A river of the deadly opioid, fentanyl, is flowing across our southern border from Mexico into the United States, thanks to President Biden’s “open borders” policies. Fetanyl killed more than 100,000 Americans last year, more than vehicle crashes and gun deaths combined.
While this deadly opioid invasion is occurring, Biden’s incompetent and inept Homeland Security Secretary, Alejandro Mayorkas, assures us the border is “closed and secure,” when we can see that it’s wide open to illegal immigrants, including drug and human traffickers.
This isn’t right-wing “fake news.” It’s what the reliably liberal New York Times is reporting. “No other advanced nation is dealing with a comparable drug crisis,” the Times reported, “and over the past two years it has worsened. Annual overdose deaths spiked 50 percent last year as fentanyl spread in illegal markets…” When the Times criticizes the Biden administration, the political issue is serious indeed.
“In the 1990s, drug companies promoted opioid painkillers as a solution to a problem that remains today: the need for better pain treatments,” the Times continued. “Purdue Pharma led the charge with OxyContin, claiming it was more effective and less addictive than it was.” Later, opioid users moved on to more potent drugs, like heroin, and finally, to fentanyl.
These disturbing facts lead us back to Biden’s dangerous “open borders policies,” which represent a serious threat to our national security. If Mayorkas is incompetent and inept, Biden’s designated border czar, Vice President Kamala Harris, is even worse because she won’t go anywhere near the border. Apparently, she’s looking elsewhere for the “root causes” of massive illegal immigration. What a joke!
The U.S. Border Patrol recently announced that there were a record-breaking 1.7 million arrests at the border last year. That’s more than 4,500 arrests per day for those who are keeping score. And even worse, the agency expects daily arrests to double by this spring. But don’t worry because the Biden administration is ordering the Border Patrol to briefly detain those illegal aliens – many of them single, adult males – before putting them on midnight flights to cities around the country. Are any of them coming to Northern Nevada? Who knows? And if they know, they’re not telling us.
Wall Street Journal columnist Jason Reilly commented that “winking at illegal immigration can also be considered a ‘root cause.’” Yes it can, and while Biden, Harris and Mayorkas continue to order the Border Patrol not to do its job, illegal immigrants keep coming in droves, bringing huge quantities of dangerous drugs -- including enough fentanyl to kill all of us – with them. “Republicans are certain to tee-up border security as a midterm campaign issue,” Reilly wrote, and I hope they do.
Meanwhile, a bipartisan congressional commission on opioid trafficking and abuse has urged the Biden administration to get tough on dangerous drugs by shutting down the sources of chemicals used to make synthetic opioids. The commission’s report noted that most of the chemical raw materials are produced in China while Mexican drug cartels control the production and shipment of these deadly drugs to the U.S.
“Overdose deaths cost the U.S. economy $1 trillion a year in health expenses… equivalent to nearly half of America’s growth last year,” the New York Times concluded. So let’s start enforcing our immigration laws, as imperfect as they may be, and let’s tell President Biden and his incompetent cohorts to let the Border Patrol do its job.
“There’s nothing humane about lawlessness, and that’s exactly what we have on our southern border,” the conservative Washington Examiner opined, and I agree 100 percent.
Guy W. Farmer is the Appeal’s senior political columnist.
