On May 31, the Washington Post examined — but failed to find a dispositive reason for — a decline in fentanyl seizures at the Southwest border. Perhaps the capital’s “newspaper of record” should read the Center’s website, and in particular an explanation for this phenomenon by my erstwhile colleague Todd Bensman in early April, after he interviewed President Trump’s acting DEA administrator.
A Uniquely Deadly Drug
Fentanyl is a uniquely deadly drug — two milligrams (similar to five to seven grains of salt), of the stuff can be lethal, “depending on a person’s body size, tolerance and past usage”.
That toxicity was blamed for an increase in drug fatalities in the United States throughout the pandemic and well into the Biden administration, with nearly 74,000 of the roughly 108,000 overdose deaths in FY 2022 (68.5 percent) traced to it.
It’s commonly accepted that most of the fentanyl that ends up in this country is produced in Mexican drug labs using precursor chemicals shipped to that country from China. Less well-examined is the role Canada also plays in production of the synthetic opioid and in the laundering of drug proceeds.
One major issue with fentanyl is that users — particularly young adults in an experimental stage — may not know that they are consuming the drug at all. Due to its potency, the drug is often mixed with other illicit substances to give them more powerful effects.
CBP statistics reveal the agency’s seizures of the drug skyrocketed along with the migrant surge at the Southwest border under the last administration, rising 89 percent between FY 2022 (14,100 pounds seized at the border and the ports) and FY 2023 (26,700 pounds).
While total CBP Southwest border seizures of fentanyl declined slightly (to 21,100 pounds) in FY 2024, Border Patrol seizures increased modestly during that period (from 2,800 pounds in FY 2023 to 2,900 pounds in 2024), a sign smugglers shifted away from the ports (where CBP officers can more easily find contraband) to the wide-open spaces between them as migrants continued to flow into the country.
Enter Candidate Donald Trump
On the 2024 campaign trail, then-candidate Donald Trump pounded the Biden-Harris administration over those fentanyl deaths.
At a campaign rally in Michigan, for example, he vowed, “We’ll bust up and dismantle the gangs, savage criminal networks, and bloodthirsty cartels. And we will stop the fentanyl.” The Republican National Convention last July featured what NBC News described as “an emotional prime-time speech from a mother who lost a child to fentanyl”.
Trump’s first campaign ad after securing the nomination — and after then-Vice President Kamala Harris replaced Joe Biden at the top of the Democratic ticket:
portrays Harris dancing to hip hop at a White House party and deflecting questions during an interview about visiting the border while the narrator argues that millions of people have illegally crossed the border, and 250,000 Americans have died from fentanyl, “on Harris’s watch.”
“Trump’s War on Fentanyl Off to a Strong Start”
That focus on fentanyl wasn’t all talk from the eventual winner of the 2024 presidential race. Which brings me to an op-ed written by Bensman on April 2, 2025, headlined “Trump’s War on Fentanyl Off to a Strong Start”.
In it, Bensman examined the decline in both fentanyl seizures and overdose deaths in the early weeks of the second Trump administration, and noted that the president’s efforts to stem the drug flow actually began in the months before he was sworn in, as then-President-elect Trump “threatened devastating trade tariffs against Mexico if they did not seriously crack down on cartel production and smuggling”.
The country’s president, Claudia Sheinbaum, responded by sending 10,000 Mexican troops to secure her border with the United States against migrant- and drug-smugglers, and extraditing “29 alleged drug traffickers” wanted by our government to the United States in February as part of her crackdown on cartels — as well as Mexican government raids on cartel labs.
As part of his investigation, Bensman interviewed Derek Maltz, the acting DEA administrator, and as he noted: “What Maltz said ... almost defies commonly believed narratives about Mexico’s cartel crime syndicates — especially the idea that they are more impulsively violent than strategic and pragmatic.”
Apparently deciding that “Trump is bad for business”, the Mexican cartels have made a business decision to “quit smuggling” fentanyl into the United States and send it instead to Europe and elsewhere.
“What to do about the lost revenue? Easy. Make up the difference by shipping greater volumes of less politically and physiologically lethal drugs like cocaine and methamphetamine, Maltz said.”
Here’s how that shift has affected the fentanyl trafficking to this country: Between January and April 2024, CBP seized 6,000 pounds of fentanyl. In the same four months of 2025, seizures dropped to 3,132 pounds, a 47.8 percent decline.
“A New and Puzzling Reality”
The Post admits there has been a decline in border fentanyl seizures and that the “purity rate of fentanyl” on American streets is also going down (which suggests illicit imports of the drug are falling), but questions whether Trump should get the credit for this “new and puzzling reality” given “the decline started before Trump took office in January”.
That, of course, disregards the impacts of Trump’s pre-inauguration “activities” (read: “tariff threats”), but the Post also ignores Maltz’s explanations as it points to internecine fighting among the cartels and a decline in shipments of precursor chemicals for fentanyl production from China (for which it credits Biden) for the reduction in the flow.
As I have explained repeatedly and at length over the past four years, smugglers and cartels exploited the Biden border crisis by sending large groups of migrants (and families and kids in particular) to draw agents away from the line and (in CBP Commissioner nominee Rodney Scott’s words) “create controllable gaps in border security” that they then ran drugs through.
Now that the migrant flood at the Southwest border has slowed to a trickle, agents can focus on the drugs — fentanyl, coke, meth, whatever — that transnational criminal organizations are trying to ship, aided by Mexican military backup and a tariff-wary President Sheinbaum on the other side.
Trump’s critics may never allow him to be thought of as a “statesman”, but he’s a canny politician who recognized Americans’ fears about the drugs flooding their streets and killing their often-naïve children. Unlike many politicians, however, he’s keeping his promises, and for now the results are — well, promising.
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