"100% of heroin/fentanyl epidemic is because we don't have a WALL." — Ann Coulter on Tuesday, January 30th, 2018 in a tweet
"Left Behind by Trump’s Boom: The Rural Americans Who Elected Him [...] Federal money rescued rural America after the Great Depression of the 1930s, as the government poured resources into job-creating investments. Today, Washington’s main presence in places like Clay County is the U.S. Department of Agriculture. It helps with everything from building houses to providing medical services. Clay County got a $50,000 grant this year for an ambulance, an urgent need in a region blighted by opioid addiction. "
Would a border wall have prevented the opioid epidemic?
By Paul Specht on Friday, February 2nd, 2018 at 1:17 p.m.
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In his State of the Union speech on Tuesday, President Donald Trump proposed a stricter immigration system that he says would keep Americans safer and help address the country’s opioid epidemic.
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Even though a lot of heroin comes from Mexico, it’s not always walked across the border. As PolitiFact pointed out in this fact check of Trump .. https://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2016/sep/13/donald-trump/trump-right-heroin-coming-through-southern-border/ , traffickers typically smuggle the drugs in through secret compartments in vehicles crossing the border (through legal checkpoints and illegal crossings), transport them to stash houses in hub cities like Dallas, Los Angeles and Phoenix, and then distribute to the Midwest and East Coast.
"Traffickers hide their illicit cargo in secret, state–of–the art compartments designed for cars, or under legal goods in trailer trucks. And they have learned many techniques for fooling the border patrol," Vanda Felbab-Brown wrote in an August 2017 essay for the Brookings Institute, a nonprofit public policy organization based in Washington, DC.
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Our ruling
Coulter, alluding to the opioid crisis, said the heroin and fentanyl epidemic was "100 percent" caused by America’s lack of a border wall. Heroin is mostly trafficked from Mexico, mostly hidden in cargo – not by crossing the border through the desert. Fentanyl comes from both Mexico and Canada, and can also be transported through the mail. Coulter’s "100 percent" claim is far off-base no matter how we parse it. We rate this claim Pants on Fire.
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