Officials in United States President Donald Trump’s cabinet continue to blame the northern border, and specifically Vancouver, for fentanyl entering the U.S.
Director of the FBI, Kash Patel, appeared on Fox News on Sunday saying that despite Trump sealing the border, fentanyl is still coming into the U.S.
“Where are all the narco traffickers going to keep bringing this stuff into the country?” Patel said.
“The northern border. Our adversaries have partnered up with the CCP (Chinese Communist Party) and others, Russia, Iran, on a variety of different criminal enterprises, and they’re going and they are sailing around Vancouver and coming in by air.”
Patel said it was the lack of cooperation from federal authorities and prior administrations to secure the northern border, which is allowing violent crime to continue.
“Now we’re focused on it and we’re calling our state and local law enforcement partners up there, but you know who has to get to step in is Canada because they’re making it up there and shipping it down here,” he added.
“And I don’t care about getting into this debate of making someone the 51st state or not, but they are our partner in the north. And say what you want about Mexico, but they helped us seal the southern border. The facts speak for themselves.”
The mayor of Blaine in Washington state told Global News that she was told the additional searches at the Canada-U.S. border were targeting drug traffickers.
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“If drugs are coming into the U.S. it means that money must be going back across the border to pay for the drugs,” Mary Lou Steward said.
“So that’s also what they were looking for when they were doing these searches of outbound cars.”
However, the latest data from the U.S. Customs and Border Patrol shows 6.3 kg of fentanyl were seized at the northern border in April, which is a fraction of the nearly 300 kg of fentanyl intercepted from Mexico.
BC Conservatives are calling on the NDP government to launch public inquires into the diversion of safe supply and drug decriminalization as well as a bipartisan task force on fentanyl trafficking.
“It’s concerning but I don’t think this is something that we should write off as being rhetoric attached to the trade war, because our own Canadian Intelligence Service reports do point to an increase in the amount of organized crime groups producing drugs here in Canada and it’s something we need to take action on now,” Elenore Sturko, the BC Conservative solicitor general critic told Global News.
The chair of B.C.’s tariff committee, Ravi Kahlon, calls the latest claim by the U.S. nothing more than “misinformation” aimed at justifying unfair tariffs on Canada.
“All of this is a distraction,” he said.
“The tariffs that they’re bringing in were brought in on the guise that they were addressing fentanyl, but their own data is showing that the percentage of fentanyl coming into the U.S. is very, very small.”
© 2025 Global News, a division of Corus Entertainment Inc.
