Authored by Darlene McCormick Sanchez via The Epoch Times,
The Trump administration’s border crackdown is slowing the flow of deadly drugs into the country to the point that cartel profits have plummeted.
Border czar Tom Homan said during an appearance at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) on Thursday that President Donald Trump’s operation to go after the Mexican cartels has been successful, and that they are now focusing their drug operations on Europe and Asia.
“Cartels are going broke,” Homan said. “They know it’s hard here.”
Sara Carter, director of the National Drug Control Policy and a CPAC speaker, said that securing the U.S. border has meant fewer illegal immigrants and drugs, especially fentanyl.
“We’ve seen a decrease in fentanyl coming into our country of around 56 percent to 57 percent, which is phenomenal,” she said.
“You’re holding China accountable and telling them we are watching the supply chain, and you will be responsible if we see more deaths in our country.”
The cartels securing fentanyl precursor chemicals from China and India know what they are doing, she said, adding that cartels and America’s adversaries want “to break us and to create this massive casualty event.”
Discussing the impact of policy changes, Carter said that under the Biden administration, the cartels made hundreds of billions of dollars from human trafficking and the sale of narcotics.
She said adversarial countries pushing drugs onto American streets, such as China, amount to a “proxy war” against the United States.
Homan and Carter applauded Operation Southern Spear, in which narcoterrorists carrying drugs on boats in the Caribbean were destroyed with U.S. military air strikes.
Carter said stopping drug runners in the Western Hemisphere was part of the president’s America First strategy. Carter’s comments are supported by a recent study that also points to a sharp decrease in fentanyl deaths.
The January study suggested that the decrease in deaths, which started in mid-2023, was due to a disruption in the supply chain of fentanyl precursor chemicals from China, creating a shortage of fentanyl on the streets.
With less fentanyl, dealers and cartels stretched their supply, according to the study. Fentanyl and other street drugs are often cut with substances such as baby powder or sugar.
Opioid deaths that started to drop under the previous administration are continuing their downward trend. The Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) under the Trump administration intensified enforcement operations, putting pressure on the global fentanyl supply chain, forcing narco-terrorists such as the Sinaloa Cartel and CJNG Cartel to alter their business model.
DEA lab testing showed 29 percent of fentanyl pills analyzed during fiscal year 2025 had a potentially lethal dose, a significant drop from just two years earlier, when 76 percent of pills had enough fentanyl to kill.
The purity of fentanyl powder has decreased to 10.3 percent in fiscal year 2025 from 19.5 percent in 2024, the DEA said.