The Republican House has presented the fentanyl crisis as being linked to the ongoing border issues. House Homeland Security Chairman Mark Green (R-TN) claimed “backpacks full of fentanyl [are] pouring into our country” as border police experience difficulty with migrants. Fentanyl statistics instead suggest that American citizens are trafficking the drug through the border.
From The Hill:
“Despite arresting over 700,000 illegal entrants so far this year, less than 1 percent of CBP’s fentanyl seizures have come from people carrying it across the border illegally,” David Bier, the group’s associate director of immigration studies, told lawmakers last month. “Maybe it’s right to investigate the scourge of fentanyl deaths. But immigrants are not the cause.” ... “When migration goes up, fentanyl numbers don’t change; when migration goes down, fentanyl numbers don’t change either,” said Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, policy counsel at the American Immigration Council. “If it were true that high numbers of migrants led to more fentanyl making it across the border without being detected, you would expect to see that in the drug and migration data. But you just don’t,” he said.
