If you’ve been paying attention to the news, social media, or anything really over the last couple of years, you will know that the situation at our southern border with Mexico is a complete mess – so much so that they are calling it an immigration crisis.
As of August, more than two million illegal migrants had been arrested in their efforts to cross the border so far this year. And we still have several more months to go, according to Customs and Border Protection data.
As I said, it’s a mess – no thanks to Democratic President Joe Biden and his ill-fated administration.
But it isn’t just illegal people crossing that border and making their way into our communities, neighborhoods, and homes. Additionally, millions of dollars and pounds of illicit drugs have found their way into the U.S., wreaking havoc on American lives and families.
Thankfully, the Justice Department, in partnership with the DEA, Border Patrol, and local law enforcement agencies, have been working hard to find and confiscate these incoming drugs, as well as the people who are smuggling and selling them.
According to a recent statement from Attorney General Merrick Garland and his Justice Department, over 10 million fentanyl-laced pills and another 82 pounds of fentanyl power have been seized over the past five months as part of an ongoing operation spanning over 100 criminal cases and all 50 U.S. states.
As Garland correctly says, “Across the country, fentanyl is devastating families and communities, and we know that violent, criminal drug cartels bear responsibility for this crisis.”
The operation, known as “One Pill Can Kill Phase II,” linked 129 investigations to Facebook Messenger, TikTok, Instagram, and Snapchat accounts.
By the end of five months, the operation and its investigations had resulted in 390 cases, with 51 of those being linked to overdose poisonings. And more than a few of those, 35 to be exact, lead back to one or both of the main drug cartels in Mexico, the Sinaloa Cartel and the Jalisco New Generation Cartel, Garland says.
According to the DEA, some 107,622 American deaths in the last year have been attributed to either drug poisoning or overdose. Additionally, 66 percent of those were due to the use of synthetic opioids such as fentanyl.
This is in large part due to the ever-widening variety of fentanyl products available from drug traffickers. What was once a pretty much bland little pill now comes in various shapes, sizes, colors, and even flavors. The DEA noted the existence of “rainbow” fentanyl, for example, in February of this year. And so far, it has been found and seized in 21 states already.
Naturally, this gives the Department of Justice and the DEA much provocation and reason to continue their efforts to cut these cartels and their drugs off.
As DEA Administrator Anne Milgram recently said in a statement, “The Sinaloa Cartel and CJNG are ruthless, criminal organizations that use deception and treachery to drive addiction with complete disregard to human life. To save American lives, the DEA is relentlessly focused on defeating the Sinaloa Cartel and CJNG by degrading their operations to make it impossible for them to do business.”
Thankfully, the DEA and Justice Department have been doing well on that front so far. Or at least more recently. We can only hope that those efforts and tremendous results continue.
Of course, it would help if the White House and Biden’s Homeland Security would get the border itself under control. If people couldn’t cross the border so easily, these drugs wouldn’t be making their way into our communities and destroying lives either.
I mean, it’s not like the drugs can smuggle themselves through, right?
If Biden really wants to save American lives, as he claims, then he would do well to look at these numbers and realize that open borders aren’t just about the people coming through, as dangerous as that can be.
Instead, his lax immigration policies allow addiction to deadly drugs such as fentanyl to spread like wildfire. Just ask his son, Hunter.
