The Department of Homeland Security seized 900 pounds of fentanyl on the southern border in the first week of its new initiative to crack down on the deadly synthetic opioid.
The drug seizure was one of the largest made in a single week recently by Customs and Border Protection officials and took place after the launch of Homeland Security’s Operation Blue Lotus on March 13.
Seven hundred pounds of methamphetamine and over 100 pounds of cocaine were also seized, according to DHS. The operation deployed extra canine units and advanced technology to conduct 18 seizures, 16 federal arrests and two state arrests.
The move was part of “a multi-pronged strategy” by the Biden administration “to combat the scourge of fentanyl,” Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas said in a statement.
“In the past two years, DHS has seized more fentanyl than the previous five years combined. But we must do more,” Mayorkas said. “Operation Blue Lotus is a DHS-led, coordinated surge effort to curtail the flow of illicit fentanyl smuggled into the United States from Mexico and bring to justice the dangerous criminal organizations profiting from the illegal production, distribution, and sale of this dangerous substance.”
Critics have pointed to President Biden’s permissive border policy for allowing fentanyl to flow freely into the US, prompting some Republican lawmakers to call for a military response against the dangerous drug cartels in Mexico.
“These narco-terrorist groups are more like ISIS than like the American mafia,” former Attorney General Bill Barr said this month in a Wall Street Journal op-ed. “The real question is whether we are willing to go after them as we would a terrorist group.”
Lawmakers including Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) and Rep. Chip Roy (R-Texas) have floated bills to that end, urging Biden to label the cartels as “foreign terrorist organizations.”
Drug overdoses killed more than 106,000 Americans in 2021, the National Institutes of Health reported — with almost two-thirds of the deaths attributable to non-methadone synthetic opioids like fentanyl.
Barr noted the fatalities are higher than “the number of Americans killed in action during the bloodiest year of World War II.”
Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador said last week that the overdoses happen because US families don’t hug their kids enough.
“There is a lot of disintegration of families, there is a lot of individualism, there is a lack of love, of brotherhood, of hugs and embraces,” he said.
CBP announced a record-breaking seizure in late February after officers discovered more than $1 million worth of the highly lethal drug that had been concealed in a pickup truck’s gas tank.
“CBP is on the frontline of stopping fentanyl and other illegal narcotics that are primarily trafficked through Ports of Entry,” Acting Commissioner Troy Miller said in a Tuesday statement. “Our dedicated personnel are already seizing record amounts of fentanyl, and we continue to make the interdiction of cross-border smuggling one of our top priorities.”
Officials seized 575 pounds of fentanyl on average each week during February before the launch of Operation Blue Lotus.
Since the start of the 2023 fiscal year, CBP has seized around 11,000 pounds of fentanyl — a fifth of which was taken in February alone.
Nearly 15,000 pounds of fentanyl were seized in the previous fiscal year, and 11,200 in the year before that.
