A former head of US border security has accused Donald Trump of “exploiting” the pain of the opioid epidemic to wrongly vilify migrants as responsible for the surge in American deaths from fentanyl during recent years.
But the Trump campaign is expected to double down on the deception now that the vice-president, Kamala Harris, whom Republicans describe as Joe Biden’s “border czar” and accuse of inaction over a surge of illegal immigration, is likely to be the Democratic presidential candidate in November.
Gil Kerlikowske, who led Customs and Border Protection (CBP) during the Obama administration following five years as the White House chief of national drug control policy, said Republicans know there is no truth to accusations that migrants crossing the Mexican border illegally are carrying the bulk of fentanyl sold in the US. Yet that was a line again pushed at last week’s Republican convention. Official statistics show that nine in 10 convicted fentanyl traffickers are US citizens.
“I think they’ve taken exploitation to a new level with fentanyl,” said Kerlikowske. “They know that this is terribly misleading but it resonates so well with people who have lost a loved one or people whose children are addicted.”
A few years ago, the opioid epidemic was driven by prescription painkillers and was a largely bipartisan issue with a focus on prevention and treatment. But as fentanyl, a synthetic opioid usually made from chemicals manufactured in China and put together in Mexico, became the principal cause of overdose deaths in recent years, the drug crisis was caught up in the broader political battle about the border and migration.
Fentanyl is popular with drug cartels because it is very powerful in small quantities and therefore easier to smuggle than heroin or cocaine. But because the narcotic is so strong, it has driven up accidental drug overdoses.
Fentanyl has claimed more than 70,000 lives a year in the US since 2021. The head of the Drug Enforcement Administration, Anne Milgram, earlier this year said the synthetic opioid is at the heart of “the most dangerous and deadly drug crisis the United States has ever faced”.
“Fentanyl is the nation’s greatest and most urgent drug threat,” she said.
Trump and other Republicans have sought to link that tragedy to the migrant crisis at the border with Mexico as the numbers of people arriving from Central America have surged, and to cast blame on Biden and Harris.
At last week’s Republican national convention in Milwaukee, Trump claimed that hundreds of thousands of people have been killed by fentanyl smuggled across the border by migrants entering the US illegally.
Delegates wept and cheered as a mother from California, Anne Fundner, told the conference that Biden, Harris and the California governor, Gavin Newsom, were responsible for the death of her 15-year-old son, Weston, from an accidental fentanyl overdose in 2022.
“I hold Joe Biden, Kamala Harris the border czar – what a joke – and Gavin Newsom, and every Democrat who supports open borders, responsible for the death of my son,” she said to a standing ovation from Trump.
“We have seen the highest number of fentanyl deaths during the Biden-Harris administration, and fentanyl is now the No 1 killer of Americans ages 18 to 45 … We need President Trump back in office. We need a president who will seal the border, aggressively prosecute drug dealers and stop communist China from poisoning our children.”
State and local Republican election candidates have also embraced the claim that the Biden-Harris administration opened borders to drug traffickers, including Eric Hovde, who is running for a US Senate seat in Wisconsin.
“Biden, with his border czar, Vice-President Harris, opened our southern border, allowing criminals and terrorists to enter our country. They’ve emboldened drug cartels to flood our streets with fentanyl, killing over 100,000 Americans every year,” he said at the Republican convention.
The claim may be false but it has resonance. An NPR‐Ipsos poll found that 60% of Republicans wrongly believed “most of the fentanyl entering the US is smuggled in by unauthorized migrants crossing the border illegally”.
Last year, a report by the libertarian Cato Institute said that US citizens accounted for 89% of convicted fentanyl traffickers in 2022. In addition, 93% of fentanyl seizures were made at official border crossings or customs checkpoints. Just a fraction was found on people who had crossed the border from Mexico on an illegal migration route.
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“At most, just 0.009% of the people arrested by the border patrol for crossing illegally possessed any fentanyl whatsoever,” the Cato report said.
Kerlikowske said that it has long been the case that drug traffickers have little incentive to use migrants traveling into the US illegally as they are far more likely to be stopped than US citizens driving into the country through an official immigration post.
“There’s still no reason to believe that a drug smuggler is going to trust a migrant coming across the border with a commodity as lucrative as fentanyl because there’s such a good chance they will get apprehended,” he said.
None of that appears likely to change the Republican narrative or the attempts to paint Harris as the administration’s “border czar” responsible for stemming the flow of migrants. In fact, the vice-president’s responsibilities were limited to examining the root causes of large numbers of people fleeing Central America for the US, such as violence, crime and poverty.
As speculation mounted in the days before Biden withdrew from the presidential race, Trump’s supporters were already ramping up their attacks against Harris over the border.
“Kamala had one job,” Nikki Haley told the party’s convention. “One job. And that was to fix the border. Now imagine her in charge of the entire country.”
Days later, after Biden quit the campaign and threw his support behind Harris, the Texas governor, Greg Abbott, launched a similar attack.
“Joe Biden has now endorsed and fully supports his ‘Border Czar’ Kamala Harris to be the Democrat candidate for president. I think I will need to triple the border wall, razor wire barriers and National Guard on the border,” he tweeted.
Polls by the independent health policy organisation KFF show that 29% of Americans say they or someone in their family has been addicted to opioids. Opioid addiction is also more common among residents of rural areas and white adults, both demographics that Trump won over during the last presidential election.
Kerlikowske said Trump’s attempts to tie migration to fentanyl smuggling appeals to some Americans because it offers “a quick and simple answer to a complex problem”. He said it was particularly comforting to parents who might in some ways blame themselves for the addiction or death of a child.
“So if you can then push this off, as Trump is doing, to the fact that this fentanyl is coming across the border and is available, here’s something that can be blamed for what happened, not you,” said Kerlikowske.