantner Smith, a retired police sergeant and spokesperson for the National Police Association. “It is definitely a possibility, but that would require so much advanced thought and action. That brings us back to someone who knew her and very specifically targeted her.”

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On the other hand, if the suspect knew her well enough, they might have known she didn’t have a cloud subscription for the cameras she did have.

The Pima County Sheriff’s Department declined to comment on any potential internet outage in Guthrie’s neighborhood at the time of her abduction.