Solving the Border Crisis

Dear Friend,

The crisis at the border has gotten out of control. Before President Biden took office, nobody could have imagined things getting this bad—and the situation is only getting worse.

Fentanyl is flooding over the southern border and into our communities at an unprecedented rate. Since October 2022, 23,800 pounds of fentanyl have been seized along the southwest border. That’s enough to kill 5.4 billion people—almost 70 percent of the world’s population.

That’s how much we know almost made it across the border. How much more slipped through the cracks?

We really don’t have to guess. Another American dies from a fentanyl or synthetic opioid overdose roughly every 7 minutes. We don’t need more numbers and data to illustrate the problem. All we have to do is look around us—at the mothers and fathers mourning the loss of their children, the children growing up without parents, and the families forever destroyed by this horrible crisis.

In 2018, almost all fentanyl was being shipped by mail from China. That ended when Congress passed the Synthetics Trafficking Overdose Protection Act. The reforms in the new law helped stop the flow of fentanyl into our country—until Chinese companies started selling precursor chemicals to Mexican drug cartels.

It’s no surprise that these cartels continue to exploit the President’s rolling back of effective border policies to ramp up fentanyl trafficking into our country. In fact, during recent House Homeland Security hearings, it was revealed that they’ve even resorted to using drones to smuggle.

It’s madness to keep doing what we know doesn’t work. In fact, President Biden and Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas have made it clear that they’d do rather everything but what works at the border. Rolling back effective border security policies like “Remain in Mexico,” and implementing disastrous ones like “catch and release” threatens not only our border, but American citizens and our sovereignty.

The situation is dire—but not hopeless. We can—and must—do more to end this crisis.

We must bring back policies that work, deploy new technology, and secure our border. We can’t solve the fentanyl crisis that’s poisoning our communities until we do.

Sincerely,

Sam Graves