The largest-ever U.S. fentanyl bust came at a legal entry point. That shouldn’t come as a surprise.

By Siobhán O'Grady
February 1 at 2:29 PM

The truck was transporting cucumbers, but something much more dangerous was hidden inside: fentanyl, the extremely potent narcotic that has contributed to the epidemic of overdose deaths in the United States in recent years.

The stash, all 254 pounds of it, was seized last Saturday by U.S. Customs and Border Protection officials at the Nogales border crossing in Arizona. Officials announced Thursday it was their largest-ever seizure of fentanyl, and that they also discovered 295 pounds of methamphetamine during the bust.

And it was seized at a legal border crossing.

President Trump has repeated time and again a border wall will prevent illegal drugs from being trafficked into the United States. The Washington Post’s fact-checking team has previously debunked these claims and determined Trump has repeated some version of them at least 71 times.

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Vanda Felbab-Brown, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution who studies drug policy, said most drugs are smuggled into the United States through legal ports of entry. The drugs that do enter the United States are rarely carried by undocumented migrants, she said.

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