WASHINGTON, DC, Apr 18 – We’ve heard it all before: illegal migration drains public funds, overwhelms our neighborhoods, and compromises national security. But there is a deadly side effect of the illegal surge at our southern border. It’s called fentanyl, and Mexican drug traffickers are using the migrant surge to smuggle their deadly wares into the U.S. It’s killing users throughout America by the tens of thousands.
“Drug Enforcement Administration Divisions across the U.S. are seeing overdose deaths climb at an alarming rate, especially those caused by the synthetic opioid, fentanyl. Only weeks ago, the DEA reported overdose deaths in the U.S. had topped 100,000 for the first time over a 12-month period ending last spring,” according to a recent DEA report.
Drug dealers sell fentanyl in powder form directly to users who sniff it or smoke it. It’s so powerful that three milligrams of the stuff – the weight of a snowflake – can be deadly. Dealers also mix it with other drugs such as cocaine and heroin to speed up the high.
The fentanyl crisis emerged in 2013-14. By 2017, President Trump declared it a national emergency, the likes of which we have never seen, and he took concrete measures to help stem the drug trafficking across the Mexican border. More recently, Congressman Bryan Steil [R-WI] and 116 Republican colleagues sent a demand to President Biden, noting that “Fentanyl kills more people age 18-45 than car accidents, suicide, or COVID-19.” He also wrote, “We cannot stand by and watch as Americans are being killed by the flood of fentanyl related substances coming into our country…the Biden Administration does not believe in securing our southern border which makes my legislation, the SIFT Act, even more critical in order to prevent further loss of life and damage to our communities.” The SIFT Act would amend the Controlled Substances Act to list fentanyl-related substances as Schedule I controlled substances.
President Biden, in fact, issued a news release shortly after the new year in which he proposed to deal with the fentanyl crisis by spending $41 billion “for national drug program agencies, a $669.9 million increase over the FY 2021 enacted level. The largest increases in funding are for critical public health interventions to expand research, prevention, treatment, harm reduction, and recovery support services, with targeted investments to meet the needs of populations at greatest risk for overdose and substance use disorder, as well as significant investments in reducing the supply of illicit substances.”
Oh, yeah, he also proposed the creation of a new U.S. Council on Transnational Organized Crime to deal with the traffickers who bring the stuff into the country, a bureaucratic method of showing us he’s getting tough on crime. And, of course, he apparently thinks that dismissing President Trump’s Title 42 measure -a tool that allows border patrol agents to check and deny entry into the U.S. quickly and easily for suspicious migrants – is a good idea.
Perhaps he should have consulted the Governor of Texas, Greg Abbott, who took the bull by the horns and negotiated deals with three Mexican border states, Chihuahua, Coahuila and Nuevo Leon. Abbott said the governors of the three Mexican states have signed Memoranda of Understanding in an “historic step taken by the State of Texas to solve the border crisis, keep our communities safe, negotiate with our partners in Mexico, and fill in the gaps left by the inaction of the Biden Administration. Until President Biden decides to fulfill his constitutional duty to secure the border, we will continue to do whatever it takes to protect the safety and security of all Texans…Texans demand and deserve an aggressive, comprehensive border security strategy that will protect our communities from the dangerous consequences related to illegal immigration.”