On the second night of the Republican National Convention, a woman named Anne Fundner shared a heartbreaking story. A few years ago, she and her husband and their four children were living in Southern California, she told the crowd. She painted an idyllic picture of their family life. Her 15-year-old son, Weston, played hockey and football and loved to surf. The family had barbecues on the beach. Then Weston, succumbing to peer pressure, got high with friends — and died of fentanyl poisoning.
It’s an unspeakable tragedy, one felt by too many Americans in the relentless wave of an opioid epidemic that continues to claim more than 74,000 lives a year.
The available statistics expose the RNC speeches about “open borders” as a dispatch from an alternate dimension.
Unfortunately, Fundner’s story of personal loss is being used to promote a dangerous and false narrative about the state of crime under the current administration.
In her speech, Fundner had no doubt about who was to blame. It happened, she said, because President Joe Biden “opened our borders.” And the solution, according to her and many speakers present in Milwaukee Tuesday night, is to re-elect Donald Trump, who will close them again and, she urged, classify Mexican drug cartels as terrorist organizations. When she said this, Trump apparently leaned over to his running mate JD Vance and mouthed, “We should do it.”
Hour after hour, speakers hit the same themes. Biden had “opened the border.” Sen. Marco Rubio said when Trump was president “our border was secure and our laws were enforced” — but that those days are gone. Ben Carson said, “We have a wide open border.” Tom Cotton said, “Joe Biden thinks borders are racist.” The implication for all of them was that an open border is to blame for the country’s fentanyl crisis.
This narrative of course is complete nonsense. That doesn’t mean that the pain of parents like Fundner isn’t all too real. I myself know it is, having someone I cared about die of a fentanyl overdose three years ago. But the problem has absolutely nothing do with Biden “opening our border” because no such event has occurred.
The available statistics expose the RNC speeches about “open borders” as a dispatch from an alternate dimension. To start, the Department of Homeland Security’s total number of “encounters” with migrants (“encounters” is DHS speak for “arrests”) was far greater during Biden’s first two years in office than the corresponding years of the Trump administration. And greater percentage of those “encountered” under Biden have been deported than under Trump.
In fact, immigrants’ rights groups are furious at Biden for reasons anyone who believed what they saw at the RNC would have found incomprehensible. Biden championed a bipartisan bill that would have shredded many of the rights of asylum-seekers. People who in some cases have reason to be terrified that they’ll be tortured or killed if they returned to their home countries, are going to have their cases heard faster, not because the existing system would be expanded to deal with the backlog but because their cases would be moved from the Department of Justice to the DHS, where they’d get “a much faster review, often without attorneys or a deliberative process,” according to reporting from PBS.
When that bill failed, after most Republicans followed Trump’s lead in opposing it, Biden acted unilaterally by executive order to curtail the rights of many asylum-seekers. He’s now being sued by several immigrants’ rights groups as well as the American Civil Liberties Union, which notes:
“These executive actions will effectively shut off any access to asylum protections for the vast majority of people arriving at the U.S.-Mexico border, no matter how strong their claims. The proclamation echoes the Trump administration’s previous asylum entry ban, which immigrants’ rights advocates successfully challenged.” Ted Cruz said at the RNC that the influx of undocumented immigrants was an “invasion” — not, he clarified, a figurative invasion but a literal one. He named a number of Americans who were raped or killed by criminals who had entered the country illegally, claiming to “speak for” these individuals (it is unclear whether or not the individuals approved of Cruz and his politics). The best available data shows that the undocumented migrant population is far less likely to commit crimes (beyond the initial illegal entry) than native-born Americans, likely because they’re afraid of being deported. American citizens who are the victims of violence are, in the overwhelming majority of cases, victims of other American citizens. And while we’re at it, a crushingly overwhelming majority of those arrested for smuggling fentanyl —86% — are American citizens, and more than nine out of 10 fentanyl seizures “occur at legal crossing points or interior vehicle checkpoints, not on illegal migration routes.” This stands to reason, given U.S. citizens crossing legally are far less likely to be seized and searched. Fentanyl overdoses are aptly classed as “deaths of despair,” statistically concentrated in Rust Belt areas ravaged by deindustrialization. To actually tackle the fentanyl crisis, we’d need to start by devoting far more resources to treatment for addicts, but above all you’d need to do something about the despair, by moving toward a more economically equal society. That is likely the last thing Trump and JD Vance plan to do should they be elected in November. The first Trump administration was a four-year orgy of tax cuts for rich people, deregulation and union-busting. He even went after Medicaid expansion. If Trump returns to office and gives us four more years of these policies, the result will be a society mired even more deeply in poverty, inequality and mass despair than it is right now. And that’s a recipe for a whole lot more grieving mothers looking for someone to blame.
Ben Burgis
Ben Burgis is a political commentator and author. He has written articles for Jacobin and The Daily Beast. 
