A 25-year Border Patrol agent and Texas sheriff testified before Congress that Mexican gangs are running risky operations to push illegal immigrants across the U.S.-Mexico border in an effort to draw attention away from drug smuggling activities. The inflow of illegal narcotics that followed has sadly led to an alarming rise in fentanyl poisoning-related fatalities.
“Each and every day along the entirety of our southwest border, criminal cartels dictate when, where, and how illegal border crossers enter our country,” On February 15, Brandon Judd, President of the National Border Patrol Council and spokesperson for 16,000 agents and staff members working close to US borders, spoke before Congress and provided an opportunity for them to share their perspectives on immigration policy.
TRENDING: NEW Trump Diamond Bills Will Drive Liberals Crazy!
“The cartels have figured out the loopholes in our laws,” he said during the two-hour hearing entitled “President Biden’s Border Crisis is a Public Health Crisis,” staged in Weslaco near McAllen in the Rio Grande Valley. “And they know that when our agents are forced to process huge numbers of illegal border crossers, we are unable to properly patrol the border.”
The Border Patrol and CBP are responding to surges, leaving broad areas unsecured, as Sheriff Martinez of Brooks County disclosed, placing a severe burden on local law enforcement. As a result, domestic law enforcement agencies are overworked in their efforts to maintain safety.
Romeo Ramirez, the sheriff, oversees a large rural county that is 70 miles north of the border and has 7,400 citizens. This 943 square mile area, which is home to two major roads and the largest US Border Patrol crossing in America (Falfurrias), is no new to its own special set of issues for his five deputies and first responders—all of which put a financial strain on the taxpayers.
1.2 Million ‘Got-Aways’
The highest known escape of unauthorized entries occurred in Texas in 2022 when an estimated 1.2 million illegal immigrants managed to elude capture by Border Patrol, Customs and Border Protection (CBP), as well as other agencies. Martinez’s eyewitness testimony showed that this estimate only took into account immigrant groups that had been observed by law enforcement, indicating that the actual numbers may be substantially higher.
“We have no idea if they’re cartel, other criminals, or terrorists because the federal government has failed to enforce border security efforts and Border Patrol’s time has been taken up processing the majority of migrants giving themselves up at the border,” he said.
Martinez recently drew attention to the worrying complexity of cartels, noting the rise in the use of drones coming from Mexico. He made an appeal to Congress for help in reestablishing border security by reinstituting former President Trump’s “stay-in-Mexico” policy and making changes to the laws governing asylum requests, along with plans for building what has been branded “The Wall” along America’s southern borders.
Doing so will “let them work,” he said of Border Patrol agents and CBP officers. “They can do the job, They know what they are doing. Let them do the work they are supposed to be doing.”
Republicans organized the scheduling of two field hearings this week in Texas. On February 13th, the Natural Resources Committee’s Energy & Mineral Resources Subcommittee traveled to Odessa with a big mission: to assess how federal energy production has benefited and will benefit local communities around Texas.
The Energy & Commerce Committee will hold a hearing in Midland on February 16 to address how American energy expansion is reshaping local economies and enhancing quality of life for individuals. Come discover this fascinating new development with us!
Rep. Cathy McMorris Rodgers, the chair, is turning up the fire on Capitol Hill with new legislation to stop illegal fentanyl from entering our communities and to ensure that law enforcement has all of the equipment need to protect people from this lethal poison. The “HALT Fentanyl Act” seeks to protect Americans from these dangers by preventing illicit entry at the southern border.
The next hearings will delve into how President Joe Biden has changed energy production while also examining the startling implications of fentanyl’s presence and spread in America.
CCP, Cartels Collaborating
The policies “enacted by President Biden and his Department of Homeland Security have directly resulted in the least secure border in my 25-year career,” according to Judd’s witness testimony,” adding that Biden’s executive actions “have directly resulted in an increase in illicit fentanyl coming across our southern border with Mexico and into our communities in all 50 states.”
Since Biden took office in January of 2021, “We have seen historically high numbers of people crossing the border illegally forcing more than 50 percent of patrol resources to be dedicated to administrative duties such as, but not limited to, processing, transport, hospital watch, and detention security,” Judd said. This “allows cartels to create gaps in our coverage facilitating the highest number of known ‘got-aways” in our history.
“Couple that with the more than 3.1 million people who crossed the border illegally and were released into the U.S., and we’ve added more than 4.3 million illegal border crossers to our population just since President Biden has been in office,” he added. “And at the current accelerated trajectory, we’ll add another more than 6 million illegal border crossers to our population over the next two years.”
In this environment, Judd said, criminal cartels have “become incredibly successful at bringing their high-value products into our country illegally and these circumstances have contributed to a huge increase in the flow of hard narcotics making their way into the U.S., and wreaking havoc on our communities.”
Almost 107,000 individuals tragically died from drug overdoses in 2021, according to a heartbreaking Washington Post report. This alarmingly high number was made all the more awful by the fact that fentanyl was responsible for an astounding two-thirds of these deaths.
“The amount of illicit fentanyl, a synthetic opioid, pouring into our country across our Southern border is staggering and frankly terrifying knowing that just 2 milligrams is considered a lethal dose,” Judd said.
