In her first visit to the United States-Mexico border since 2021, Vice President Kamala Harris met with Customs and Border Protection (CBP) and vowed that as president she’d ramp up prosecution for fentanyl trafficking.
The September 27 photo op at the border in Douglas, a small city in swing state Arizona, was largely about cracking down on immigration. In service of that narrative CBP briefed Harris on the current status of its fentanyl interdiction efforts, and its usual propaganda about agents stopping more fentanyl in 2022 and 2023 than the past five years combined, etc.
Harris for her part hit all the main Biden administration talking points about disrupting the global fentanyl supply chain and calling on China to expand crackdowns of fentanyl precursor chemicals. She reportedly called fentanyl a “scourge” and vowed that as president she’d strengthen border security, including by doubling funding for prosecution of transnational drug trafficking organizations. She also reportedly said she’d embrace “new technologies to get the job done,” a reference to non-intrusive inspection (NII) scanning systems CBP uses to X-ray vehicles as they pass through border checkpoints.
NII has mainly gained attention due to many of the scanners spending extended time sitting in storage, but CBP mentions them in pretty much every seizure announcement these days. Harris promised to revive the bipartisan border security deal blocked by Republican senators in February, which would allocate significant additional resources to CBP including technology like NII.
As Attorney General of California, I prosecuted transnational criminal organizations that trafficked guns, drugs, and human beings. I know the importance of safety and security, especially at our border.
Today, I visited the U.S.-Mexico border and spoke with Customs and Border… pic.twitter.com/tM310fcwrA
— Vice President Kamala Harris (@VP) September 28, 2024
At campaign rallies September 28 and 29 in Wisconsin and Pennsylvania, respectively, Trump reportedly told the crowds that Harris “wants to legalize fentanyl.” His campaign has been getting a lot of mileage out of an American Civil Liberties Union questionnaire Harris completed in 2019, which was resurfaced earlier in September.
It shows Harris checked “Yes” in response to a question asking if she supported decriminalizing possession of all drugs at the federal level. The New York Times and other outlets have suggested that Trump’s claim may have come from her written response wherein she discussed legalizing marijuana, since the questionnaire never mentioned fentanyl. But if anything, her response to the question preceding that one, which asked about decarceration for the Federal Bureau of Prisons, is the strongest statement:
“[T]he opioid crisis has reaffirmed the failure of criminalization. Full decriminalization with appropriate treatment responses could address this stark racial injustice and reduce incarceration.”
Whatever Harris said in 2019, broad decrim is not exactly what she’s campaigning on in 2024. There’s been recent speculation about whether Harris supports decriminalizing sex work, too, which is also unfounded. Harris supports federal legalization of marijuana, which in some cases has been stretched into claims that her overall drug policy is equitable, but even her stance on marijuana is predicated on the idea that other drugs warrant criminalization.
Harris approaches overdose and immigration as the same crisis. She will sometimes mention how under the Biden administration the Food and Drug Administration approved the first over-the-counter naloxone product, or how treatment services got a bunch of funding, but her campaign platform is very clear that the overdose crisis is a criminal issue, not a public health one. We’re going to arrest our way out of it after all.
Image of non-intrusive inspection scanning system via United Stated Customs and Border Protection
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