“Because of the work that this president has done, because of what we’ve done specifically on fentanyl at the border, it’s at historic lows.” —White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre last week

Fact-check: More than 70,000 Americans died from a fentanyl overdose in 2021, which is 26 times higher than 10 years earlier and the vast majority of the 100,000 overdose deaths in the U.S. The death toll almost certainly went even higher in 2022. An awful lot of the fentanyl supply in the country is smuggled across Joe Biden’s open border by Mexican drug cartels.

It’s true that smuggling precedes Biden, and every death is not on his hands. It’s a problem that has been on the rise since 2013. He was well aware of that, being vice president back then, and yet he opened the border anyway. Ergo, Biden most certainly bears a good bit of blame for the humanitarian crisis that is our southern border.

KJP said so herself: “Because of the work that this president has done.”

After two Americans were murdered by a cartel last week, Senator Ted Cruz laid the blame at Biden’s feet. “Joe Biden created the chaos at the border. Joe Biden stopped building the wall. He reinstated catch-and-release. He pulled out of Remain in Mexico,” Cruz said. “Joe Biden and the Democrats are responsible for turning these vicious murderers into multibillionaires. We need to bankrupt them. We need to put them out of business, and the people responsible for these murders need to be brought to justice.”

Instead of bankrupting the cartels, Biden has exponentially boosted their revenue. According to The New York Times last July, revenues from human trafficking “have soared to an estimated $13 billion today from $500 million in 2018.” That’s part of why Cruz added, “Joe Biden becoming president is the best thing that ever happened to the Mexican drug cartels.”

Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador says the whole thing is our problem, not his. “Here, we do not produce fentanyl, and we do not have consumption of fentanyl,” he claimed last week. “Why don’t [the Americans] take care of their problem of social decay?” López Obrador may have a point about social decay here, but he’s flat-out lying about fentanyl.

The drug is produced and processed in Mexico (often with chemicals from China), transported and sold by Mexican drug cartels, and consumed by Mexicans at higher rates than López Obrador would have you believe.

So, why is he lying? Because American politicians are angry and promising to do something about the cartels, and because López Obrador is a communist who’s backed by those cartels. In fact, López Obrador, better known to the Mexican people by his initials, AMLO, effectively runs a narco-terrorist state.

The Mexican cartels are heavily armed (in part thanks to Barack Obama’s Operation Fast and Furious gun-running scheme), and there’s a vast amount of money to be made perpetuating misery and death.

Way back in 2018, our now-retired colleague Arnold Ahlert wrote, “It’s time America started treating drug cartels as what they truly are: terrorist organizations that pose a threat to national security.”

A few in Congress are beginning to make some noise in this direction. “We’re going to unleash the fury and might of the United States against these cartels,” promised Senator Lindsey Graham last week. “We’re going to destroy their business model and their lifestyle because our national security and the security of the United States as a whole depends on us taking decisive action.”

Republican Senators Roger Marshall and Rick Scott reintroduced the Drug Cartel Terrorist Designation Act last week. Officially designating four drug cartels as foreign terrorist organizations would give the U.S. tools for taking them on and reducing their power. Earlier this year, Congressmen Dan Crenshaw and Mike Waltz introduced a bill to establish an Authorization for Use of Military Force (AUMF) against the Mexican cartels. “We must start treating them like ISIS,” Crenshaw said, “because that is who they are.”

Former Attorney General Bill Barr supports these ideas.

Naturally, the Biden administration isn’t quite so keen on them. According to Senator John Kennedy, Biden says using the military is “a bad idea.” Democrats don’t even want to classify fentanyl-related substances (FRS) as Schedule I substances.

AMLO derided such proposals as “an insult to Mexico” that show “a lack of respect for our independence and sovereignty.” He’s free to rein in the cartels himself any time, but he won’t do it for the reason already stated. Graham alluded to that, adding, “I would tell the Mexican government if you don’t clean up your act, we’re going to clean it up for you.”

In response, AMLO promised to interfere in U.S. elections. “Starting today,” he said, “we are going to start an information campaign for Mexicans who live and work in the United States and for all Hispanics to inform them of what we are doing in Mexico and how this initiative by the Republicans, in addition to being irresponsible, is an offense against the people of Mexico.” He promised to push Hispanics “not to vote for that party because it is interventionist, inhumane, hypocritical, and corrupt.”

The American media, which spent years hyperventilating over the totally false charge that Donald Trump was elected because Russia interfered in the 2016 election, hardly bothered covering AMLO’s stated promise to interfere. That’s no surprise, of course, since AMLO is on the side of American Democrats.

As for Joe Biden, he caught some serious flak earlier this month after rebutting attempts to blame him for the fentanyl crisis. Rebecca Kiessling gave heart-wrenching testimony to Congress about losing two sons to fentanyl overdoses in July 2020. Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene wrongly framed “her son’s [sic] murders” as being “because of the Biden administrations refusal to secure our border.” Biden absolved himself of all responsibility by blaming the previous administration — with a chuckle.

We’ll be kind and chalk that up to his mental deterioration rather than malice, but his border policies are contributing to such deaths 70,000 times over every year. Instead of working on the border, he’s zealously focused on banning “assault weapons,” when rifles of any type account for a couple of hundred deaths each year. Something’s grossly amiss about his priorities.