Citing a December 2022 U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency Alert, Judd said, “The vast majority of counterfeit [opioid] pills brought into the United States are produced in Mexico, and China is supplying chemicals for the manufacturing of fentanyl in Mexico.”
Rep. Diana Harshbarger (R-Tenn.) queried Judd about the 1.2 million “get-ways,” noting these are people who didn’t want to get caught and claim asylum at the border.
More than 50 people on the FBI’s Terrorism Watch List have been captured by U.S. border agents, and they are observing an increase in Chinese nationals trying to enter the country illegally at America’s southern borders, which is further evidence of the growing security threat to our country.
Judd was asked an unsettling question by Harshbarger: Could the notorious Mexican gangs be working with the CCP to increase the number of fentanyl laboratories across China? Furthermore, may these deadly groups be planning smuggling operations and unlawfully transporting people across borders?
“Yes,” Judd said.
“Absolutely, so do I,” she said, calling for the Sinaloa and Jalisco New Generation cartels in Mexico to be declared terrorist organizations.
Playing a ‘Blame Game’
Democrats and witnesses made a convincing case that, despite the complexity of the opioid addiction issue, militarizing our borders in an effort to battle fentanyl won’t help. Instead, we need to concentrate on coming up with sensible answers that approach this fundamentally humanitarian problem with empathy.
Rep. Angie Craig (D-Minn.) said, “Folks are dying and families are absolutely being torn apart” by fentanyl, “and yes, it is leading to an increase in crime” in many areas across the country.
Addressing the opioid addiction crisis “should not be a partisan issue,” she said, adding that she “sincerely hopes that we could come together” on the matter but that “even the name of the hearing, ‘Joe Biden’s border crisis’ is political.”
Just 0.2% of the fentanyl that was captured at U.S. borders in 2021 was the result of drug trafficking by illegal immigrants; instead, 97 percent of entries were routinely made through busy commercial crossings supervised by customs and border protection agents.
“Ninety-seven percent is coming across at legal ports of entry,” not the expanses managed by the Border Patrol, she said. So the questions should be, “what resources can we give, what more in technology, what more in officers” are needed in better “stopping illicit fentanyl from coming across the border at legal ports of entry?”
Instead, Craig said rather than searching for “real policy solutions,” Republicans are going for “political point-scoring.”
“We have a real problem in America and this does nothing for our constituents to solve the problem but who we can pitch blame on for the next election,” she said.
‘Militarized Border’ No Solution
The Texas Civil Rights Project’s Rochelle M. Garza testified with the goal of pursuing a twofold agenda for advancement and progress.
“First … the public health crisis related to fentanyl and the humanitarian crisis at the border are two separate issues that should not be conflated,” Garza said. “Second, I want to share how the current approach of heavy-handed policies, that prioritize military force as the only solution, has not and will not help address either crisis.”
Governor Abbott has refused to provide any concrete answers despite the rising suffering along Texas’ border with Mexico and has instead claimed that “securing the border” will somehow address issues like fentanyl-related deaths.
As Rio Grande Valley residents know, “securing the border” means “building an expensive, divisive, and unnecessary border wall in our community, sending the military and state troopers to flood our small towns, and luring people awaiting the resolution of their immigration cases into buses only to dramatically drop them off at the homes of his political opponents.”
She vehemently opposed using opioid addiction and fentanyl-related deaths for political benefit and urged knowledge of these problems that goes beyond simple point scoring.
“The vast majority of fentanyl seized at the border is intercepted at either U.S. ports of entry or through U.S. mail, with most smugglers being U.S. citizens,” she said. “We must call out the attempt to conflate fentanyl with migrants for what it is—a cheap political trick to use a serious public health crisis as justification to waste public resources on the same ineffective border policies they have been pushing in communities like mine for years.”
Military on Border A Solution
Rep. Dan Crenshaw criticized the politicization of the fentanyl epidemic and the border problem, saying that doing so was a “cheap political ploy” that wasn’t worth thinking about.
Fentanyl being imported from our southern neighbor in significant amounts, according to findings from a field hearing close to the border. Regrettably, rather than coming together to find a solution and save lives, this issue has devolved into partisan fighting over whether the majority of it occurs through points of entry or between them.
Congressman. Crenshaw made a startling connection between immigration and the US drug crisis: Due to Mexican drug cartels taking advantage of weak border security caused by large influxes of immigration, tons of fentanyl have been allowed to enter our country unchecked. Overworked agents are juggling guardianship and transporter responsibilities, a situation that, if not resolved right once, might be disastrous for public health.
Cartels “use that opportunity to run drugs through places they cannot watch,” Crenshaw said. “This is not partisan comment to make.”
The fentanyl epidemic differs from previous drug problems in that it entails unintentional individuals consuming the drug due to its misleading disguise rather than necessarily being a matter of addiction. Unfortunately, those looking for pain treatment are poisoned rather than getting the essential support they need.
“This is a different problem” and merits a different solution, he said, vowing to introduce legislation to allow “the military to go after” Mexican drug cartels “and the Mexican officials who help them.”
