Trafficked: How Joe Biden’s Open Border Policies Have Fueled America’s Fentanyl Epidemic

May 10, 2021 began like any other afternoon for 15-year-old Michael Stabile. The freshman at Lake City High School in Coeur d’Alene, Idaho — who had just been promoted at his after-school job at Pokéworks restaurant — came home, greeted his parents, and “went to into his room and turned on his music like he normally does,” according to his sister, Kristin. But as evening drew on, his parents checked on him, only to find him passed out in his room, unresponsive. Though they administered CPR, they were unable to revive him. The teenager died of an overdose after taking one or more counterfeit prescription pills secretly laced with fentanyl.

While Stabile was irreplaceable, law enforcement made him part of a grim statistic: The teen was one of five people to suffer a fatal overdose of fentanyl-contaminated pills in Kootenai County during an eight-day period.

“It could’ve been anybody’s child,” warns Kristin.  “It can be anyone’s child.”

Patricia Saldivar of Texas agrees. Her 22-year-old daughter, Cassandra, died during a party in June when she took what she thought was Percocet, but was in fact a counterfeit pill that contained a lethal amount of fentanyl. Patricia, who now must raise her two-and-a-half-year-old grandson, rented a billboard across from AT&T Stadium in Arlington (the home of the Dallas Cowboys), with a picture of her daughter and the message, “1 pill. That’s all it took.” Patricia said she rented this memorial in a highly trafficked area because she’s trying to “spread awareness so that nobody has to go through the same thing I did.”

Officials say it’s impossible to overestimate the deadly impact of fentanyl, in any of its forms, on America’s young people — and that lax border policies implemented by the Biden administration are reaping a deadly harvest nationwide.

Fentanyl: the number-one killer of teenagers in some areas

Too many young adults — and minors — are already suffering the same fate as Michael and Cassandra. “[T]he group of people that it’s hitting is the 16 to 24-year-old group because, again, it appears to be a safe drug, they think it’s a pharmaceutical drug,” said Tarrant County, Texas, Sheriff Bill E. Waybourn in June. Neighboring Arizona sees a similar pattern. “This isn’t a figure of speech; this is reality: Fentanyl overdoses have replaced car accidents as the leading cause of death for people 19 and younger in Pima County,” Arizona, said the state’s governor, Doug Ducey (R),