Now Republicans Are Blaming Sanctuary Cities for the Opioid Epidemic

A month after linking the drug crisis to Medicaid, GOP lawmakers have a new scapegoat.

Bruce Chambers/The Orange County Register/ZUMA

Fight disinformation: Sign up for the free Mother Jones Daily newsletter and follow the news that matters.

Republicans in Congress have a new scapegoat for the country’s opioid crisis: undocumented immigrants. At a hearing on Capitol Hill Thursday, GOP lawmakers repeatedly claimed that so-called sanctuary-city policies are fueling the drug epidemic—a theory that a number of experts say simply isn’t true.

Sanctuary cities are generally described as places that limit how local law enforcement can work with federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials to help deport undocumented immigrants. Many Republicans fiercely oppose such policies and have sought to turn them into an electoral wedge issue.

“We have heard countless stories of sanctuary practices and the havoc they wreck on public safety, national security, and the sanctity of the rule of law,” said Rep. Raúl Labrador (R-Idaho), chairman of the House Judiciary Subcommittee on Immigration and Border Security. “Our public safety and our public health are tied to eradicating opioids, which can never be accomplished when the force multiplier that is ICE is sidelined.”

Labrador was careful not to claim that sanctuary cities were the primary reason for the crisis. “We are not here to discuss the underlying causes of the epidemic, and to be sure this committee is not asserting that sanctuary policies have caused such an epidemic,” he said. “But the fight against opioids at the law enforcement level has, as asserted by our witnesses’ written testimony, greatly relied on strong federal partnerships, including partnerships with ICE.”

Immigration isn’t the first hot-button political issue that Republicans have tried to link to opioids. Senate Republicans held a hearing last month in which they argued that Obamacare’s expansion of Medicaid—the government’s health insurance program for the poor—was worsening the epidemic. (Experts rejected that theory, too.)

At Thursday’s hearing, law enforcement officers claimed that while heroin and other illicit drugs often come from Mexico, sanctuary policies prohibit cops from asking about alleged drug dealers’ immigration status or contacting ICE. The policies are “creating a safe haven for criminality,” said Jackson County, Texas, Sheriff A.J. Louderback. “Wherever sanctuary policies exist, your law enforcement is not able or permitted to cooperate, communicate or partner to fight crime as a team.”

Nick Rogers, the president of the Denver Police Protective Association, told lawmakers that he repeatedly experiences a familiar story: He arrests an undocumented immigrant for allegedly dealing heroin, and then, months later, he arrests the same suspect again, this time with a different fake ID. The city’s sanctuary policy, he said, has created “a city that is much less safe than it was prior to this [sanctuary] ordinance.” In interviews with local media, Denver Police Chief Matt Murray has disputed some of Rogers’ arguments. “He clearly doesn’t understand the training or ordinance,” Murray told Denver’s CBS4.

Democrats on the committee criticized the premise of the hearing. Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.) said there was no “factual basis in connecting so called sanctuary city policies with the opioid crisis.”

“It would be laughable if it weren’t so serious,” she said. “If it weren’t so hurtful to the characterization of immigrants across this country.”

The Republicans’ witnesses were countered by Keith Humphreys, a Stanford psychiatry professor who served as a drug policy adviser under Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama. Opioid addiction and overprescription—not immigration and sanctuary city policies—are the root of the epidemic, he explained. “Prescription opioids come from American companies, are prescribed by American doctors, overseen by American regulators,“ he said. “Arresting heroin dealers from other nations will thus never eliminate the root of our problem.”

Harvard criminologist Thomas Abt told Mother Jones that there is no evidence to suggest that sanctuary policies are fueling the epidemic—and regardless, such policies don’t stop law enforcement from targeting and imprisoning drug dealers. “This hearing appears to be another in the ongoing effort to tie public safety challenges like violent crime and opioids to the administration’s anti-immigration agenda,” he said.

Studies have repeatedly supported a public health-oriented approach to the epidemic—one that emphasizes reducing opioid prescription rates and increasing access to treatment and the overdose reversal drug naloxone. But Attorney General Jeff Sessions has taken a law enforcement-focused approach reminiscent of the War on Drugs, encouraging mandatory minimum sentences for even low-level drug offenders and giving dozens of speeches connecting opioid overdoses to violent crime and immigration. 

Trump and Sessions are crime dinosaurs, using outdated approaches to crime policy that lack evidence of effectiveness,” said Abt. “Honestly, sometimes it seems as if they fell asleep in the early 90s and just woke up.”

AN IMPORTANT UPDATE

We’re falling behind our online fundraising goals and we can’t sustain coming up short on donations month after month. Perhaps you’ve heard? It is impossibly hard in the news business right now, with layoffs intensifying and fancy new startups and funding going kaput.

The crisis facing journalism and democracy isn’t going away anytime soon. And neither is Mother Jones, our readers, or our unique way of doing in-depth reporting that exists to bring about change.

Which is exactly why, despite the challenges we face, we just took a big gulp and joined forces with the Center for Investigative Reporting, a team of ace journalists who create the amazing podcast and public radio show Reveal.

If you can part with even just a few bucks, please help us pick up the pace of donations. We simply can’t afford to keep falling behind on our fundraising targets month after month.

Editor-in-Chief Clara Jeffery said it well to our team recently, and that team 100 percent includes readers like you who make it all possible: “This is a year to prove that we can pull off this merger, grow our audiences and impact, attract more funding and keep growing. More broadly, it’s a year when the very future of both journalism and democracy is on the line. We have to go for every important story, every reader/listener/viewer, and leave it all on the field. I’m very proud of all the hard work that’s gotten us to this moment, and confident that we can meet it.”

Let’s do this. If you can right now, please support Mother Jones and investigative journalism with an urgently needed donation today.

payment methods

AN IMPORTANT UPDATE

We’re falling behind our online fundraising goals and we can’t sustain coming up short on donations month after month. Perhaps you’ve heard? It is impossibly hard in the news business right now, with layoffs intensifying and fancy new startups and funding going kaput.

The crisis facing journalism and democracy isn’t going away anytime soon. And neither is Mother Jones, our readers, or our unique way of doing in-depth reporting that exists to bring about change.

Which is exactly why, despite the challenges we face, we just took a big gulp and joined forces with the Center for Investigative Reporting, a team of ace journalists who create the amazing podcast and public radio show Reveal.

If you can part with even just a few bucks, please help us pick up the pace of donations. We simply can’t afford to keep falling behind on our fundraising targets month after month.

Editor-in-Chief Clara Jeffery said it well to our team recently, and that team 100 percent includes readers like you who make it all possible: “This is a year to prove that we can pull off this merger, grow our audiences and impact, attract more funding and keep growing. More broadly, it’s a year when the very future of both journalism and democracy is on the line. We have to go for every important story, every reader/listener/viewer, and leave it all on the field. I’m very proud of all the hard work that’s gotten us to this moment, and confident that we can meet it.”

Let’s do this. If you can right now, please support Mother Jones and investigative journalism with an urgently needed donation today.

payment methods

We Recommend

Latest

Sign up for our free newsletter

Subscribe to the Mother Jones Daily to have our top stories delivered directly to your inbox.

Get our award-winning magazine

Save big on a full year of investigations, ideas, and insights.

Subscribe

Support our journalism

Help Mother Jones' reporters dig deep with a tax-deductible donation.

Donate