U.S Customs and Border Protection (CBP) officers at eight South Texas ports of entry seized “significant increases” in drugs and other “inadmissibles” during Fiscal Year 2022.
According to a new report, CBP agents encountered a 19 percent increase in cocaine seizures, along with other narcotics, unreported currency, weapons and other violations.
“As nonessential traffic resumed early in Fiscal Year 2022, overall workload volumes returned to normal but CBP officers continued to experience the ongoing trend of hard narcotics, particularly cocaine and significant gains in encounters of individuals without valid entry documents,” Acting Director of Field Operations Eugene Crawford, Laredo Field Office said in the report. “The hard narcotics volume underscores the seriousness of the drug threat we face and hemispheric economic and security challenges also tend to drive the migration volumes.”
Federal agents seized 47,755 pounds of narcotics that have a combined street value of $436 million.
The drugs confiscated at the border included 6,578 pounds of marijuana; 10,243 pounds of cocaine, up 19 percent from FY 2021; nearly 30,476 pounds of methamphetamine; 176 pounds of heroin; and nearly 282 pounds of fentanyl.
CBP officers also seized $5.8 million in unreported currency, 320 weapons and 78,487 rounds of ammunition.
Texas has drawn attention recently as the border crisis has escalated and a record 2.7 million illegal aliens were arrested by CBP officers during FY 2022. That figure represents a higher number than all four years of the Trump presidency.
Since President Joe Biden was sworn in, 5.5 million illegal aliens have crossed the border into the U.S., prompting calls for border and immigration policy reform and forcing local officials to declare a state of emergency to marshal additional resources to cope.
“Some 2.7 million migrants—those who illegally entered or were otherwise inadmissible at a port of entry—were encountered at our borders in FY 2022, bringing the total under President Biden to a whopping 5.5 million,” Dan Stein, President of the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR), told Timcast in an interview at the end of FY 2022. “One thing is clear: These record-breaking numbers are a direct consequence of open-borders policies implemented by Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas and the person who appointed him, President Joe Biden.”
The latest report from CBP authorities comes as Arizona’s outgoing Attorney General Mark Brnovich says that the U.S. southern border “has never been worse.”
In an interview with the Washington Times, he said that the Biden administration “essentially decriminalized and incentivized people breaking the law and coming over here.”
