HAMMER: Why Is No One Discussing The Drug Trafficking Aspect Of Our Southern Border Crisis?

The sheer scope of the systemic, all-encompassing sovereignty crisis at our southern border is staggering.

From both a constitutional and a philosophical perspective, the federal government has no more important responsibility to its citizenry than securing the border. Period.

From a national security perspective, it is stupefying to ponder the reality that we are releasing tens of thousands of barely vetted aliens into the interior each month due to a brutal combination of catch-and-release tomfoolery, limited bed space due to the under-funding of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), and the erroneously decreed Flores settlement. Indeed, we know from the intrepid reporting of journalist extraordinaire Todd Bensman that the predominantly Central America-fleeing economic migrants have no shortage of dangerous Middle Easterners mixed in among them. Furthermore, we are letting in no shortage of migrants afflicted with deadly diseases.

From an assimilation perspective, the huge number of Central Americans absconding into the nation’s interior due to the de facto amnesty of catch-and-release only exacerbates our increasingly stark crisis of national unity — including but hardly limited to our ability to (literally) all speak a common language.

From a crime perspective, we know that non-citizen aliens commit a disproportionate share of federal crime — 44.2% of it over the course of 2011 – 2016, according to statistics from the U.S. Sentencing Commission. And from a pure common sense perspective, it ought to make sense that vulnerable unaccompanied alien youths showing up at our border would be more susceptible to recruitment by MS-13 and other Central America-originating transnational gangs. In fact, both MS-13 and the cartels operate so fluidly throughout the U.S. due in no small part to the ongoing surfeit of prospective gangsters and drug mules who reach our border and are released into the interior. Consider this harrowing story out of Los Angeles:

But perhaps the singular least discussed aspect of the ongoing crisis at our southern border is that the illegal alien influx there has dramatically metastasized America’s already-dire drug epidemic. An eye-opening report in the Washington Examiner this morning shines a spotlight on the extent to which the border crisis has frozen our Department of Homeland Security (DHS) human assets — redirecting those officials who would normally be in the business of interdicting contraband 50-100 miles inland to deal with apprehension and toddler daycare duty at the border itself. Per the Examiner:

Border Patrol highway checkpoints in the southern New Mexico region that normally seize seven figures worth of drugs annually have not seized a dollar in nearly four months after being shuttered in late March, allowing drugs to flood into the country. Meantime, with the added supply, prices for illicit drugs are dropping precipitously.

Those seven checkpoints have sat unattended after Border Patrol closed them to move all personnel to the border to assist with apprehending, processing, and caring for the high number of migrant families arriving. …

Officials have also noted upticks in methamphetamine and fentanyl seizures since March. Black said the cost of a pound of meth has been slashed in half since then, from $4,700 when the checkpoints first closed to $2,500 by late June. The price dropped because the market is saturated.

To summarize, then, Border Patrol assets who are normally tasked with interdicting contraband have been, due in no small part to the current under-funding of DHS, redeployed to the border to deal with the sundry maladies transpiring there. As a consequence, drugs trafficked in by the cartels and their terrorist allies (like Hezbollah) are not being seized. There is now a huge, unprecedented glut of deadly narcotics pouring into the nation. Recall that a sugar packet-sized dose of fentanyl can kill a whole room full of people. And now, so much meth is being trafficked into the interior that prices in Las Cruces, New Mexico have been cut by nearly half in just four months! That is simply astonishing.

America’s drug overdose epidemic, while misdiagnosed as an “opioid” epidemic, is really a more general narcotics epidemic that has fentanyl, cocaine, meth, and heroin as its leading contributors. Our under-funded DHS and political unwillingness to stanch the illegal alien influx bleeding at our border is not just resulting in machete-style MS-13 murders in Los Angeles. It is also leading to an unprecedented crisis of drugs so potent that — in the case of fentanyl — they might be reasonably compared to cartel-driven chemical warfare against our inner cities and collective progeny.

This is a huge, huge problem. Drugs are literally destroying countless small towns across the nation. And now our political elites, by ignoring the border crisis as they have, are somehow making the drug epidemic crisis even worse than it already is. It is nothing short of a blemish upon our entire political ruling class.