As the Republican Party fields unhinged and even self-described unqualified candidates ahead of the midterm, Fox News is helping steer the GOP to a familiar strategy: fearmonger about immigration and the southern border. 

The 2022 iteration of this plan involves suggesting migrants and those seeking asylum at the border are responsible for the United States’ fentanyl crisis, even though most drug traffickers are U.S. citizens and there is no evidence that increased migration has impacted opioid smuggling. 

This election playbook is nothing new to the network that manufactured the threat of caravans from Latin America or feigned concern over migrants acting as COVID-19 disease vectors. And while there’s no question that the United States is facing a fentanyl crisis — according to the National Institutes of Health, synthetic opioids, primarily fentanyl, were the “main driver of drug overdose deaths with a 6-fold increase from 2015 to 2020” — Fox has the perpetrators wrong.

Drug seizure numbers have often been used as political cudgel, and Fox has used a recent increase in fentanyl seizures to imply that those seeking asylum at the border or crossing illegally have contributed to the severity of the opioid crisis either by carrying the drugs themselves or diverting limited resources away from drug smuggling identification due to unprecedented border apprehensions. (Seizures of fentanyl at the southern border have steadily increased since 2016 and experts suggest pandemic and legal travel restrictions at the border have increased smuggling and accelerated users’ transition to fentanyl.)

In reality, most drug traffickers bringing opiates into the U.S. are already legal citizens. According to the U.S. Sentencing Commission, 86.2% of convicted fentanyl drug traffickers in 2021 were citizens. U.S. citizen traffickers also bring fentanyl through legal crossing points hidden in large trucks and passenger vehicles — not on foot through illegal routes across the border. A relatively small amount is actually smuggled by cartels across the border between official ports: According to CBP, Border Patrol agents who were not at vehicle checkpoints have accounted for just 9% of fentanyl seizures near the border so far in 2022. 

Contrary to right-wing media narratives, the vast majority of migrants at the border also do not aid in fentanyl smuggling. The Cato Institute reported in 2021 that just 0.02% of arrests at the border resulted in fentanyl seizure. The organization also explained there is no evidence to suggest that asylum-seekers distract border agents from drug seizures, as trafficking arrest trends do not deviate measurably with greater numbers of asylum-seekers. In April, the American Immigration Council testified to Congress that “Title 42 [pandemic border restrictions] and increased migration has no impact on the flow of opiates into the United States.”

These facts have not stopped Fox from implementing this false “open border” framing in its coverage, as an NPR/Ipsos poll from last month found that 39% of Americans, and 60% of Republicans, believed that “most of the fentanyl entering the U.S. is smuggled in by unauthorized migrants crossing the border illegally.” By repeatedly running segments that conflate increased border apprehension numbers, undocumented immigration, and fentanyl smuggling, Fox is portraying the arrival of migrants and asylum-seekers as a public health crisis or even a “national security” threat, all as a ploy to galvanize Republican voters.

Here is a noncomprehensive list of the network pushing the false narrative that migrants are driving the severity of the opioid crisis: