Sessions: Obama’s lawless immigration policy is allowing cartels to flood U.S. with heroin

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=46tZMbNtJUY
(Video above: Senator Jeff Sessions on the Senate floor discussing the heroin epidemic)

WASHINGTON — Senator Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.) on Tuesday took to the Senate floor to warn that President Barack Obama’s lack of immigration enforcement is enabling Mexican drug cartels to “flood our country with cheap heroin.”

Sessions has been a frequent critic of the Obama administration’s immigration policies, including the significant decline in removals of individuals living and working in the interior of the country and their tolerance of so called sanctuary cities. U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) data has shown the agency releases tens of thousands of deportable aliens each year, in spite of them being deemed by ICE to pose a criminal threat.

According to the Center for Disease Control and Prevention, over 47,000 people died from drug overdoses in the United States in 2014 — one every 12 minutes. Sixty-seven percent of those overdoses involved opioids, triple the rate of the year 2000.

While treatment and accountability are critical to breaking the cycle of addiction, it is not the whole solution. We must also reduce the availability of heroin.

According to DEA’s 2015 Threat Assessment, Mexican drug cartels “control drug trafficking across the Southwest Border and are moving to expand their presence in the United States, particularly in heroin markets.”… Our unsecured borders make it easy for the cartels to flood our country with cheap heroin, and the administration has made it clear that officers are not to deviate from the President’s lawless immigration policy.

Sessions, a former U.S. Attorney and Alabama Attorney General, also took aim at the U.S. Justice Department for not vigorously prosecuting drug traffickers.

Attorney General Holder ordered Federal prosecutors not to charge certain drug offenders with offenses that carry mandatory minimum sentences that are in law… This is directing prosecutors not to follow the law. It has contributed to a decrease in the number of traffickers being prosecuted and convicted.

Make no mistake, Federal prisons are not filled with low level, nonviolent drug possessors. According to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, 99.7 percent of drug offenders in Federal prison at the end of fiscal year 2012 were convicted of drug trafficking offenses, not drug possession. Drug trafficking is inherently violent activity, and it only serves to fund the drug cartels while fueling violence in our cities.

We need to enforce our laws, and we have to make the consequences of drug trafficking a deterrent… Law enforcement plays a critical role in it. This means supporting, not blocking the efforts of law enforcement to do their jobs and giving them the tools to arrest drug traffickers and be effective at the border, putting them in jail, not giving them early release so they can commit more crimes.

We have to stop people from becoming addicts in the first place, and we can’t let the fact that we have a heroin abuse epidemic cause us to forget that we have a drug trafficking epidemic too. Law enforcement is prevention.

Sessions’ full remarks on the Senate floor can be viewed in the video above.