Federal data do not show that “the flow” or “intake” of illegal fentanyl into the United States has been cut “by half” during the Biden-Harris administration, as Vice President Kamala Harris claimed in television interviews. The amount of fentanyl seized by border officers has increased significantly in recent years, but those statistics alone do not support the vice president’s claim.
The federal government does not track how much fentanyl enters the country each year. It reports how much has been seized by U.S. Customs and Border Protection, but there is no way to know how much has entered the U.S. undetected. Without that information, it’s not possible to know definitively if there has been a reduction, experts we interviewed said.
Harris made the claims about fentanyl during recent interviews in which she discussed the administration’s efforts to curb illegal immigration.
“And the numbers today, because of what we have done, we have cut the flow of illegal immigration by half. We have cut the flow of fentanyl by half,” Harris said in a “60 Minutes” interview that aired Oct. 7.
The following day, during an appearance on “The View,” Harris repeated a version of the claim, saying: “We took further action in terms of executive action and we have seen illegal immigration reduced by half, the intake of fentanyl reduced by half.”
In August, there were 58,038 encounters of people who illegally crossed the southern border, according to CBP’s statistics. That’s down about 51% from 117,905 encounters in May, the month before President Joe Biden issued a proclamation implementing steps to decrease illegal crossings and restrict asylum eligibility for apprehended individuals. The August figure also is down about 77% from December, when there were 249,741 encounters, the highest monthly total while Biden and Harris have been in office.
The data on border encounters are a proxy for illegal crossings.
As for fentanyl, a potent synthetic opioid that has contributed to an increase in overdose deaths, there are no government statistics that support what Harris claimed.
There is not an exact count of deaths from fentanyl, but overdose deaths from non-methadone synthetic opioids, which includes deaths due to fentanyl or fentanyl analogs, have been rising for several years, including during the Trump administration.
As we have written, there were an estimated 219,141 of those overdose deaths from 2021 to 2023 during the Biden-Harris administration, according to the National Center for Health Statistics. That was about 44% more than the 152,676 deaths during President Donald Trump’s four-year term, and the total under Trump increased about 306% from 37,642 deaths during President Barack Obama’s second term.
What we know about fentanyl seized by border officers is that annual figures had steadily been increasing prior to fiscal year 2024, which is on pace for about a 20% year-over-year decrease in pounds seized.
CBP authorities seized about 27,000 pounds of fentanyl that were trafficked into the U.S. in fiscal year 2023, overwhelmingly at legal ports of entry. That was an increase of roughly 462% from about 4,800 pounds in fiscal year 2020, Trump’s last full fiscal year in office. It also was an increase of about 141% from 11,200 pounds in fiscal year 2021, which includes more than eight months of Biden’s first year as president. There was about a 586% increase in fentanyl seized from fiscal year 2016, which ended before Trump took office, to fiscal year 2020, as we have written.
The Harris campaign did not provide an on-the-record response for our story. However, a campaign aide told the Washington Post that Harris was referring to the increase in fentanyl seizures between fiscal year 2021 and 2023.
But that doesn’t tell us how much fentanyl was smuggled into the country, experts told us.
“The best thing that we have as a gauge for what comes into the country is the seizure data,” which “is not a metric of how much is actually coming into the U.S.,” Katharine Neill Harris, a fellow in drug policy at Rice University’s Baker Institute for Public Policy, told us in an interview.
“This is just the data that’s coming through the border security,” she said, noting that drugs that are trafficked other ways, such as through the mail, are not accounted for.
In fact, the nonpartisan Congressional Research Service has said, “There are no comprehensive data on the total quantity of foreign-produced illicit drugs smuggled into the United States at or between official ports of entry (POEs) because these are drugs that have generally evaded seizure by border officials.”
And some Republican critics of the Biden-Harris administration have argued that an increase in the amount of fentanyl seized actually is a sign that more of the drug – not less – is getting into the country undetected.
Not having that total figure makes it impossible to know if the vice president’s claim is accurate, David Luckey, a senior international and defense researcher at RAND and professor of policy analysis at the Pardee RAND Graduate School, explained in an interview.
“If you don’t know the denominator, you can’t have an answer,” he told us.
The one thing we know is that the amount of fentanyl intercepted by federal law enforcement at the border increased more than five-fold between fiscal year 2020 and fiscal year 2023. “But that’s only one of many elements, so we need more data,” Luckey said.
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