Keystone Today

United States President Joe Biden seeks to end some immigration restrictions as crime rates increase. Drug use and crime have increased throughout the nation, including in Pennsylvania.

A Washington Post opinion writer recently attributed the increase in U.S. crime to Biden's immigration policy, citing the significant drug issues the nation has seen in the past year. 

"One major reason we are facing a surge in crime is the disaster Biden unleashed on our southern border," Washington Post writer Marc Thiessen said on April 20. 

The New York Times has voiced alarm about drugs coming in from Mexico to the United States as well. 

"Supplies of tainted pills, crudely pressed by Mexican cartels with chemicals from China and India, have escalated commensurately" The New York Times reported. 

Pennsylvania officials are concerned as well. 

“Fentanyl has rapidly replaced heroin as the dominant opioid in Pennsylvania" Pennsylvania's attorney general Josh Shapiro recently said in a statement. "Last year, our Bureau of Narcotics Investigation seized more fentanyl than they had in the last four years combined. The rise in fentanyl has also contributed to a rise in overdose deaths. Last year, we lost 15 Pennsylvanians each and every day to a drug overdose. Law enforcement and policymakers alike must continue to do more to combat this crisis and devote additional resources to stopping fentanyl at the Southern border. In Pennsylvania, overdose deaths rose by 16.4% in 2020, and continued rising to 5,438 reported overdose deaths in 2021, another 6% increase from the prior year."

Thiessen says that America's spike in crime and drug abuse is powered by Biden's immigration policy. Citing DHS statistics, Thiessen asserts that the increase in illegal migrants at the southern border during the past year has forced U.S. Customs and Border Protection to shift money and personnel away from drug enforcement and toward processing migrants. According to criminal noncitizen statistics from the U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP), the number of criminal noncitizen arrests during the Fiscal Year 2021 was 10,763, a 341% increase from FY2020 when the amount was only 2,438. 

The number of criminal noncitizen arrests for FY2022--which runs from October 01, 2021, to September 30, 2022-- currently stands at 5,985. The 20.4 million counterfeit pills taken by the DEA in 2021 provide enough fentanyl to kill every American. In recent months, Biden has voiced support for lifting Title 42, a COVID-19 law that has been utilized to efficiently deport migrants coming from Mexico. 

If the regulation ends, border patrol agents expect a sharp surge in illegal migrant border crossings. On May 20, U.S. District Judge Robert R. Summerhays of Louisiana granted a preliminary injunction that blocks the Biden administration from ending Title 42. Twenty-one states joined the lawsuit to block the end of the regulation.

Pennsylvania has seen a surge in crime as well, having the highest crime rate in the northeast. In 2020, there were 49,793 violent crimes reported in the state -- or 390 for every 100,000 people. No state reported a bigger year-over-year increase in violence than Pennsylvania. Driven by surges in aggravated assault and homicide, Pennsylvania's violent crime rate rose 27% from 2019 to 2020.