California’s marijuana decriminalization incentivized Mexican drug cartels to create illegal farms in the state’s redwood forests and bring their criminal lifestyles along with them. Cartel-connected murders, gun fights, sex trafficking, and missing persons are on the rise in Humboldt County. Environmental pollution from illegal pot farms is increasing. And the cartels have so frightened residents that they asked reporters with The Los Angeles Times not to use their names.

Meanwhile, California’s 2014 reduction of drug possession from a felony to a misdemeanor, and the de facto decriminalization of open-air drug markets by the city governments of San Francisco and Los Angeles, greatly expanded the reach of the Sinaloa cartel. Young men from Honduras, who are in the U.S. illegally, and protected by California’s sanctuary laws, publicly deal drugs supplied by the cartel in downtown San Francisco.

Just last week, a small town in California’s Central Valley saw a cartel-style killing of six people, including a 72-year-old woman, a 16-year-old girl, and her 10-month-old baby who she was cradling in her arms as she ran away from the killers. The massacre has raised the specter that the brutal violence that plagues much of Mexico, including the killing of children and family members by drug cartels, has arrived in the U.S. The killing occurred in the small city of Goshen, about a 30-minute drive southeast of Fresno on highway 99.