At a campaign rally in 2024, President Trump promised that fentanyl crossing the border would stop “so fast your head would spin.” One year later, the border seizures of fentanyl are down more than 50 percent, and the border does not look like what Americans were promised. Depending on who you ask, two different opinions come from the same problem.
Fentanyl seizures at the southern border are down nearly 50 percent halfway through the fiscal year of 2026 compared to last year, according to data from U.S. Customs and Border Protection, a number the Trump administration calls proof of progress, and critics call proof that drugs are simply getting through.
That gap between what the statistics say and what they keep sits at the center of one of the most heated debates in the country right now. For us, students at Loyola High School, this debate hits very close to home.
The administration’s border strategy has two stated goals: to stop the flow of controlled substances and to remove people without legal status. For supporters, both are long overdue. For those with family or community ties to the immigrant population, both have come with a cost that statistics don’t capture.
Christopher Parry, 29, supports the administration’s zero-release policy and says that the human toll of inaction was already devastating before enforcement ramped up, and thinks that President Trump has implemented a solution at the border.
“Fentanyl deaths are finally trending down because we stopped treating the border like a revolving door,” said Parry. “For the first time in years, we are actually keeping these substances out of our neighborhoods.”
He points to the administration’s broader drug interdiction push as the mechanism: More agents at ports of entry, tighter screening, and stricter consequences for trafficking. Since President Trump took office, the Department of Homeland Security has reported that fentanyl trafficking at the border has gone down 56 percent compared to 2024. Whether that figure represents less fentanyl moving or less fentanyl being caught is still a question experts continue to debate. The general stability of wholesale drug prices tells us that the supply hasn’t meaningfully dried up, but for Parry, the direction of the trend matters.
For Nathan Meyer, 29, an immigrant rights advocate, he tells us that these statistics and numbers can be found in Loyola, too, and that President Trump’s job at the border has been utterly horrible.
“Putting up walls to stop immigrants from coming into the country is bad for our community as well,” Meyer explains. “When they say ‘secure the border’, they are trying to prevent people from entering our country because they are fleeing violence in their home countries. Our student and staff members are worried about their communities because ICE is rounding them up.”
Los Angeles was not spared either. In this city, parents and students came to start their 2025 school year in fear of ICE agents being present among teachers and volunteers at schools.
In this regard, Meyer makes an exact connection between the current situation and the composition of the Loyola student body, “Many of the students at Loyola are the grandchildren of people who would have been turned away now,” he said. “We wouldn’t even have had the same classes 30 years ago under these laws.”
This contradiction, between the real dangers posed by fentanyl in America and the real dangers posed by the harsh enforcement in immigrant communities, cannot be reconciled easily. Parry is right, of course, that fentanyl kills people. Meyer is also correct that deportation fear directly impacts Loyola and the very concept of learning itself.
What Loyola’s Jesuit mission asks, and what this debate keeps forcing back to the surface, is whether a policy should be judged by the people that it affects or the problem that it solves.
