Members of the House Subcommittee on Border Security and Enforcement asked witnesses from federal agencies at a July 12 hearing what they need to do to help stem the flow of drugs. They heard from officials with the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), Customs and Border Protection (CPB) and the Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) at the hearing, titled “Protecting the U.S. Homeland: Fighting the Flow of Fentanyl from the Southwest Border."
"Every day, transnational criminal organizations use America’s complex highway systems to smuggle illicit drugs such as deadly fentanyl, and human beings enter our country. These criminal organizations pose an enormous threat to the United States as they undermine our public safety and flood our streets with drugs,” subcommittee Chairman Clay Higgins, R-LA, said. “The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention cites drug poisoning as the leading cause of mortality due to injury in the United States.”
The amount of fentanyl seized at the southern border has continued to increase over the past few years, the CBP website says. The number of pounds of fentanyl seized at the southern border alone rose from 4,600 in fiscal year 2020 to 10,600 in 2021 and to 14,100 in 2022, the website says. Already in FY 2023, over 19,000 pounds of fentanyl have been seized at the southern border. Of the 19,800 pounds that have been seized throughout all USCBP regions, 19,700 have been seized at the southern border, the CBP website says.
Ranking minority member Rep. Lou Correa, D-CA, said the fentanyl problem is not new and had increased during the previous administration. He said that what is needed is to stop the supply lines and go after those profiting from illegal drugs. The public health care response to this crisis also needs to be addressed, he said.
“That’s why this morning, the chairman and I introduced the bipartisan Cooperation on Combating Human Smuggling and Trafficking Act, which would direct Homeland Security Investigations to expand its transnational criminal investigative units,” Correa said.
He asked Kemp Chester, senior advisor to the director of National Drug Control Policy in the Office of National Drug Control Policy, about cooperation from China.
Chester said the People's Republic of China decided not to work with the United States on counter-narcotics and other issues.
“The United States would like that level of cooperation again, and we have made a few things clear to the PRC. The first one is, we’re not blaming the PRC government for this. There are criminal elements within China and Mexico and in the United States who keep this global supply chain alive,” he said.
New Border Patrol Chief Jason Owens said in a tweet on July 5 that in a span of 120 hours, 107 pounds of fentanyl had been seized at the border.
The DC Enquirer reported that between March 6 and May 8 of this year, federal border agents confiscated more than 2,000 pounds of fentanyl, a quantity that had the potential to cause the deaths of more than 450 million individuals, the Enquirer said. A lethal dose of fentanyl can be as tiny as two milligrams, the article said.
“When you have something that one kilogram will kill a hundred thousand people, good God, that's dangerous,” Rep. Neal Dunn, R-FL, said in an interview with Federal Newswire. Dunn said police have strongly emphasized educating children about fentanyl as early as second grade because every single common street drug now has the possibility of containing fentanyl. It is no longer “don’t take candy from strangers,” he said, but “because it will kill you... Every single time you are using a street drug, you’re playing Russian roulette with your life,” he said.
“100k Americans are dying each year due to the fentanyl crisis.” U.S. Presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy said in a May 24 tweet. “If we can use $100 billion to secure somebody else’s border in God knows where, halfway around the world, we can take a small fraction of that and use our own military to secure our own border,” but “Biden sits in the White House & watches the fentanyl crisis like he’s a bystander” instead of using the military for its primary purpose, which is to protect the U.S., he said.
Chester said the administration announced in April that it would use commercial disruption to attack vulnerabilities in the supply chain: precursor chemicals, pill presses, die molds and encapsulating machines used to create counterfeit pills, along with commercial shipping and the flow of financial benefits and operating capital to those involved in the illicit drug industry.
“These organizations do not limit themselves to a single criminal enterprise and have evolved beyond narcotics smuggling into poly-criminal organizations involved in weapons trafficking, cybercrime, human smuggling, money laundering, and more,” Steven Cagen, assistant director of the Countering Transnational Organized Crime Division, Homeland Security Investigations, said.
Mexican cartels get precursor chemicals from China, Chinese criminal organizations sell industrial pill press equipment and Chinese money laundering organizations enhance the Mexican cartels' ability to traffic deadly fentanyl into the United States, Cagen said.
James Mandryck, deputy assistant commissioner in the CBP Office of Intelligence, said the agency uses advanced detection capabilities such as specialized canines and non-intrusive inspection equipment, intelligence collection, research and analysis, laboratory testing and scientific analysis.
Record-level seizures have been made, including over 22,000 pounds of fentanyl so far this fiscal year, the equivalent of over 90 million doses and over a billion dollars in cartel profits, Mandryck said.
