By S.A. McCarthy

With the U.S. border secure and the influx of illegal immigrants into the nation halted, the number of tragic drug overdose fatalities has sharply declined. According to data released by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the number of drug overdose deaths fell by nearly 25% between August 2024 and August 2025, falling from nearly 91,000 in August 2024 to fewer than 70,000 in August 2025.

Drug overdose deaths began to climb rapidly when Joe Biden took office in January 2021, rising from nearly 95,000 to a peak of 111,466 in June 2023. Since Trump returned to the White House in January 2025 and immediately got to work securing the southern border, drug overdose deaths have fallen steeply.

While Oklahoma and Virginia saw two of the largest drops in drug overdose deaths (-42.62% and -40.01%, respectively), the entire northeastern corner of the U.S. also saw a significant decline: overdose deaths fell steeply in Massachusetts (-42.44%), New York (-38.94%), Rhode Island (-38.40%), and Vermont (-37.12%), but also declined significantly in New Jersey (-27.84%), New Hampshire (-27.19%), Maine (-25.19%), and Connecticut (-20.11%).

Of note, a number of jurisdictions with high rates of fentanyl consumption saw relatively large drops in overdose deaths. West Virginia (-34.60%), the District of Columbia (-38.82%), Delaware (-16.58%), Tennessee (-24.71%), Alaska (-18.89%), Maine (-25.19%), Vermont (-37.12%), and Kentucky (-24.43%), eight of the top 10 states with fentanyl overdose deaths per capita, all saw drops in overdose deaths between 2024 and 2025, but declines in Washington (-5.20%) and New Mexico (-4.08%), which sit on the U.S. borders with Canada and Mexico, respectively, were much smaller in size. Overall, overdose deaths involving natural, semi-synthetic, and synthetic opioids, including both methadone and fentanyl, fell by nearly 16%.

The decline in drug overdose deaths comes as President Donald Trump and his administration have effectively secured the U.S. border. In years past, drug cartels have notoriously used the U.S.-Mexico border in particular as a means of smuggling drugs, including fentanyl, into the U.S. Earlier this month, U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) recorded December as the eighth consecutive month with zero illegal immigrants encountered at the border released into the U.S. Notably, CBP seized nearly 900 pounds of fentanyl, nearly 13,000 pounds of methamphetamines, nearly 4,000 pounds of cocaine, and over 14,000 pounds of marijuana in December alone.

“This is such good news. The number of opioid deaths has been an absolute tragedy,” said Jessica Vaughan, director of Policy Studies at the Center for Immigration Studies, in comments to The Washington Stand. “There are likely a number of factors behind this decline, but there can be no question that one of the important factors has been the tight border policies of Trump.” She noted that designating drug-trafficking cartels and international criminal gangs as foreign terrorist organizations (FTOs) has also been a benefit, allowing the U.S. to prosecute and financially cripple many of these FTOs and their operatives. “In addition, Trump’s diplomatic efforts have pushed Mexico and certain other countries to clamp down on the drug production and trafficking within their borders, meaning there is less to send to the U.S., and apparently the prices are higher.”

“Of course, we need to improve the way we treat addiction and improve access to treatment, but stifling the supply helps a lot, and many of the deaths were due to fentanyl poisoning in particular, often from pills that were produced abroad,” Vaughan noted. “Shutting down this supply had decreased the lethality of what is being consumed. Some of the deaths were more poisonings than overdoses, when victims unwittingly consumed fentanyl-laced pills that they thought were more harmless drugs. These pills often were produced and sold by foreign drug traffickers,” she continued. “By hitting the trafficking organizations on both ends with sweeping federal prosecutions and increased immigration arrests in the United States, together with crackdowns and extraditions from abroad, the Trump administration is saving literally thousands of lives and making communities safer.”

Lora Ries, director of the Heritage Foundation’s Border Security and Immigration Center, told TWS, “The decline of drug overdoses and fentanyl poisonings tracks with the decline of illegal border crossings. Border security saves lives — both in terms of preventing entry of drugs and criminals.” With an eye to maintaining U.S. security beyond the expiration of Trump’s term in 2028, she recommended that Congress codify the president’s border security measures and “prevent the Left from re-using their go-to mass illegal immigration tools.”

“Congress should end the ability to apply for asylum and other persecution relief if an alien illegally entered between ports of entry,” Ries stipulated. “Aliens showed they are perfectly capable of traveling to a port of entry during the Biden administration when then-DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas instructed them to do so, using the CBP One app, for mass parole,” she continued. “Congress should also expressly limit immigration parole and Temporary Protected Status, and rescind special immigration benefits for unaccompanied alien children, which have only incentivized and increased unaccompanied child border crossings.”

S.A. McCarthy serves as a news writer at The Washington Stand.