The crime wave in America keeps getting worse, as evidenced by the bloody Easter weekend in New York City. From Friday through Sunday, 29 people were shot, one fatally, in 24 different incidents. And New York is far from the only city seeing a surge in crime.Sign up for a weekly roundup of thought-provoking ideas and debates
This is a major problem for President Biden. In a new ABC-Ipsos poll, approval of the president’s handling of crime has fallen to 38 percent — down five points from the same poll in October. According to Gallup, 80 percent of Americans say they are worried about rising crime. Fifty-three percent say they worry a “great deal,” behind only inflation and the economy on Gallup’s list of 14 national concerns. Americans feel unsafe — and they blame Biden and other Democrats.
They are right. And one major reason we are facing a surge in crime is the disaster Biden unleashed on our southern border. Last year, the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) seized enough fentanyl to provide a lethal dose to every American. Overdose deaths from fentanyl coming across the border hit record levels in 2021, claiming a new victim every five minutes.
Most fentanyl entering the United States used to come from China. Then in 2018, President Donald Trump signed the bipartisan Synthetics Trafficking & Overdose Prevention Act, which frustrated the ability of Chinese traffickers to ship fentanyl through the U.S. Postal Service. At the 2018 Group of 20 summit, Trump also got Chinese President Xi Jinping to declare fentanyl a controlled substance, making trafficking it a crime under Chinese law. As enforcement against Chinese fentanyl increased, transnational criminal organizations shifted production to Mexico and began shipping it in larger and larger quantities over our southern border.
The problem has worsened in the past year thanks to the border crisis Biden unleashed, as the flood of illegal migrants over the past year has forced Customs and Border Protection to shift resources away from drug interdiction to processing migrants. Biden’s own budget acknowledges this, requesting funds for 300 new “Border Patrol Processing Coordinators to respond to migration along the Southwest border,” who “will allow existing agents to focus on their core counterterrorism, law enforcement, and security missions.” Because the same cartels are engaged in both human and drug trafficking, they often use migrants — including children — as drug mules. And they strategically send caravans of migrants to overwhelm and distract Border Patrol in one area so they can surge drug shipments across the border in another location.
As the migrant crisis has grown over the past year, fentanyl seizures rose 56 percent in March 2022 compared with March 2021. And this surge in illegal drugs has contributed to the crime surge in U.S. cities. Last fall, the DEA analyzed “national crime statistics and [Centers for Disease Control and Prevention] data to identify hot spots of drug-related violence and overdose deaths across the country.” The DEA study “revealed alarming trends” about the criminal drug networks’ activity in 34 U.S. cities, finding the vast majority of those networks “are engaged in gun violence.” In response, the DEA launched Operation Overdrive this February “aimed at combatting the rising rates of drug-related violent crime.” By making it easier for cartels to flood our country with illegal drugs, our unsecured borders are fueling a drug-related crime wave across the United States that has necessitated a major DEA response.
But instead of securing our border, Biden is preparing to make the problem even worse with his plan to scrap Title 42, the public health order that allows border officials to turn away illegal migrants to prevent the spread of covid-19. Lifting Title 42 would open the floodgates for the cartels to traffic illegal drugs into the United States, as even more Border Patrol agents will be pulled off the front line to process and care for migrants. This is one reason vulnerable Senate Democrats are joining with Republicans in introducing a bill to keep Title 42 in place. It’s not just border-state Democrats such as Sen. Mark Kelly (Ariz.) pushing back on Biden. Sen. Maggie Hassan (D-N.H.) has also joined the Title 42 revolt. New Hampshire is about as far from the southern border as you can get, but it is also ground zero for the fentanyl epidemic. That’s why Hassan just released a video of herself standing in front of the border wall and calling on Biden to address “gaps in physical barriers along the border.” When vulnerable Democrats are calling for border wall construction, you know the president’s border policies have failed.
Over the past two years, Democrats have shown themselves to be opponents of both law enforcement and border enforcement. Now, some are belatedly recognizing their error and trying to distance themselves from the left’s push to defund the police. But, as Biden’s Title 42 decision shows, there has yet to be a similar reckoning when it comes to the border. Until Democrats reverse course on border security, as they have on police funding, the crime wave will continue — as will Biden’s collapse in the polls.
