‘TSUNAMI’ OF DRUG DEATH
Sheriffs: Fentanyl from Mexico
A quartet of Texas sheriffs took aim at President Biden this week, telling The Post his laissez-faire border policies are creating a tragic tidal wave of smuggled drugs.
“It’s quite frankly a tsunami of death that is crashing into the United States over our southern border,” Collin County Sheriff Jim Skinner said of the thousands of pounds of fentanyl that Mexican drug cartels trafficked into the Lone Star State.
“It’s killing Americans wholesale and it’s just an epic slaughter manufactured by the cartels. If you don’t secure the border, it’s going to continue.”
Skinner was joined by Lone Star lawmen Rand Henderson (top inset) of Montgomery County, Javier Salazar (middle) of Bexar County and Bill Waybourn (bottom) of Tarrant County on an exclusive Zoom call with The Post.
Fentanyl is now the leading cause of death for Americans between the ages of 18 and 45, according to one analysis. A total 107,622 people died of overdoses in the US in 2021, with the overwhelming majority caused by synthetic opioids like fentanyl, according to the Centers for Disease Control. The drug is frequently brought into the United States from Mexico and China.
Skinner said there has been a 571% increase in fatal fentanyl poisonings in his county. In nearby Tarrant County, home to Fort Worth, Waybourn said he had seized enough fentanyl to kill 400,000 people.
All four men said they felt Washington was not taking their concerns seriously and cited as evidence a planned meeting with Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas during a swing through Texas this week. An original 90-minute meeting was canceled after Mayorkas’ team said he could spare only half that time for the lawmen, they said. Reps for Mayorkas disputed that and said the meeting fell apart due to scheduling conflicts.
“He was just placating us,” growled Waybourn.
Henderson ripped the job Biden and Mayorkas are doing at the border.
“When the Biden administration came into office, they winnowed down the number of offenses that would be considered for deportation,” he said, adding that he had hoped to press the secretary on ridding the country of criminal illegal aliens.
“If we have criminals operating in our community that can be deported, I think we need to take advantage of that. This administration under Mayorkas’ leadership has chosen not to,” he said.
Salazar said the planned visit came after months of “strongly worded” calls and letters from him about the border situation — which for him has meant a flood of migrants who are often “dumped like yesterday’s trash in the middle of our county.”
Salazar said some of his letters in the past had warned about the migrants being hauled into the country on large trucks and the dangers that posed.
In June at least 53 migrants were found dead inside a large tractortrailer in San Antonio.
“I’m a Democrat. I am actually on the side of President Biden on this, but all the same you need to come down to Texas to get an eye on this thing and you really need to see the magnitude of it personally,” Salazar said.
A DHS spokesman said the agency “regularly reaches out to and engages law-enforcement and first responders all over the country including state, local, tribal, territorial and campus law-enforcement agencies. One of our most critical missions is sharing information.”