The lies about the border Americans choose to believe
In the world of international drug smuggling, there are facts and there are lies. A fact: there is a fentanyl crisis in the United States. Even in small doses, the synthetic opioid can be deadly, and over a hundred thousand Americans continue to die each year of overdoses related to fentanyl smuggled into the United States by Mexican cartels and, on a smaller scale, Canadian drug-runners.
Now, a lie: undocumented immigrants are smuggling fentanyl into this country. They are not. By any metric. Let me be clear: There are no numbers to support this fallacy.
Citizen smugglers
But in certain corners of the political divide, even intelligent people claim that Mexican cartels are conscripting people seeking asylum into trafficking operations.
Some have, but not in the large numbers some politicians would have you believe.
“I would say it’s a handful,” Customs and Border Protection Officer Juan Garcia said to me in an interview (Officer Garcia, who has a command, asked that I not use his real name in order to not endanger his role at CBP). “There are always desperate people who are willing to take some money to do something illegal.”
“But border patrol agents know what’s up: American citizens traffic fentanyl,” he said.
According to the United States Sentencing Commission, in 2021, 86.3% of convicted fentanyl traffickers were U.S. citizens. Fewer than 8.5% were “illegal immigrants.” The remainder were affiliated with cartels and had no intention of immigrating to the United States.
After crunching all the relevant numbers, it emerges that only 0.02% of people arrested for illegally entering the country had fentanyl.
So why do so many people believe otherwise? Why do politicians, with access to the real numbers and knowledge, choose to perpetuate a lie that their own law enforcement and statisticians constantly refute? The answer is fear.
Fearful Americans
“People further from the border are more likely to believe that there is a criminal invasion of illegal immigrants carrying drugs and coming to replace quote ‘true Americans,’ than the people who live here [on the border],” Officer Garcia, who often travels to visit family in the midwest, said.
People running for office like to drum up fear about the border in order to get elected. “Scaring the [expletive] out of folks is easier than dealing with a humanitarian mess.”
“Truth is, there are two crises at the border: a drug crisis and an immigration crisis,” he said. To combine them is to participate in “a stupid and dangerous lie that is making it impossible to do any of our jobs correctly.”
I spoke to two people at the Department of Homeland Security, one hired during the Trump Administration, who confirmed Officer Garcia’s concerns. According to them, banning and limiting asylum only worsened the situation, and Border Patrol officers are now stretched thin. The allocation of funds to fight fentanyl by targeting undocumented people has proved fruitless.
“It’s a distraction,” said Officer Garcia. “We need to turn the machines on.”
He is referring to the new scanners CBP purchased for millions, which use state-of-the-art Non-Intrusive Inspection technology to locate fentanyl (a notoriously easy-to-conceal drug). They’re currently sitting in warehouses, because Republicans in Congress blocked funding for installation and use.
“We need to be searching cars at currently understaffed legal entry points, and we should be targeting and monitoring the U.S. citizens who cross at several different entry points in a short amount of time,” he said.
There are real solutions to both the crises at the border. CBP needs to be better equipped to stop the smuggling of fentanyl. Whether that’s fighting Chinese and Indian producers, smugglers in Mexico and Canada, or American traffickers and consumers (over 90% of fentanyl users in America are citizens), we need to refocus the conversation if we want actual solutions.
But it’s not related to undocumented asylum-seekers, who are neither smugglers nor violent criminals. Those are lies, meant to distract us, and currently succeeding at redirecting the exact people we need on the front line of this fight.
Quite frankly, we need to install those fentanyl scanners now. No matter how many political points that might cost the Republicans running for office.
We can solve the problem
“We can actually solve this problem” Officer Garcia said. He supports Senator Bob Casey’s “Stop Fentanyl at the Border Act.” So do I. It’s a sensible bill that includes funding to get those machines turned on, but it’s currently sitting with the Senate’s Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs.
It’s telling that not a single Republican has signed on to sponsor the bill, despite all their calls for increased border security and falsehoods about who is actually bringing fentanyl into our country.
Fact: American lives matter more than winning elections through lies. We can begin to fight back; we just need to believe the officers on the front lines over the politicians looking for a comfortable seat in Washington.