Bill O’Reilly calls ‘overdose deaths’ a national emergency after major drug bust at US-Mexico border

After officials seized hundreds of pounds of a dangerous synthetic opiate at the U.S.-Mexico border last week, former Fox News anchor Bill O’Reilly reiterated his calls for a border wall, arguing that the deaths these drugs cause constitute a national emergency.

“In the eight years that President [Barack] Obama was in office…35,000 pounds of heroin [were] seized,” O’Reilly explained on his latest No Spin News podcast. “So you can see, at the southern border there’s a state of emergency.”

Drug epidemic shatters records

The conservative commentator went on to lament the deaths of tens of thousands of Americans from likely preventable drug overdoses.

“And then you have the drug overdose deaths,” he said. “Last year — no, 2017’s latest stats from the CDC, Centers for Disease Control — 72,287 people die from overdoses in America. If that’s not a national emergency, I don’t know what is.”

35,000 pounds of heroin were seized crossing the southern border during the Obama administration. In 2017, 72,287 people died from drug overdoses in America. If that’s not a national emergency, what is? pic.twitter.com/BIVR37h57E

— Bill O’Reilly’s No Spin News (@NoSpinNews) January 31, 2019

O’Reilly’s call for stronger border security came the same day that U.S. Customs and Border Patrol (CBP) agents seized a record 254 pounds of the deadly synthetic opioid known as fentanyl at the southern border. According to the Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA), ingesting just a few grains of the substance — or 2 milligrams — can be lethal, and the amount that border agents confiscated on Thursday had the potential to kill 115 million people.

Liberals and their flawed reasoning

But rather than acknowledge how effective a border wall would be at stopping the flow of drugs coming from Mexico, mainstream media reporters used last week’s fentanyl seizure to argue against erecting a barrier at the southern border.

The liberal position, and one that has been used to undermine O’Reilly’s statistics, is that the vast majority of drugs are trafficked through legal ports of entry, and a wall would be useless at stopping the endless flow of narcotics. A report from AZCentral noted after the bust: “And guess where federal officials carried out this huge fentanyl bust? At the Nogales border crossing in Arizona. Yes, a port of entry, not somewhere over a border fence in the barren desert.”

But this line of thinking misses a key point: In 2019, the White House suggested hiring 750 new border agents with 150 support staff, while the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) sought funding for 2,000 new agents and 1,300 support personnel. By flexing reinforcements to the border, the White House has produced measurable results at ports of entry along the U.S.-Mexico border.

In fact, CBP reported in a press release on Thursday, “Over the last year Border Patrol has seized 110 percent more fentanyl than the year prior.”

As these once-reliable smuggling routes are shut down, drug dealers will have no choice but to seek alternative routes of entry along the desert wilderness separating the two countries. And unless lawmakers act, there will be nothing there to stop them.

Even if the status quo remains, however, an estimated 10 percent of imported heroin would still be trafficked through backcountry routes from California to Texas. If that heroin is just as lethal as the illicit substances smuggled through customs every year, thousands of Americans could be killed simply because their government lacks the infrastructure to stop the drug trade.

O’Reilly is right — there is an emergency at the southern border, one that has contributed to a decline in U.S. life expectancy for the first time in decades. But until lawmakers take this threat seriously, thousands of Americans will continue to needlessly perish from a problem that has a simple solution.