Earlier this week, U.S. Rep. Jaime Herrera Beutler, R-Battle Ground, sent a letter to President Joe Biden inviting him to meet with the Lewis County Joint Narcotics Enforcement Team (JNET), a narcotic-focused task force in Southwest Washington, in order to gain a deeper understanding of drug addiction and overdoses in the area that the congresswoman attributed in part to border policies.
Because the president had planned a visit to Portland and Seattle this week, Herrera Beutler recommended a half hour meeting with a narcotics task force, saying it would be “illuminating” for him. She said the meeting may well inform a change in his administration’s border policy.
In Biden’s first visit to the Pacific Northwest as president, he was scheduled to talk about infrastructure and rising costs. Herrera Beutler said those were important topics, but stated in her letter that “a more immediate physical threat to residents in every single community throughout this region is the overdose epidemic that has been fed by the border crisis. That’s why I invite you to meet with one of the narcotics-focused law enforcement teams here in Southwest Washington to gain a deeper understanding of how Americans have been impacted by what’s happening at our borders.”
The letter continued, “Your Drug Enforcement Administration has detailed how drug cartels are smuggling deadly fentanyl and other illicit poisons through the southern border and up the I-5 corridor into the Pacific Northwest. The Lewis County Joint Narcotics Enforcement Team shared with me in a recent meeting that 95% of the drugs it has confiscated have originated from Mexico.”
