According to a press release, Senator John Barrasso recently went to Texas with six other Republican senators to assess the southern border.

Along with Barrasso, Senators Ted Cruz and John Cornyn from Texas, James Lankford from Oklahoma, Joni Ernst from Iowa, and Ron Johnson from Wisconsin also went to the border.

The senators met with Border Patrol agents, went on a midnight patrol, met with local landowners, and did a helicopter tour over the Rio Grande Valley.

Barrasso said in the release:

"The president is quick to condemn [Border Patrol] for doing their job, while he refuses to do his job of protecting the border from the invasion that is coming in from this southern border," Barrasso said. "President Biden has created a crisis in this country – a humanitarian crisis, a criminal crisis, a national security crisis."

When it comes to how Biden created the issues on the border, Barrasso, along with seven other Republicans on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, published a 56-page report on how the Biden Administration has increased illegal border crossings.

The main findings of the report were that Biden should reinstate Title 42 enforcement and the Migrant Protection Protocols, build better migration programs in Central American countries, and prosecute people who are a part of transnational criminal organizations.

In a video at the border, Barrasso said:

"It's the drugs that are killing Americans. They talk about the amount of drugs that they were able to seize, but there are a lot of drugs that aren't being seized, and that's why right now, the death rate from fentanyl, illegal narcotics in the United States, is at an all-time high," Barrasso said. "The number one cause of death in America today for adults under the age of 45 is drug-related, and so much of it fentanyl, coming across this southern border from Mexico to the United States. And the money that is coming from this goes to the gangs, goes to the cartels. We talked to the border patrol about their budget. The amount of money for the border patrol here for the whole year is very small compared to what cartels are able to make every week through the smuggling of drugs, the smuggling of people."

Deaths due to overdoses were at an all-time high in 2020, up to 91,799, an increase from 70,630 in 2019, and up from 52,404 in 2015, with synthetic opioids like fentanyl as the primary cause of death.

Seizures of fentanyl at the southern border increased in 2020 during the Trump Administration, going from 233 pounds seized in May 2020 to 676 pounds seized in June 2020, and since then drug seizures at the border have fluctuated.

The budget of Customs and Border Protection has increased most years since its creation in 2003, going from $5.9 billion to $17.7 billion in 2021.

It is unclear how much money cartels make every week, with one estimate saying Mexican cartels generate $21 billion in revenue each year, but the exact figure is difficult to quantify.

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