They Say a Wall Can't Stop Fentanyl. Here Is the Whole Answer

Let me tell you about the single most effective debating move the other side has on the border, because I want you to see it coming. You say, "We need more border security because fentanyl is killing our kids." They say, "Fentanyl comes through the ports, in cars, not over the fence in a backpack, so your wall does nothing." And then they sit back with a satisfied smile, as if they have just solved a Rubik's cube.

Here is the uncomfortable thing for our side: on the pattern, they are right. And here is the more uncomfortable thing for their side: being right about the pattern does not get them where they think it does. Their argument proves that we need to look harder at the ports. It does not prove that we should skimp on the stretch between them. If you take their own fact seriously, the conclusion is "do both," and I am happy to explain why.

The claim at its strongest

Let me state the critic's case the way a smart critic would, without caricature.

Fentanyl is a synthetic opioid that is extremely potent in tiny amounts. That potency matters for smuggling, because a quantity that could kill an enormous number of people fits in a small space. A small, dense load is easy to hide in a vehicle's compartments, a commercial truck's cargo, or a person's bag at a legal crossing. Customs and Border Protection publishes its seizure data, and by that data the great majority of fentanyl seized at the southwest border is found at ports of entry, and a large portion of it in passenger vehicles. A great many of the people caught carrying it are U.S. citizens, who can cross at a port without raising suspicion. A fence between ports does not touch any of that traffic. Therefore, the critic concludes, spending on barriers between ports is a distraction from the real problem, and the money should go to the ports.

That is a good argument. It is built on a real pattern, it comes from the government's own numbers, and it has persuaded many reasonable people. I will answer it in six numbered points, and I will concede along the way what the critic gets right.

Point one: the pattern is real, and it tells you where to put the scanners

Start by agreeing. If most hard drugs are caught at ports, then the ports are the main front for drug interdiction. That means officers in the booths, canine teams, license plate readers, advance cargo information, and above all the imaging machines that let an officer see inside a vehicle without dismantling it. I describe those machines in Towers, Sensors and Scanners, The Technology Half of Border Security.

Here is a fact that should bother every taxpayer. These scanners exist, yet there is a limit to how much traffic they can examine, because scanning takes equipment, space, trained staff and time. Congress controls that money. The honest conclusion from the critic's own premise is to pay for more scanning capacity and more officers at the ports. I will say it plainly: a Republican who wants to end fentanyl smuggling and votes against funding for port inspection has a consistency problem.

Point two: the booth is where the smuggler meets a person

Technology is only half of a port. The other half is the officer in the booth who looks at the driver, asks questions, notices that a story does not fit, and decides whether to send the vehicle for a closer look. That judgment cannot be automated. It is a human skill, built on training and experience.

That is why staffing matters. A port with too few officers has to choose between slowing legitimate trade to a crawl and waving vehicles through. A family-owned produce business that runs trucks across the border every day feels the first choice. The public feels the second. If you want security and commerce together, you need enough officers to do both jobs well. That is a budget decision, and it is one conservatives can win on the merits.

Point three: the stretch between the ports is a different problem, and it is not nothing

Now the critic's mistake. The fact that most hard drugs come through the ports does not mean nothing comes between them. The land between ports is where people cross without inspection, and where other contraband can move with them. The same criminal organizations that move drugs also move people, a point I come back to below.

A barrier and agents between the ports answer a different question from the one the scanners answer. The scanners ask, "What is in this vehicle?" The barrier and the patrols ask, "Who is crossing where nobody checks?" You can care about the first question without dropping the second. If a smuggling organization finds the ports hard, it will look at the gaps. If it finds the gaps hard too, its costs go up everywhere. That is what a layered system does: it raises the price of every route at once.

Think about a bank. Nobody argues that because most thefts involve someone walking through the front door, the bank should leave the back door open. You secure both, because a thief chooses whichever is weaker.

Point four: the supply starts upstream, with precursor chemicals

The most important fentanyl policy may not happen at the border at all. Fentanyl is made, not grown. It has to be synthesized from chemical ingredients, called precursors, and those precursors come from somewhere. Justice Department indictments have described chains that begin with chemical suppliers overseas, move to clandestine laboratories in Mexico, and end with pills pressed in bulk and shipped north. I trace that chain link by link in How Fentanyl Gets From a Chemical Shipment to the Street.

If the chain is the problem, then the places to bite are the early links: the sellers of the chemicals, the shippers, and the labs. Regulations on precursor chemicals, enforcement against the companies that sell them, and diplomatic pressure on countries where they are produced are all part of the answer. The government can designate chemicals for control, bring indictments, and impose sanctions. This is a case where a conservative can be both tough and smart: go after the supply with tools aimed at the supply.

Point five: follow the money

Cartels are businesses, and businesses run on cash. The profits from the drug trade have to be moved, hidden and washed into the legitimate economy, which requires bankers, brokers, couriers and front companies. Federal law makes it a crime to smuggle bulk cash across the border, and a currency-reporting regime requires travelers to declare large sums. The Bank Secrecy Act and Treasury's financial intelligence office make it harder to launder money through the banking system, and sanctions can freeze the assets of those involved.

