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In recent remarks to the press, President Donald Trump restated his intention to impose 25% tariffs on U.S. imports from Mexico and Canada as early as Feb. 1. His reasoning: “vast” illegal immigration and “massive” amounts of fentanyl coming to the U.S. from those countries.
But Trump drew a false equivalence between the two countries. In fact, the magnitude of the difference is enormous.
While illegal immigration through Canada has increased in recent years, it still is nowhere near the level of illegal immigration at the border with Mexico. Likewise, the amount of fentanyl seized by federal authorities at the northern border is tiny compared with the amount seized by officials along the southwest border.
“We’re thinking in terms of 25% on Mexico and Canada because they’re allowing vast numbers of people … to come in and fentanyl to come in,” Trump told a reporter who asked about the tariffs while Trump was signing executive orders in the Oval Office on Jan. 20.
The following day, in a press conference from the White House, Trump again explained why he may move forward with the tariffs.
“They’ve allowed, both of them, Canada very much so, they’ve allowed millions and millions of people to come into our country that shouldn’t be here,” Trump said. “They could’ve stopped them and they didn’t. And they’ve killed 300,000 people last year, my opinion, have been destroyed by drugs, by fentanyl. The fentanyl coming through Canada is massive. The fentanyl coming through Mexico is massive.”
Trump is exaggerating the number of fentanyl-related deaths in the U.S., and his Canada and Mexico comparison is off-base, too.
In this post, we take a quick look at the numbers to give some relative perspective.
Illegal Immigration
In fiscal year 2024, which ended on Sept. 30, there were more than 1.5 million Border Patrol apprehensions of people who illegally entered the U.S. through the border with Mexico, according to data published by U.S. Customs and Border Protection. That figure was down from about 2 million apprehensions in fiscal year 2023 and more than 2.2 million in fiscal 2022. But the FY 2024 figure was still up significantly from the 400,651 apprehensions in FY 2020, the last full fiscal year before the end of Trump’s first term as president. (The figures include repeat border-crossers.)
Those figures also do not include an unknown number of so-called “gotaway” migrants who crossed the southwest border illegally and managed not to be captured by authorities.
However, at the northern border with Canada, the number of apprehensions of people making illegal border crossings has been much, much lower.
In FY 2024, Border Patrol apprehended 23,721 people who illegally crossed the northern border into the U.S. That’s about 1.5% of Border Patrol apprehensions nationwide. The northern border apprehensions were lower in 2023 (10,021) and lower still in 2022 (2,238), according to the most recent data available on the CBP website.
Throughout all of Trump’s first term as president, Border Patrol made about 14,000 total apprehensions of people crossing the northern border between legal ports of entry.
In a December 2022 analysis, the Bipartisan Policy Center said that increasing encounters at the border with Canada, including migrants crossing at legal ports of entry and between those ports, “indicate that migrants are seeking alternative routes to enter the U.S.” The growing numbers also have inspired lawmakers in the House and Senate to introduce legislation to strengthen security at the northern border.
But unlike the situation with Mexico, there have not been close to “millions,” as Trump suggested, illegally migrating through Canada, according to the CBP figures.
Fentanyl
The fentanyl numbers – at least the ones available – tell a similar story.
Fentanyl is a synthetic opioid that is many times stronger than morphine and heroin, according to the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration. The legal version of the drug is approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration as a pain reliever and anesthetic, but the drug also is illegally manufactured and trafficked into the U.S.
Illicit fentanyl coming into the U.S. has contributed to an increase in the annual number of overdose deaths, as the drug can be lethal in very small doses. In 2023, there were 72,776 deaths involving non-methadone synthetic opioids, which includes fentanyl and fentanyl analogs, according to the National Center for Health Statistics, a division of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. There were not 300,000 fentanyl-related overdose deaths, as Trump suggested in his remarks.
While we don’t know the total amount of fentanyl that is smuggled into the country each year, because comprehensive data do not exist, the federal government does track how much of the drug gets seized from people entering the country at or between legal entry ports. Like illegal immigration, the seizing is overwhelmingly happening at the southwest – not northern – border.
CBP data show that in FY 2024 there were 21,148 pounds of fentanyl seized by officials at the southwest border – the vast majority of which was intercepted from people, largely American citizens, coming through legal ports of entry. That figure was down from the 26,718 pounds seized in FY 2023. The figures for both years are higher than the 14,104 pounds seized in FY 2022.
Meanwhile, there were 43 pounds seized from people crossing the northern border in FY 2024 — and most of it was captured by Border Patrol, not at legal ports. That was up from just 2 pounds confiscated in FY 2023 and 14 pounds seized in FY 2022.
For at least the last three full fiscal years, the amount of fentanyl captured coming from Canada has made up less than 1% of all fentanyl seized nationwide by the Border Patrol and the Office of Field Operations.
“There is no indication at all that any significant amount of fentanyl is coming to the United States from Canada,” Vanda Felbab-Brown, a senior fellow in foreign policy at the Brookings Institution, told us in an email.
“Seizures at the northern border found only very small amounts trafficked, essentially for personal use,” she said. “The fentanyl producing networks in Canada — atomized producers not belonging to Mexican or other large cartels, even though sometimes operating very large labs — are not connected to drug trafficking networks into the United States.”
During a December 2024 event in which she and other panelists discussed the results of a year-long Brookings research project on synthetic opioids in the U.S. and abroad, Felbab-Brown said that “Mexico is the predominant source of fentanyl for the United States.”
The Congressional Research Service, in a report updated in December, also said, “At present, most U.S.-destined illicit fentanyl appears to be produced clandestinely in Mexico, using chemical precursors from China.”
That doesn’t mean that fentanyl coming across the northern border could not become a larger problem in the future.
In a report last year, Canada’s foreign ministry said that “seizures of Canada-sourced fentanyl in places like the U.S. and Australia suggest that domestic production is likely exceeding domestic demand,” making Canada a “source (and transit) country for fentanyl to some markets.”
Jonathan Caulkins, a professor of operations research and public policy at Carnegie Mellon University, told us in an email that it is also his understanding that criminal organizations have increased their production capacity in Canada. And, he said, “there is no logical or physical reason” why they would not be able to produce and transport enough fentanyl to meet demand in the U.S.
“[B]ut I don’t know anyone serious who thinks it is happening at any such scale,” he told us.
The fact is, both migrants and fentanyl are crossing the northern border with Canada at significantly lower levels than at the southwest border with Mexico.
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