Old North News

Texas Gov. Greg Abbott (R) last month signed an executive order that designated the Sinaloa and Jalisco New Generation cartels as foreign terrorist organizations.

"Cartels are terrorists, and it's time we treated them that way," Abbott said in a news release from his office.

He wrote a letter to President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris requesting that they take the same action in order to raise national awareness about fentanyl and pursue harsher sentences for convicted traffickers.

"Designation, apprehension, and prosecution would also heighten public awareness of the cartels' trafficking of deadly fentanyl while signaling to the international community that the United States will not tolerate terrorists who poison our citizens," Abbott said in the letter.

The governor underscored the need to allocate more resources to Border Patrol agents to equip them for the escalating crisis at the U.S./Mexico border. Debbie Stabenow (D-MI) in 2021 voted against a bill that would have appropriated $300 million to U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) to better engage in the fight against trafficked opioids. 

The problem with opioids is not restricted to border states. Forsyth County in North Carolina last month conducted its largest drug bust in history, Fox News reported. Detectives seized 22 pounds of fentanyl, with an approximate street value of over $2.6 million. Fentanyl is deadly when mixed with cocaine or heroin.

Data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) showed that North Carolina reported 3,421 overdose deaths in May 2021 and 3,572 overdose deaths in May 2022 – a 4.4% increase in one year.

Abbott's September letter to Biden was not his first effort to alert the president about the opioid crisis. He sent a similar letter to Biden in April 2021; Abbott said the president did not respond. 

When the Supreme Court declared Biden's termination of the so-called Remain in Mexico policy as constitutional, Abbott issued a statement warning that the decision would open the door to more significant problems associated with illegal immigration.

"Reinstating and fully enforcing Remain in Mexico would deter thousands more migrants from making that deadly trek, and President Biden should take that simple step to secure the border because it is the only humane thing to do,” Abbott said in a news release in June.

CBP reported more than 2.1 million encounters at the southern border since October 2021.