Mr. President, in just a few short weeks, President Trump has restored order to the southern border. If initial reports are accurate, approximately 8,450 illegal immigrants were apprehended trying to cross the border last month. Not long…
Mr. President, in just a few short weeks, President Trump has restored order to the southern border. If initial reports are accurate, approximately 8,450 illegal immigrants were apprehended trying to cross the border last month. Not long ago, Border Patrol would sometimes apprehend that many illegal immigrants in a single day--in a single day.
With less chaos, Border Patrol can focus on the criminals, cartels, terrorists, and traffickers who used to try to hide behind the surges, and that makes our country safer. But we have more work to do. Illegal drugs continue to plague too many communities and take too many Americans' lives. More Americans die of drug overdoses each year than Americans who died in the entirety of the Vietnam war. The New England Journal of Medicine estimated that 22 teenagers died of overdoses each week in 2022. That is an entire high school classroom lost every week to the scourge of drugs. And so many of these tragedies are from a lethal dose of fentanyl in a single pill--fentanyl that can frequently be traced back to the southern border.
This crisis is affecting every part of the country. We have seen it in South Dakota. Police in Sioux Falls seized enough fentanyl to kill 2.5 million people last year. Law enforcement reports that cartels have a presence in our area, and the price of a single pill has dropped from $40 a few years ago to $5 per pill today, largely because of increasing supply.
I am grateful for the men and women in law enforcement and first responders who work every day to save lives, and we need to help them get these drugs off our streets and prevent more overdose deaths.
The President is already taking major steps to halt the supply of drugs flowing across our borders, and, later today, the Senate will vote to begin consideration of the HALT Fentanyl Act, which will provide law enforcement with a critical tool to combat fentanyl.
Until a few years ago, the fentanyl analogs that have killed so many Americans were generally classified as schedule II substances, meaning they were less tightly regulated and violations carried lighter penalties. And if a particular analog was moved to schedule I, cartels would slightly alter the chemical composition of their fentanyl equivalents to avoid a crackdown--changes that made those drugs no less deadly.
But in 2018, President Trump put a stop to that. All fentanyl analogs were temporarily reclassified as schedule I drugs, enabling law enforcement to go after the people bringing this poison to our communities. Congress has extended this provision several times because it works, but the most recent extension expires at the end of this month. It is time that all fentanyl analogs are permanently classified as what they are: the most deadly kind of drugs.
Our colleagues Senators Cassidy, Grassley, and Heinrich have put forward a bill to do just that, expanding on Senator Johnson's leadership in this area and Senator Graham's good work. The HALT Fentanyl Act would permanently list fentanyl analogs on schedule I. Doing this will help law enforcement keep pace with the evolving threat of fentanyl that is driving drug overdoses in our country.
It has backing from a number of State attorneys general and from law enforcement. Attorney General Bondi has endorsed the bill. It has bipartisan support here in Congress, including bipartisan cosponsorship and strong bipartisan votes in both the Senate Judiciary Committee and in the House of Representatives.
I am also proud that this bill has come to the Senate floor through regular order. The Senate Judiciary Committee held a hearing on fentanyl, where members heard the heartbreaking stories of lives taken or changed forever by deadly fentanyl analogs. The committee held a markup and reported the bill to the floor by a bipartisan vote of 16 to 5, and now we are going to have a debate on the bill here on the floor of the U.S. Senate. And I hope that, in the coming days, we will have a productive process to make a law that will save American lives.
So, Mr. President, I thank Senators Cassidy, Grassley, and Heinrich for their leadership on this issue, and Senators Johnson and Graham for their work, as well, and I am looking forward to sending the HALT Fentanyl Act to President Trump's desk soon.
I yield the floor.
I suggest the absence of a quorum.