Republican politicians have been accused of exploiting the tragedy of America’s fentanyl crisis by blaming Joe Biden for the rising death toll, and linking it to his immigration policies and populist anger over the US’s troubled southern border.
Critics say Republican leaders are guilty of a cynical political ploy by misrepresenting an increase in asylum seekers as a cause of the serious problem of cross-border drug smuggling driving a huge US public health crisis.
Fentanyl kills about 70,000 Americans a year. It is the leading cause of record drug overdose deaths in the US and the primary cause of death among adults under the age of 45.
The synthetic opioid, usually made from chemicals manufactured in China and put together in Mexico, is popular with drug cartels because it is many times more powerful than other narcotics and so requires smaller quantities, which are easier to smuggle than heroin or cocaine.
It is then laced into other drugs to boost their power and value. But because small amounts of the narcotic as so strong, fentanyl has driven up the number of accidental overdoses and deaths.
The Republicans’ push to blame the Biden administration follows record seizures of fentanyl at the US’s south-western frontier. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) has discovered three times as much of the drug so far this year as during the same period in 2022. If seizures continue at that rate, CBP is on course to confiscate enough fentanyl in 2023 to kill close to a billion people – and that is almost certainly only a fraction of the drug smuggled into the US.
The Republican party claims this is evidence that “cartels have operational control of the border”. The speaker of the House of Representatives, Kevin McCarthy, tied the sharp increase in fentanyl seizures and deaths to the record number of undocumented migrants entering the US last year, and blamed the White House for letting them in. So did Congresswoman Mary Miller when she claimed that Biden and the homeland security secretary, Alejandro Mayorkas, “opened our borders and flooded our streets with fentanyl”.
When Ron DeSantis was looking for someone to blame for the escalating death toll from the supercharged opioid his eye naturally fell on Biden.
The Florida governor and presidential candidate brought dozens of sheriffs from across the US together in Arizona in June to peer into Mexico and claim that the president’s easing of Donald Trump’s restrictions on migrants seeking asylum had opened the door to a flood of the drug killing about 200 Americans a day.
“Illegal immigration has not only ravaged communities along the southern border, it has harmed states across the country with the deadly influx of cartel-trafficked fentanyl and higher rates of violent crime,” DeSantis told the sheriffs.
Ninety of them signed a letter praising the Florida governor’s position as Republicans increasingly link the growing toll from opioids to “Biden’s open border”.
Sheriff Mark Dannels of Cochise county, which runs along Arizona’s border with Mexico, hosted the DeSantis meeting and signed the letter. He didn’t hesitate to blame Biden for what he said was a surge in frontier-related crimes in his jurisdiction over the past 18 months, from drug smuggling to murder, because the president “is not enforcing the rule of law on the border”.
“The border is not effectively secured. About 40% of all the people in my jail are there for crimes that are border-related. That’s unheard of,” he said.
“Fentanyl is a big part of it. These are drugs that are being smuggled into our country that we have confiscated through port of entries, through highway interdiction, at roadblocks. The common nexus is it’s coming from south of the border.”
It is not just border figures jumping on the trend.
The Arkansas governor, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, tweeted that fentanyl seizures in her jurisdiction this year had been “enough to kill almost the entire population of our state”.
“Nearly all of it comes through the southern border. The consequences of Biden’s border crisis are deadly for every state,” she said.
Republicans held a congressional hearing in July into the Biden administration’s “open border policies” after the party’s members on the homeland security committee released a report accusing Mayorkas of a “dereliction of duty”.
The senior Democrat on the committee, Congressman Bennie Thompson, dismissed the hearing as a “political stunt” hatched by Trump supporters.
Congressman Raúl Grijalva, whose Arizona district includes Cochise county, described DeSantis’s visit as motivated by hate and fearmongering “to pander to the same old race baiting anti-immigrant extremist politicians and officials in southern Arizona”.
Some Republicans claim that cartels are using migrants to carry the drug or are hiding traffickers among the border crossers. Others say that large numbers of people arriving covertly away from official crossings are distracting the border patrol from going after the drug smugglers.
But Mayorkas described the claim that the bulk of fentanyl is carried into the US by migrants crossing covertly from Mexico as “unequivocally false”.
“The vast, vast majority is thought to be smuggled through the ports of entry and tractor-trailer trucks and passenger vehicles,” he said.
CBP reports show that last year, 84% of the fentanyl seized was found at an official border crossing.
Gil Kerlikowske, a former head of the CBP and White House drug tsar during the Obama administration, said migrants crossing the border to seek asylum have little interest in carrying fentanyl because they want to be apprehended.
“They wave down the border patrol, they want to go into custody. They want to file an asylum claim. They’re not going to be carrying drugs,” he said.
Kerlikowske said the vast majority of fentanyl was brought through busy border posts because the sheer numbers of people crossing there make it easier for smugglers to hide in the crowd whereas small groups crossing illegally in an isolated part of the frontier are far more likely to be spotted by technology and detained.
“The drug smuggling is at the ports of entry. San Ysidro in San Diego is the busiest land border in the world. That’s where fentanyl is coming through. It has nothing to do with migrants,” he said.
“Fentanyl is a gamechanger in many ways because such a small amount of fentanyl can produce such dramatic results in drug use and overdoses. So unlike the days that marijuana was smuggled across the border in planes, or in vehicles carrying big amounts that would try to ram through a small section of the border, now they can bring fentanyl hidden in vehicles through the ports of entry.”
Dannels disagrees. He said a large proportion of the arrests his officers make for border crimes are of American citizens, some of whom who act as “smuggler drivers” by picking up migrants after they cross the border illegally.
“The migrants bring the drugs. They are paying back a debt to the cartels. They’ve been told, you will carry this across the border. When the smuggler drivers pick them up, they take the drugs off them and they’re distributed from there. We’ve seen that. I’m talking about humans but they also use drones. It’s all one big business,” he said.
“Biden should enforce the rule of law via securing the border, not based on the political game. Drop politics out of this. Let’s get back to the values of our oath of offices. And let’s secure the border which protects this country and our citizens.”
Democrats have derided Republicans who claim that increasing seizures of fentanyl are evidence of increased smuggling and not improved policing. Kerlikowske thought it likely that both were true.
“When you’re making those increased seizures, it also reflects the fact that more fentanyl is coming across. But they’re also certainly a reflection of better intelligence, better technology, more focus on fentanyl,” he said.
Kerlikowske said that one problem was that no one really knows how much is being smuggled into the US. One of his predecessors as the head of CBP estimated that about 10% of illegal drugs were seized.
“We really looked into that and wanted to see, how solid is this research? Quite frankly, how do you know what you don’t know? We didn’t really find any strong support for that statistic. We just don’t know,” he said.
But Kerlikowske cautioned that ultimately the scale of seizures does not have a big impact on the opioid crisis. He dismissed the “false narrative that the more drugs are seized at the border the more that will reduce America’s appetite for use of drugs”.
“That has been disproven time after time after time. It’s been disproven with heroin going back decades. It’s been disproven with methamphetamine, and certainly it’s been disproven with fentanyl. People lose sight of the fact that seizing more drugs is not going to reduce drug use or overdoses in the United States.” he said.
“You can’t take your focus off of going after traffickers and drug dealers. You have to do that. But if you’re not reducing demand through quality prevention, if you’re not providing treatment and recovery resources for people who are addicted, you’re fighting that battle with one hand tied behind your back.”
