Federal Authorities Have Busted Another Elaborate Cross-Border Fentanyl Shipment

While the United States experiences an “unprecedented” bogus asylum claim-driven migrant influx crisis at our beleaguered southwestern border, less attention is often paid to the contraband that seeps over that porous border — at the behest of the transnational gangs, trafficking rings, and cartels — every single day.

Fentanyl, which is an extremely lethal drug, is perhaps the prime example of the incredibly harmful effects of cartels having “operational control of the border” — as freshman congressman Rep. Chip Roy (R-TX) described the situation in his maiden House floor speech. Daniel Horowitz wrote last year at Conservative Review about the fentanyl epidemic:

Rather than a steady decline in fatalities from overdoses to match the decline in prescription opioids, everything went bonkers from 2013 to the present, after the public and politicians turned against the use of prescription opioids. We saw a spike in deaths of unfathomable proportions, getting worse every year through 2014, 2015, and 2016. The level of fatalities doubled and tripled in those states as, not surprisingly, heroin and fentanyl flooded the market. …

The [drug] epidemic we are facing today is not from prescription opioids, at least not more than it has been for an entire generation. The number of prescriptions has already been reduced dramatically, and the overdose rate has leveled off and even dropped in some of the most affected states since 2016, like Ohio. Almost the entirety of the increased fatalities above the long-term existing trajectory beginning in 2012 were from illicit drugs and mainly from the most dangerous one – heroin. Then, as heroin use began to skyrocket in 2013-2014, we began to see the growth of the cursed synthetic drug – fentanyl – which is 50-100 times stronger than morphine and can kill in small quantities. It’s often laced into heroin. In pretty much every state, fentanyl has skyrocketed to such a level that it has overtaken heroin as the leading drug killer. Cocaine and meth overdoses have also gone up a lot but are not nearly as serious.

Now, Jordan Schachtel of Blaze Media reports that U.S. Customs and Border Protection officers announced this week that they interdicted another large shipment of fentanyl that smugglers had attempted to sneak across the border:

Feds announced Tuesday that officials had intercepted 26 pounds of fentanyl, an extremely potent and frequently lethal drug, that was hidden inside of a truck subject to a secondary inspection at the Juarez-Lincoln International Bridge. The bridge separates Laredo, Texas, from the Mexican city of Nuevo Laredo.

A KGNS-TV report added that a canine unit sniffed out 10 separate packages that contained fentanyl, and that the drugs had an estimated street value of $728,000. The case has been turned over to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement for further investigation, according to CBP.

“Our frontline CBP officers continued to remain vigilant amid heavy Semana Santa traffic and that dedication to the border security mission yielded a significant seizure of fentanyl,” Port Director Albert Flores of the Laredo Port of Entry said in a statement.

The Daily Wire has reported before on the fentanyl crisis. In January, The Daily Wire’s Ryan Saavedra reported on a record-setting fentanyl seizure of 254 pounds:

U.S. Customs and Border Protection officials announced on Thursday that officers made a record-breaking seizure of fentanyl on the U.S.-Mexico border that was enough to kill tens of millions of Americans.

“According to U.S. Customs and Border Protection, a canine officer alerted other officers to the presence of 254 pounds of fentanyl hidden inside an 18-wheeler carrying cucumbers, during a secondary inspection at the Mariposa port of entry just past noon on Saturday,” The Arizona Republic reported.

“This is the largest fentanyl seizure in any port of entry,” CBP official Guadalupe Ramirez said. “In CBP, in the history of CBP, this is the largest fentanyl seizure.”