(CNSNews.com) - At least one Senate Democrat is willing to say that the crisis at the Southwest border has grown worse under the Biden administration.
"Colorado is being overrun by fentanyl," Sen. Michael Bennet, a Colorado Democrat, told leaders of the U.S. intelligence community on Wednesday when they testified about national security threats before the Senate intelligence committee.
"And we're at a point now, when a kid dies who is the age of my children, I no longer ask, what was the accident? Did they have a car accident? You know, was it leukemia? The question is, you know, was it suicide, was it fentanyl, or was it guns?
"And I guess from my perspective, I don't see any evidence that we're getting the cooperation that we need from Mexico to deal with this crisis at our border."
Bennet asked Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines, "What would it look like to have a neighbor to the south who is actually taking seriously the fact that we are losing more than 100,000 Americans a year, many of them children, who are taking drugs for the first time in their lives and then drop dead? What would it look like to have a partner in our neighbor country?" Bennet asked.
"I think we should talk about this in closed session," Haines replied.
"Okay, let's do that," Bennet agreed. "Because we haven't made any progress. Things have gotten a lot worse, and I'm sorry to say, they've gotten a lot worse during the course of this administration."
Fentanyl vs. racially/ethnically motivated extremists
At the same hearing on Wednesday, Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) also raised the fentanyl crisis.
Cotton pointed to page 33 of the Annual Threat Assessment, which says:
"Transnational racially or ethnically motivated violent extremists "continue to pose the most lethal threat to U.S. persons and interests, and a significant threat to a number of U.S. allies and partners through attacks and propaganda that espouses violence."
The report describes Transnational Racially or Ethnically Motivated Violent Extremists as "largely a decentralized movement of adherents to an ideology that espouses the use of violence to advance white supremacy, neo-Nazism, and other exclusionary cultural-nationalist beliefs. These actors increasingly seek to sow social divisions, support fascist-style governments, and attack government institutions…”
"I just found that astonishing," Cotton said. "Do you all agree with me that fentanyl is a more lethal threat to Americans than racially and ethnically motivated violent extremists?"
"Yes, absolutely," Haines replied.
She explained that in terms of global terrorism, racially/ethnically motivated extremism is the most lethal threat to Americans: "And it simply is a question of how many people, how many U.S. persons are killed or wounded as a consequence of attacks."
CIA Director William Burns agreed that racially/ethnically motivated attacks are a more lethal threat to Americans than ISIS and al Qaeda:
"I agree, Senator, with what Director Haines just said, that if you measure this in terms of American lives lost or people who were wounded, I think those statistics bear that out. I mean, we obviously take extremely seriously the threat posed by groups like al Qaeda, ISIS and Hezbollah as well -- that's our job as a foreign intelligence service as well."
"I find this astonishing," Cotton concluded.