The Trump campaign might truly believe that they care about the people dying from fentanyl poisoning. Former President Donald Trump and his vice presidential candidate JD Vance address the issue at nearly every campaign stop. But they can’t stop tying the crisis to immigration, and to be blunt, if you’re blaming immigrants for fentanyl deaths, you don’t really care about saving anyone. Immigrants aren’t causing these deaths.

New research from the Cato Institute, using data obtained via a Freedom of Information Act request, dismantles the alleged connection between immigration and fentanyl smuggling. The dataset shows that from 2019 to 2024, 80% of individuals caught with fentanyl at ports of entry were U.S. citizens: 7,598 out of the 9,473 cross-border smugglers.

Focusing on seizures at ports of entry is critical because 88% of all fentanyl was seized at ports of entry from FY 2015 to 2024. Only 8% was seized by Border Patrol, mostly during vehicle stops. These figures are consistent with investigations by the Drug Enforcement Administration, Customs and Border Protection (CBP), and the Office of National Drug Policy, showing that drug smugglers primarily use ports of entry rather than illegal crossing routes.

Drug trafficking organizations prefer US citizens for smuggling because they have the right to enter the United States and are less likely to be interrogated by officials at ports for seeking to enter. The US Sentencing Commission data supports this: from 2018 to 2023, US citizens made up 80% of convicted drug traffickers in southwest border districts.

Due to the high likelihood of detection during illegal crossings, smugglers prefer legal crossing points. CBP estimates it intercepted only 2.98% of cocaine at ports of entry, in contrast to over 75% of immigrants crossing illegally. Even if CBP overestimates its effectiveness at stopping illegal crossers, it still wouldn’t make sense to try to smuggle drugs that way.

Critics might argue that we can’t see the drugs that get by. True, but Border Patrol apprehensions offer a substantial sample size for drawing reasonable conclusions about this flow. Between Oct. 2018 to June 2024, Border Patrol made 8.5 million arrests and 1,341 fentanyl seizures. It’s likely half of these involved US citizens stopped at vehicle checkpoints.

Fentanyl smuggling among illegal border-crossing immigrants is rare, occurring in fewer than 1 in 12,000 encounters. While it’s not that it never happens, even if we invested billions in stopping it, it wouldn’t be a solution to the real problem we are trying to solve: fentanyl-related deaths. Cartels can easily just increase their supply through other available channels.

Eliminating immigration won’t solve the fentanyl crisis, as overdose deaths spiked during years of restricted immigration. In 2020, when immigration was drastically reduced, fentanyl overdose deaths rose by 56%, and by another 22% in fiscal year 2021 under continued restrictions. In 2020, cartels shifted from heroin to fentanyl, which is 50 times more potent, enabling them to meet demand with fewer crossings.

As a recent study by University of Cincinnati professor Ben Feldmeyer in the journal Criminology found, more immigration is more often associated with less drug overdoses. This is partly because immigrants are more likely to abstain from drug use. As a result, noncitizens are about 1.4% of overdoses, even though they make up over 7% of the US population. It may also be because immigration improves the economy in those areas.

Enhanced detection technologies at ports aren’t the solution either. Marijuana was smuggled for decades despite being easier to detect. Seizing more won’t affect fentanyl availability unless cartels fail to supply more to replace it, which history shows they don’t. For example, even as marijuana seizures increased as Border Patrol expanded, availability remained unchanged, and its potency increased.

Additionally, even more potent synthetic opioids like Nitazenes are already appearing in the U.S. and could replace fentanyl, requiring fewer smuggling trips and leading to even more deaths. In the unlikely event that Mexican smuggling routes were sealed, smugglers would simply turn to other methods, like mailing packages or domestic production. Wherever there is demand, there will be supply.

The experience with marijuana proves that the only way to stop smuggling is to cut off demand for the cartel’s product. Of course, no one is going to legalize fentanyl for non-medical purposes. But there are plenty of effective solutions short of that: legalize fentanyl test strips to let consumers choose not to consume it, eliminate restrictions on alternative legal options, such as methadone treatment, allow doctors to treat pain and addiction without legal risks, and reschedule diamorphine for treatment purposes. Effective drug policies in other countries have yielded better outcomes, and none of them relied on immigration restrictions to get there.

The obsession with immigration as a solution to the fentanyl problem diverts attention from tangible solutions. Politicians’ focus on immigration further empowers cartels to flood the market with fentanyl, resulting in thousands of American deaths. It’s time to stop the distraction and implement policies that reduce demand and save lives.

If you truly care about the dead and dying, you’ll stop blaming immigrants and start holding political demagogues accountable.