WASHINGTON – Today in the Senate Judiciary Committee, U.S. Senator John Cornyn (R-TX) questioned U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland on the Department of Justice’s refusal to hold cartels trafficking drugs across our southern border accountable, and General Garland sidestepped responsibility for enforcing mandatory minimum sentences and stopping the flow of fentanyl. Excerpts are below, and video can be found here.

CORNYN: “An average 737 or a passenger jet today holds between 145 and 185 passengers. If you were to rack up all of the deaths that we’ve seen as a result of drugs coming across the southwestern border as a result of this successful business model that the cartels have employed, you would be talking about the equivalent of a passenger jet per day crashing, killing everyone on board. I have been just astonished at the lack of sense of urgency to deal with this issue.”

“It’s directly related to the open border policies of the Biden administration, where people continue to come across the border, turn themselves into a broken asylum system, or simply get away from law enforcement because they’re overwhelming the Border Patrol’s capacity. This is intentional.”

“It’s a business model of the cartels, and they are getting rich. And students, like those parents who I met with last week and Johnson High School in Hays County, Texas, right outside of Austin, are losing their sons and daughters to fentanyl overdoses because of exactly this.”

“At 108,000, roughly, Americans who died as a result of drug overdoses last year – 71,000, roughly, of fentanyl overdoses – do you consider your current policies successful?”

GARLAND: “We have a huge epidemic of a fentanyl problem created by intentional acts by the cartels. We are doing everything we can within our resources to fight that.”

“This is a whole government problem. The border is a responsibility of the Department of Homeland Security. We do what we can do with respect to the jurisdictions that we have.”