Biden's Open Border Is Fueling the 'Deadliest Drug Epidemic in U.S. History'

As PJ Media has reported this week, the crisis at the U.S.-Mexico border is worsening. A dozen Texas counties, many of them not directly situated on the border, have declared emergencies due to the explosive increase in human trafficking that the open border is facilitating.

The Washington Free Beacon reports that the open border is facilitating an additional outbreak of lawlessness. The opioid fentanyl is now flooding across the border.

Cooperation between U.S. and Mexican authorities to target cartels has deteriorated amid a surge of illegal immigration at the U.S.-Mexico border, Matthew Donahue, the DEA deputy chief of operations, told NPR. Donahue said Mexican law enforcement have cut off ties with the DEA, fearing punishment from the Mexican government if they cooperate with the U.S. agency—a breakdown that has helped cartels smuggle fentanyl and methamphetamines into the United States.

“It’s a national health threat, it’s a national safety threat,” Donahue said. “[The cartels] do not fear any kind of law enforcement … or military inside of Mexico right now.”

Why would they? The open border has created a massive economic boom for the cartels, which were already far better funded than Mexico’s police and military combined.

Fentanyl is one of the primary drugs flooding across the border. The majority of fentanyl and its precursor chemicals come from one place: China. The Drug Enforcement Agency detailed China’s hand in the fentanyl trade in a January 2020 report.

Currently, China remains the primary source of fentanyl and fentanyl-related substances trafficked through international mail and express consignment operations environment, as well as the main source for all fentanyl-related substances trafficked into the United States. Seizures of fentanyl sourced from China average less than one kilogram in weight, and often test above 90 percent concentration of pure fentanyl.

That DEA report also notes that most fentanyl that originates in China enters the United States through Mexico via the cartels. Opening the border should have been anticipated to make it far easier to move fentanyl into the country.

It’s possible that fentanyl is an instrument of China’s foreign policy. China’s communist government controls or strongly influences nearly all businesses of any size throughout the country. It’s impossible that the Chinese government is unaware of the fentanyl trade or that it is doing all it can to stop it. Since 2014 the highly addictive, very powerful, and very profitable drug has become ubiquitous on American streets, causing havoc and tens of thousands of deaths.

NPR filed this report on the drug in November 2020.

Under international pressure, China’s government banned the production and sale of fentanyl and many of its variants in May 2019, resulting in a significant reduction in the country’s illicit fentanyl trade.

But more than a year later, Chinese vendors have tapped into online networks to brazenly market fentanyl analogs and the precursor chemicals used to make fentanyl, and ship them directly to customers in the U.S. and Europe as well as to Mexican cartels, according to an NPR investigation and research from the Center for Advanced Defense Studies, or C4ADS, a nonprofit data analysis group.

The Brookings Institute called fentanyl “the deadliest drug epidemic in American history” in this July 2020 report.

2020 was a terrible year for fatal drug overdoses in the United States, setting a new record of over 70,000 of them. Fentanyl alone was responsible for about 37,000 fatal drug overdoses in the U.S. in 2019, according to the National Institute on Drug Abuse. George Floyd, whose death in custody of the Minneapolis police in May 2020 caused riots and unrest that continue, had a large amount of fentanyl in his system when he died, according to the coroner’s report. His death was ruled a homicide and former police officer Derek Chauvin was convicted in the case, but fentanyl was one of the contributing factors in his death.

It’s impossible to escape the conclusion that the Biden White House is aware of the exploding fentanyl trade and China’s role in it, and the border’s role in escalating the crisis — which President Trump named a crisis and tried to stop — and doesn’t care. It refuses even to describe the border chaos in any accurate terms. Kamala Harris is supposedly Biden’s appointed border czar, but she has yet to visit the border and in her 41 days on that job has not even given a press conference on it. When pressed to discuss it, Harris blames the border chaos not on her and her boss’s policies, but on “climate change.”

Biden and Harris may be that stupid, but evil is the better bet here. They have access to information most Americans never see. They have chosen to black out media coverage of the border as it continues to spiral out of control.