#Texas criminalizes fentanyl amid drug surge from border crisis

Amid an 800 percent surge in seizures of fentanyl statewide due to porous borders, Texas will create a new criminal offense for the manufacture or delivery of the drug, the governor has announced.

Speaking to reporters at a presser Thursday, Gov. Greg Abbott said he planned to soon sign a bill that had passed the Texas Senate, as overdose cases on the synthetic opioid spike.

“Well, in addition to the people coming across the border, there is something else crossing the border. It is unseen to the general public, but importantly, this unseen thing coming across the border is deadly dangerous,” Abbott explained, referring to the drug.

“Young, unsuspecting Texans are buying drugs that are laced with fentanyl. They are buying a death sentence,” Abbott said.

The cause, the Republican governor said, is President Biden’s border policies, which have caused a crisis for those in the region.

“It’s clear that Biden’s open border policies are unleashing deadly consequences right here in the Dallas-Fort Worth area,” Abbott told the room of reporters.

“Unaccompanied minors, they surge the border, Border Patrol officers get fully occupied simply processing, the people coming across the border,” he continued. “That opens up large gaps of tens, or sometimes hundreds of miles, where the drug cartels have the ability to get fentanyl across the border.”

Fentanyl is a highly addictive synthetic opioid. It is between 50 to 100 times more potent than morphine.

While the problem began to emerge in 2020, during which the state’s Department of Public Safety seized 11 pounds of fentanyl, it exploded in the first four months of 2021, Abbott explained.

In that time, DPS seized a staggering 95 pounds, enough to administer 21.5 million lethal doses.

The White House did not immediately respond to The Post’s request for comment on the matter.

The Biden administration’s undoing of former President Donald Trump’s border policies has prompted a flood of Central American and Mexican illegal migrants at the US border, including thousands of unescorted children.

Central Americans looking for refuge from the Northern Triangle countries — Guatemala, El Salvador and Honduras — have taken these policy moves, as well as the overwhelmingly more welcoming tone from Democrats, as a sign that Biden is inviting them to cross the border.

Insisting that the border was not facing a crisis, Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas said in early March that the problems the agency faced should be blamed on the previous administration.

The data, however, overwhelmingly shows that migrants were flooding the border because they believed Biden would welcome them with open arms.

As Mayorkas denied the existence of a crisis, Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador blamed the new president for it, arguing that the “expectations” he set left migrants with the perception that they would be let into the US.