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Congressman Mark Green joins effort to classify fentanyl as public health threat under Title 42




Congressman Mark Green, who now represents part of Nashville in Tennessee’s new 7th Congressional District, was named chairman of the U.S. House Homeland Security Committee earlier this month.Vivian Jones / Main Street Nashville/cheatham county exchange

Congressman Mark Green, who now represents part of Nashville in Tennessee’s new 7th Congressional District, was named chairman of the U.S. House Homeland Security Committee earlier this month.Vivian Jones / Main Street Nashville/cheatham county exchange

Tennessee Congressman Mark Green plans to introduce legislation to classify fentanyl as a threat to public health under Title 42, allowing border enforcement to expedite removals of individuals apprehended with the drug.

Green, who now represents part of Nashville in Tennessee’s new 7th Congressional District, was named chairman of the U.S. House Homeland Security Committee earlier this month. He says he’s working on a bill that would allow the government to continue expedited removal of people who cross the border illegally under the contested Title 42 provision that’s currently still expediting removals because of the COVID-19 pandemic.

“It’s hard to make the argument that COVID, now, is a reason for Title 42 to be employed,” Green told Main Street Nashville in an interview.

In 2020, the Trump administration designated COVID-19 as a public health threat, allowing the 1940s-era Title 42 to become a mechanism for speedy removals of unlawful migrants at the U.S. southern border.

A federal judge in Washington, D.C., ruled in November that the pandemic-related provision could no longer be used to expedite removals, but the U.S. Supreme Court ruled last month to allow the policy to stay in place.

Now, Green says, a different health threat is coming into the country, and the same provision should be used to stop unlawful migrants and deadly fentanyl from coming across the border. Green’s legislative team is working to draft a bill.

“Let’s face it: Fentanyl is coming across the border, and 107,000 Americans died last year. That’s over a billion over the course of 10 years, if my math is correct. So that’s a crisis. That’s a healthcare crisis.” Green says.

More than 107,000 Americans died from drug overdoses and drug poisonings in 2021, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. About 67% of those deaths involved synthetic opioids like fentanyl. Only two milligrams of fentanyl is considered a lethal dose.

“Take the fentanyl crisis, call it a health crisis and use that to further shut down the flow of the border,” Green said.

While more than 2.76 million individuals encountered U.S. Border Patrol during the 2022 fiscal year, authorities expelled more than 1.05 million people who crossed the border illegally under Title 42 during the same time period, according to the U.S. Customs and Border Protection.

The number of border crossers who returned under Title 42 has gone down in the last year — from more than 109,000 in March 2022 to 47,500 in December.

“Obviously, they’re not executing the Title 42 rulings in an appropriate way,” Green said. “Everything that the president has done has been to speed people into the country.”

As chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee, Green says securing the border is among his top priorities, by bolstering infrastructure, technology and human resources. That means prioritizing construction of border barriers and roads to allow regular patrol vehicles.

“They’re catching a lot more fentanyl and at the ports of entry, but there’s a lot more fentanyl that’s getting through because they can’t screen every vehicle that comes through,” Green says. “We want to get them the sensors that they can use to look at all the vehicles that come through for things like fentanyl and human trafficking.”

Tennessee Sen. Bill Hagerty has introduced a similar bill that would add large-scale drug smuggling as a basis for expedited removal under Title 42. Senate Democrats blocked the bill twice last year.

Tennessee’s federal delegation is not the only one working to add designations to fentanyl to increase law enforcement and penalties around synthetic opioids, including fentanyl.

In the state legislature, Rep. Mike Sparks, R-Smyrna, has introduced a bill that would classify fentanyl as a “weapon of mass destruction” and allow dealers to be prosecuted for first-degree murder and subject to the death penalty.

Last September, Tennessee Attorney General Jonathan Skrmetti has joined a multistate effort to request President Joe Biden to classify fentanyl as a weapon of mass destruction, which would require federal agencies to coordinate with the Department of Defense to orchestrate a response.

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