WASHINGTON — In a hearing on Wednesday in the border town of McAllen, Texas, the Spokane Republican who chairs the House Energy and Commerce Committee blamed President Joe Biden for the public health crisis caused by fentanyl smuggled into the United States from Mexico while Democrats accused GOP lawmakers of using the crisis for political gain.
With the House out of session this week, Rep. Cathy McMorris Rodgers took the show on the road for her first “field hearing” since she took the helm of the influential panel, whose jurisdiction includes public health, drug safety and the federal government’s refugee resettlement efforts. Those issues collided in what was ostensibly an investigative hearing, although the event’s title — “President Biden’s Border Crisis is a Public Health Crisis” — suggested its organizers had already come to a conclusion.
Republicans and Democrats sparred over the connection between immigration, border security and the proliferation of illicit fentanyl, a powerful synthetic opioid that has become the leading cause of death among Americans ages 18 to 45, according to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
In her opening remarks, McMorris Rodgers said that crisis has “been driven by President Biden’s open-borders agenda,” accusing the administration of encouraging an influx of unauthorized immigration.
“It’s putting Americans all across this country at risk, turning every town into a border town,” McMorris Rodgers said, citing the Drug Enforcement Agency labeling Spokane a fentanyl hotspot. “More people than ever are dying from fentanyl poisoning. Most heart-wrenching is that fentanyl is an attack on the young generation.”
According to U.S. Customs and Border Protection data, Border Patrol agents apprehended unauthorized immigrants more than 1.9 million times in fiscal years 2021 and 2022, a sharp increase from just less than 860,000 such encounters in fiscal year 2019, before the COVID-19 pandemic caused a drop in migration.
Nearly all of those migrants have been returned to Mexico under a pandemic-era rule that is still in effect, but the White House has said it plans to end that provision in May, letting more migrants who say they are fleeing danger in their home countries remain in the United States while their asylum claims are considered. In January, Biden announced new measures aimed at beefing up border security and discouraging illegal crossings, but he said a real solution would require congressional action.
For more than three decades, Republicans and Democrats in Congress have repeatedly tried and failed to reform what both parties call a broken U.S. immigration system. In a political environment where the compromise needed for such an effort is unpopular with both parties’ bases, immigration reform legislation appears unlikely.
In McAllen on Wednesday, lawmakers from both parties agreed fentanyl represents a serious threat to the country, but Democrats accused Republicans of conflating drug-traffickers with asylum-seekers.
“I would welcome a field hearing in Texas that explored bipartisan solutions to this public health crisis,” said Rep. Marc Veasey, D-Texas. “Instead, we’re here discussing things like the militarization of our border. We continue to hear misinformation that falsely links illegal immigration with a surge in fentanyl trafficking, and that’s simply not reality.”
Veasey cited research by the CATO Institute, a libertarian think tank, that found the vast majority of convicted drug smugglers are U.S. citizens, not unauthorized immigrants. Rep. Angie Craig, D-Minn., pointed out that 97% of illicit drug seizures occur at legal ports of entry, not illegal border crossings, according to the nonpartisan Congressional Research Service.
“This shouldn’t be a partisan circus or a political wedge issue,” Craig said. “We have a real problem, America. And it does nothing for our constituents if we revert to the kind of politics that is pretending to care about a problem but really thinking about who we can pin the blame on in the next election.”
The panel of witnesses included the sheriff of a nearby county, the CEO of a group of mental health care facilities, the president of a local civil rights nonprofit and the president of a Border Patrol agents’ union. The union president, Brandon Judd, explained that the same Mexican cartels that control the drug trade also control the smuggling of migrants across the border and strategically send those migrants to the border to draw Border Patrol resources away from areas where the cartels traffic drugs.
In an exchange with Judd, a frustrated Rep. Dan Crenshaw, R-Texas, tried to find a common set of facts after the hearing had devolved into political sniping from both parties.
Judd told Crenshaw that Border Patrol agents spend too much time processing migrants they apprehend to effectively patrol the border, and are “constantly being pulled away” to assist the shorthanded customs agents who inspect cars at ports of entry. Partly as a result of those staffing problems, Judd said, Border Patrol agents reported 1.2 million “gotaways” in the past two years, when people who crossed the border illegally evaded agents.
“Look, multiple things can be true at once,” Crenshaw said. “Most of the seized fentanyl is seized at points of entry. Another thing can be true: A lot of fentanyl comes between points of entry and we don’t find it. Another thing can be true: It is indeed related to the immigration crisis, because both crises have a common factor and that is the Mexican drug cartels. That is a common enemy. We are not enemies here. This should not be a partisan issue.”
The hearing got no less partisan from that point on.
When Rep. Mariannette Miller-Meeks, R-Iowa, asked Texas Civil Rights Project President Rochelle Garza if she thought it was humane that prospective immigrants wait for decades to enter the United States legally because the nation’s immigration system is overwhelmed by asylum-seekers who cross the border, she didn’t let the witness answer.
“I would say that the solutions to these problems are more complex than your talking points,” Garza replied, as Miller-Meeks interrupted her, saying “Yes or no? Yes or no!”
Republicans on the committee have introduced two bills aimed at addressing the fentanyl crisis. One would let the pandemic-era policy of expelling migrants to Mexico remain in place on the grounds that fentanyl represents a similar public health emergency while the other would permanently classify fentanyl as a drug at highest risk of abuse under the Controlled Substances Act.
Orion Donovan-Smith’s reporting for The Spokesman-Review is funded in part by Report for America and by members of the Spokane community. This story can be republished by other organizations for free under a Creative Commons license. For more information on this, please contact our newspaper’s managing editor.
