Drug overdoses in the U.S., many fentanyl-related, reached record highs in 2021 and are on track to cause more deaths in 2022 as President Joe Biden ignores his ongoing crisis at the southern border, which is responsible for a large portion of drug trafficking in the nation.
Biden and his team at the White House are intentionally ignoring the growing border crisis even though since the beginning of the 2021 calendar year, border officials arrested more than 2 million illegal aliens, often aided and funded by the United Nations, at the southern U.S. border. Already, Customs and Border Protection data indicates that apprehensions on the U.S.-Mexico border in the 2022 fiscal year will exceed 2 million.
Not only are illegal aliens pouring across the border in what is arguably the nation’s top humanitarian crisis, but so are lethal drugs such as fentanyl, which plays an increasing role in the number of drug-related deaths in the U.S.
In addition to creating national security problems, Biden’s open border policies have ushered in a public health crisis that is responsible for many of the 100,306 drug overdose deaths in the U.S. from April 2020 to April 2021. In South Texas ports of entry alone, CBP seized 588 pounds of fentanyl in fiscal year 2021, a 1,066 percent increase since FY2020.
Southern states, including states that border Mexico, reported a surging number of fentanyl-related hospital visits and deaths. Even states such as Kansas and Maine, which are hundreds to thousands of miles away from the U.S.-Mexico border, are grappling with record-high drug overdoses and fentanyl deaths as a result of smuggled drugs.
Some border drug traffickers are caught, such as this truck driver who faces federal drug charges for trying to smuggle 17,584 pounds of methamphetamine and 388.93 pounds of fentanyl across the Mexico-California border in November. Others, many of whom evade apprehension by overwhelmed and frustrated border officials, continue to pump lethal substances such as fentanyl into the U.S. without punishment.
Since the beginning of FY2022 in October, border officials have already seized 2,450 pounds of fentanyl. Even though the Drug Enforcement Administration admits that most illicit fentanyl is “primarily manufactured in foreign clandestine labs and smuggled into the United States through Mexico” due to a lack of border security and protection, Biden and his team repeatedly ignore his border crisis. This will only worsen the drug smuggling problem and lead to more lives needlessly lost.
Since the beginning of 2022, hundreds of people, many young, have died as a result of fentanyl. One of these overdose victims was a 13-year-old Connecticut boy who was found unconscious at his school in mid-January after he and two other seventh-graders were exposed to the fatal drug. A later search of the young teen’s home turned up nearly 100 bags of fentanyl. Authorities are still working to find the source and determine why the middle-schooler possessed the drug.
After their community lost at least 10 people to fentanyl-related overdoses last week, Westminster Presbyterian Church in Washington, D.C., plans to obtain fentanyl test strips that can detect the harmful substance. The church already has permission to distribute the anti-opioid-overdose medication Narcan to members of its community to prevent drug deaths.
It’s time for the president to step up before his border disaster makes America’s drug problems even worse. Biden’s failure to address the crisis he created by abolishing border security measures just keeps lengthening our nation’s growing list of drug overdose victims.