The Washington Post is under fire after publishing a story over the weekend that labeled the dramatic drop in fentanyl seizures at the U.S.-Mexico border as a “mystery”—despite the coinciding timeline with the return of President Donald Trump’s stringent border security measures.
The Mysterious Drop in Fentanyl Seizures on the U.S.-Mexico Border by correspondent Mary Beth Sheridan reported that monthly fentanyl seizures have plummeted from an average of 1,700 pounds in 2024 to just 746 pounds in 2025. While the piece questions what might be behind the decline, critics quickly pounced on what they saw as a willful refusal to acknowledge the role of Trump’s reimplementation of aggressive immigration and drug interdiction policies.
“The drop in fentanyl seizures at the border is only a mystery to Washington Post reporters suffering from Trump Derangement Syndrome,” said White House spokeswoman Abigail Jackson in a statement to Breitbart News. “Everyone else knows the simple truth: President Trump closed our border to illegal drug traffickers and Americans are safer because of it.”
Indeed, since Trump’s return to the Oval Office, his administration has restored a host of hardline border policies scrapped under President Joe Biden. Military deployments to the southern border, expanded drone surveillance, and fast-track deportation protocols have all contributed to a drastic 95% drop in illegal crossings from April 2024 to April 2025—conditions that logically coincide with a reduced opportunity for drug traffickers to smuggle fentanyl into the U.S.
“With more boots on the ground, you’d think seizures would go up — not down,” Sheridan writes, implying that increased enforcement should be catching more drugs, not fewer.
The White House wasn’t having it.
“The Washington ComPost clearly suffers from Trump Derangement Syndrome,” wrote White House Communications Director Stephen Cheung on X. “They can’t stand that President Trump’s strong border policies have led to a DECREASE in fentanyl coming into the U.S.”
White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt was even more blunt, calling the Post’s framing “pathetic.”
The Department of Homeland Security’s official X account also weighed in to shut down the “mystery” narrative. “It’s no mystery. On day one, President Trump closed our borders to drug traffickers. From March 2024 to March 2025 fentanyl traffic at the southern border fell by 54%. The world has heard the message loud and clear,” the agency posted.
Critics argue that the Washington Post’s refusal to credit Trump’s policies reflects a broader issue in legacy media’s approach to covering the former president: a reluctance to acknowledge successes due to political bias. The irony, many noted, is that the outlet appeared baffled by the exact results Trump campaigned on delivering—tighter border control and reduced drug trafficking.
“Only in D.C. media circles can a crackdown on drug smugglers, combined with military enforcement, result in fewer drugs crossing the border—and somehow that’s a mystery,” quipped conservative columnist Derek Hunter.
The sharp decline in fentanyl seizures comes amid a broader public reckoning over the opioid epidemic, which killed more than 70,000 Americans in 2023 alone. Fentanyl—cheap, potent, and often mixed into other drugs—has become the leading driver of overdose deaths nationwide.
Trump’s policies appear to be producing measurable results when it comes to reducing the inflow of this deadly drug.
Yet media outlets like the Post are being criticized for refusing to connect the dots—or worse, deliberately avoiding doing so to prop up an anti-Trump narrative.
As border apprehensions and fentanyl seizures drop, Trump’s supporters are already touting the data as vindication for his policies. And the louder mainstream outlets attempt to question the obvious, the more it appears to them that the media can’t stand the idea that Trump might be right.
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