WASHINGTON – WASHINGTON (AP) – President Joe Biden is urging Congress to help him do more to combat the scourge of fentanyl before he leaves office.
The Democratic administration is pushing the new policy, just like the previous one President Donald Trump intensifies attacks against the vice president Kamala Harrispainting her as Biden’s irresponsible lieutenant in the battle to slow illegal drugs and undocumented immigrants arriving in the United States from Mexico.
The White House on Wednesday announced a series of Biden proposals aimed at curbing the ongoing drug epidemic. These include pressure on Congress to pass legislation that would establish a registry of pill presses and pill machines and increase penalties against convicted drug smugglers and fentanyl traffickers.
Biden also wants to tighten rules on importers sending small packages into the United States, requiring shippers to provide additional information to Customs and Border Protection officials. The measure aims to improve detection of fentanyl precursor chemicals that often arrive in the United States in relatively low-value shipments that are not subject to customs and trade barriers.
The president’s new efforts to combat fentanyl could also benefit Harris, the presumptive Democratic nominee, as Trump and his surrogates are trying to cast her as a central player in the Biden administration’s fights at the U.S.-Mexico border throughout of his mandate.
“Yet too many of our fellow Americans continue to lose loved ones to fentanyl,” Biden said in a statement. “This is a time to act. And this is a time to come together – for all those we have lost and for all the lives we can still save.”
Biden said he will also sign a national security memorandum on Wednesday aimed at improving information sharing between law enforcement and federal agencies to improve understanding about the production and smuggling flows of synthetic products. opioid which devastated large areas of America. Over the past five months, more than 442 million doses of fentanyl have been seized at U.S. borders, according to the White House.
Trump’s campaign launched its first television advertisement of the general election cycle on Tuesday, dubbing Harris the “border czar” and blaming her for the rise in illegal crossings into the United States under the Biden administration. After running headlines about crime and drugs, the video brands Harris as “Failed. Weak. Dangerously liberal.”
Border crossings have reached record levels during the Biden administration, but have fallen more recently.
The Trump campaign has so far booked $12.2 million in television and digital ads for the next two weeks, according to data from media tracking firm AdImpact.
Biden tasked Harris at the beginning of his administration with addressing the root causes of migration. Border crossings became a major political issue for Biden when they reached historic levels. Since June, when Biden announced significant restrictions in asylum requests at the border, arrests for illegal crossings decreased.
House Republicans passed a symbolic resolution last week criticizing Harris’ work on the border on behalf of the Biden administration.
The White House reiterated its call for Congress to pass comprehensive immigration legislation that includes funding for more border agents and drug detection machines at the border. Republican Party senators earlier this year months of frustrated negotiations with Democrats over legislation aimed at reducing the record number of illegal border crossings after Trump eviscerated the bipartisan proposal.
Biden’s pill pressing registration proposal aims to help law enforcement crackdowns on drug traffickers who use pill presses to turn fentanyl into pills.
Authorities say most illicit fentanyl is produced clandestinely in Mexico using precursor chemicals from China. Synthetic opioids are the biggest killers in the deadliest drug crisis the US has ever seen. In 2014, nearly 50,000 deaths in the U.S. were linked to drug overdoses of all types. In 2022, the total was more than 100,000, according to a count by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. More than two-thirds of these deaths – more than 200 per day – involved fentanyl or similar synthetic drugs.
Meanwhile, administration and Chinese government officials are expected to meet on Wednesday to discuss efforts to stem the flow of precursor chemicals from China, according to a senior administration official.
Biden and the Chinese president Xi Jinping announced in a November Summit in California that Beijing agreed to pressure its chemical companies to restrict shipments to Latin America and elsewhere from the materials used to produce fentanyl. China also agreed to resume sharing information on suspected trafficking with an international database.
But one special committee of the Chamber focused on countering the Chinese government in April issued a report that China is still fueling the fentanyl crisis in the USA, directly subsidizing the manufacture of materials that are used by traffickers to manufacture the drug outside the country.
The official, who spoke on condition of anonymity in line with ground rules set by the White House, said China has taken “important steps” but there is much more to do.
