Scare tactic or urgent crisis? Adkins focuses on fentanyl, border in Kansas campaign
In August, Amanda Adkins, the Republican nominee in Kansas’ 3rd Congressional District, made a trip to McAllen, Texas, about 1,000 miles from the seat she’s seeking, to observe migrants crossing the southern border.
It’s a pilgrimage made by most Republicans who either are in Congress or hope to be, one where they often get an appearance on Fox News and can be used as a talking point on the campaign trail.
At a recent campaign stop in Miami County, as part of a Kansas Republican bus tour, Adkins was doing just that.
“Crime in this district, underlying, is always about drugs,” Adkins said during the tour. “It is always about the cartels and drugs coming across the southern border … into this district.”
Across the country, Republicans have emphasized crime as they attempt to win control of Congress. The Congressional Leadership Fund, a political action committee aligned with House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, has run ads highlighting growing crime rates in competitive races, tying the issue to progressive activists’ calls to defund the police.
But in the heavily suburban 3rd Congressional District, the conversation around crime has focused around drug overdoses — specifically fentanyl — as Republicans in the district and across the country use the opioid epidemic to talk about immigration at the southern border in an appeal to their party’s conservative base.
“Drugs are a big problem.” Adkins said during a September press conference. “But so is human trafficking and so is the humanitarian crisis. All of these things come together as just the outcome when there is a lack of a real plan on the part of the Biden administration.”
Rep. Sharice Davids, the Democratic incumbent in the Kansas swing district, has attempted to defend against the claims that she is not doing enough on immigration. Earlier this month, Davids put out an ad talking about her record on immigration, saying she supported better border security but also wanted to create a pathway to citizenship for some immigrants.
“Rep. Davids has worked under both the Trump and Biden Administrations to secure our border and send resources to our local police departments,” said Ellie Turner, Davids’ spokeswoman. “She’s met with parents, teachers, and law enforcement at the local, state, and federal level to hammer out real, bipartisan actions on the fentanyl crisis. That’s what leadership on public safety looks like.”
Fentanyl is a synthetic opioid that is used as pain management for people being treated for cancer. Over the past few years law enforcement has seen an increase in fentanyl, and fentanyl overdoses, as more products contain the powerful opioid.
Between 2011 and 2020, the number of overdose deaths in Kansas rose by 73.5%, according to a report by the Kansas Department of Health and Environment in September 2022. About 64.3% of the opioid deaths were from synthetic opioids, the category that contains fentanyl.
“Fentanyl is probably the number one illegal drug concern in law enforcement right now and it has become a huge, huge issue,” said Ed Klumpp, a former Topeka police chief and a lobbyist for several law enforcement agencies. “We are finding fentanyl laced into all kinds of other drugs now — laced into meth, it’s laced into cocaine, everything.”
The Kansas counties where people are most vulnerable to fentanyl overdoses aren’t in Kansas’ 3rd Congressional District. The Kansas Department of Health and Environment’s report found that the places where people were most vulnerable were in the southeastern part of the state, or in neighboring Leavenworth and Douglas counties, places with fewer married households and where incomes are lower.
Still, Adkins has emphasized the issue, using it to criticize Davids on how the federal government has handled immigration at the southern border.
“The cartels are making billions of dollars due to our lack of strong policy, billions of dollars on trafficking of drugs and humans,” Adkins said at a September press conference.
Illegal immigration and drug trafficking are two separate businesses, said Anthony Fontes, a geography and ethnography professor at American University who focuses on migration and illicit economies. There are the people who focus on migrants, charging them exorbitant amounts to smuggle them across the border. Then there are the people who focus on moving drugs across the border.
Fentanyl is more valuable per kilogram than most drugs, so drug traffickers usually don’t entrust migrants who are not professional drug traffickers to move it into the United States. Instead, they use different routes and keep the migrant smugglers out of those routes.
While there has been an increase in the amount of fentanyl seized by border patrol over the past few years — U.S. Customs and Border Protection seized more than 12,300 pounds of fentanyl in Fiscal Year 2022 — most of those seizures have come at legal border crossing points
“I think politicians, especially on the right in the U.S., have long imagined that the movement of migrant bodies coming up from Mexico, Central America and so on, they equate that with moving to drugs,” Fontes said. “And that’s always been false, for the most part, these things are very much separate flows.”
Adkins’ use of drug trafficking to talk about immigration is tied to the national messaging of the Republican Party.
There is a long history of politicians using immigration as a political wedge issue, even before former President Donald Trump put immigration at the forefront of the right-wing populist movement he helped lead. The issue was a staple in Republican primaries in the early 2000s, as Rush Limbaugh, the influential talk radio host who died in 2021, railed against immigration on his show.
Vanessa Cruz Nichols, a political science professor at Indiana University, said Adkins’ use of fentanyl is a textbook example of politicians using anxiety and fear to motivate voters.
“If they can create a sense of urgency and remind voters of the looming threat of any sort of issue that is going to be problematic for their state, or for the safety of their families, or the safety of their communities, they’re more likely to don’t pay attention,” Cruz Nichols said.
Since fentanyl is a relatively new problem, politicians have only recently used it to talk about drug trafficking. In a September video spearheaded by Sen. Roger Marshall, a Kansas Republican, a group of Republican senators warned parents about the dangers of “rainbow fentanyl” in Halloween candy, a concern at least one professor, from the University of Delaware, called “Halloween sadism.”
An internal Senate Republican memo, obtained by the Star, pins the blame for the fentanyl crisis on the Democratic Party, saying that border patrol is so busy dealing with migrants that it has trouble stopping the flow of drugs across the border.
Fontes said the focus on the southern border points a finger away from the driving factor of the drug crisis — demand for drugs in the United States.
“There’s always going to be another route,” Fontes said. “Even if you were to stop every point of entry through the southern border, there would be other avenues. And that’s the truth of the war on drugs for the last 50 years.”
Marshall, who was on the bus tour with Adkins, has made fentanyl one of his top issues in Congress. He filed a bill earlier this year that would make social media companies report people who are using their platforms to sell illegal drugs. His legislation was inspired by Cooper Davis, a Shawnee teen who died after an overdose on a fentanyl-laced pill that his parents say was purchased by a friend using Snapchat.
Outside groups — and Adkins’ own campaign — don’t appear to believe crime is the campaign’s strongest argument in the 3rd Congressional District. While Adkins often mentions the issue on the campaign trail and has held events that have focused on drug overdoses and immigration, none of her ads or ads run by the Congressional Leadership Fund focus on the issue. Instead, they train their focus on the economy, an issue that cuts across a wider swath of the electorate.
Still, Davids has had to defend her record on immigration. Her campaign points to her vote for a bipartisan immigration bill that included funding for a border wall, her support for two bills that would address fentanyl trafficking and the fact that she recently voted to provide more funding for law enforcement.
The National Republican Congressional Committee has criticized Davids over votes she took blocking some conservative priorities about drug trafficking and immigration. It is common practice in the House for the minority party, currently Republicans, to attempt to force votes on certain issues that have a political impact and for the majority party to reject them.
“It’s just textbook in the sense that you see scapegoating in general, in American history,” Cruz Nichols said. “And it’s easy to point to a group that doesn’t have voting power, right? So if you scapegoat illegal immigrants, undocumented immigrants, what are they going to do? And so Americans then can blame someone.”
This story was originally published October 20, 2022 at 5:30 AM.