The FEND Off Fentanyl Act, signed in April 2024, added tools against the money side. It gave the government more authority to sanction foreign traffickers and those who help launder their proceeds. I explain how sanctions work in practice in How Sanctions Work, From a Presidential Order to a Frozen Bank Account. This is the part of the strategy that costs the cartels the most per dollar of government effort, and it gets almost no attention on cable television because there is nothing to film.

Point six: the same organizations run people and drugs

The last answer to the critic is the one that surprises people. The groups that control routes into the United States are not specialists in one product. Organizations that charge to move people across a stretch of territory are often the same ones that move drugs through it. Prosecutors and the Border Patrol have said for years that smuggling networks are diversified, and that controlling a piece of the border is an asset they profit from several ways.

Two things follow. First, a crossing between ports is not only about immigration. It is also a revenue stream for the same criminal enterprise that is flooding the country with poison. Second, when Border Patrol agents are pulled away from the line to process large numbers of arrivals, the stretch they were guarding gets thinner, and the organizations notice. This is a mechanism, not a claim about any single day. When agents are tied up in processing, fewer are watching the gaps, and the gaps are where the smugglers choose their moment. Controlling the line frees agents to do the work only they can do.

A smuggler's arithmetic, with invented numbers

Economists like to say that criminals respond to incentives, so let me show what "raising the cost of every route" means with a made-up example. These numbers are not data. They are a teaching device.

Suppose a trafficking organization has two routes, and each shipment on a route has some chance of being caught. On the port route the chance of interception is 20 percent. On the between-ports route it is 5 percent. A shipment is worth 100 units of profit if it arrives. The expected profit per shipment is the value times the chance of getting through, ignoring other costs. On the port route that is 100 times 0.80, which is 80 units. On the between-ports route it is 100 times 0.95, which is 95 units. A rational organization prefers the second route, and that is exactly the incentive that sends traffic through the gaps.

Now scan more vehicles at the ports and raise the port interception rate to 40 percent. The port route falls to 100 times 0.60, or 60 units, while the other route stays at 95 and gets even more attractive. If the only thing you did was strengthen the ports, you would be encouraging the smugglers to look at the gaps. Raise the between-ports interception rate to 30 percent as well, and that route drops to 100 times 0.70, which is 70 units. Both routes are now worse than they were, and the organization has to spend more, carry less per trip, or absorb more losses.

That is the logic of the layered answer. Strengthening one lane alone pushes the problem into the other. It is the reason a serious plan cannot be a slogan about either the ports or the line. It also gives you a clean rebuttal for the dinner table: "If you only harden the ports, you tell them which door to use."

What the critics should concede

I have given ground, so now ask the critic to do the same. Anyone who says "the wall has nothing to do with fentanyl" is overstating things, because the same criminal enterprises operate on both sides of the ports. And anyone who says "the wall will stop fentanyl" is wrong in the other direction, because the pattern of seizures says otherwise.

Both extremes make for good applause lines, and neither survives a look at the seizure data. The honest summary fits in one sentence: drug interdiction is mostly a ports-and-supply-chain problem, and border control between the ports is a supporting layer that closes a second door and starves the same organizations of another revenue stream.

The both-lanes agenda

Here is what a conservative should demand, in order of how much the family at home would feel it.

1. Funding for scanning and officers at the ports of entry. More inspection capacity means more of the dangerous traffic gets caught where most of it shows up.
2. Pressure on precursor chemical supply. Enforcement against the sellers and shippers, plus diplomatic pressure on the countries where the chemicals are produced.
3. Financial warfare on cartel money. Sanctions, prosecutions of launderers, and the full use of bulk-cash and banking laws.
4. Barriers, technology and agents between the ports. A layered line that raises the cost of the second route, as I argue in What a Border Barrier Actually Does, and What Honest Critics Get Right.
5. Prosecution of the domestic sellers. The pills still have to be sold to someone in a neighborhood, and local and federal prosecutors can stop that last link.

None of these competes with the others. Each covers a weakness in another, which is why I get impatient with the all-or-nothing debate. If you want to see how a state-level view compares, the work Republican attorneys general have done on cartel and opioid cases is covered on the Republicans page.

The bottom line

• The critic is right that most hard drugs are seized at ports of entry. That is a reason to fund port inspection, not a reason to abandon the line between the ports.
• Demand scanning capacity and enough officers at the ports first. It is the biggest single lever against fentanyl at the border.
• Go upstream. Precursor chemical controls, indictments of suppliers, and sanctions under laws like the FEND Off Fentanyl Act hit the supply chain where it is thinnest.
• Follow the money. Bulk-cash and banking laws, plus sanctions, cost the cartels more than anything built of steel.
• When someone tells you a wall will end fentanyl, or that it has nothing to do with it, say the true thing: it is one layer of a system, and the system needs every layer.