When it comes to the overdose crisis, Donald Trump would like you to believe that the problem — along with almost every other problem currently facing the United States — is rooted in immigration.

In a section of the 2024 GOP party platform titled “Secure the Border,” Republicans draw a clear line of connection from immigration to fentanyl, promising to both “use all resources needed” to stop what they refer to as the “invasion” of undocumented migrants, and to “impose a full Fentanyl Blockade on the waters of our Region.”

Similarly, the Republican National Convention in July featured a speech by Anne Fundner, whose 15-year-old son died tragically of a fentanyl overdose. She told the crowd that she blames President Joe Biden, “border czar” Vice President Kamala Harris and “every Democrat who supports open borders” for the death of her son. “We need a president who will seal the border, aggressively prosecute drug dealers, and stop communist China from poisoning our children,” she added. Trump’s running mate, Sen. J.D. Vance (R-Ohio), has long weaponized his own family’s history with addiction to bolster anti-immigrant policies, including positing a conspiracy theory that President Joe Biden could have “open[ed] up the floodgates to the border” to allow fentanyl into the U.S. “to kill a bunch of MAGA voters.”

Of course, this rhetoric aims to sow fear; it is not rooted in truth. While the majority of fentanyl is seized at the U.S.-Mexico border, 93 percent of those seizures happened at legal crossing points last year. More than 86 percent of people sentenced for trafficking fentanyl in 2023 were U.S. citizens, and almost all fentanyl is smuggled for U.S. consumers.

Kamala Harris could have chosen to highlight these facts during the presidential debate on September 10. Instead, she used the........

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