The U.S. has long dealt with massive drug smuggling into the country from Mexico, which actually slowed somewhat during the Trump administration thanks to the former president’s border enforcement policies and, of course, the wall.

In recent months, however, the smuggling has dramatically increased thanks in large part to Joe Biden’s lack of interest in securing America’s boundaries.

But in the Biden era, something else is happening as well: Border Patrol and Customs and Border Enforcement officials report that last year, for the first time, more deadly fentanyl was smuggled into the United States than heroin, and that’s a major problem given one of the biggest suppliers of fentanyl materials to the Mexican cartels. More on that in a moment.

The Washington Examiner reports:

Not only were fentanyl seizures at the highest level ever recorded, but fentanyl overdoses within the United States also hit new highs, indicating the success that transnational criminal organizations had in pushing their deadly products to the public. A DEA investigation this fall found a direct link between criminal drug organizations in Mexico and fentanyl-related overdose deaths.

But drug users are not necessarily choosing to consume fentanyl, which is half the problem for U.S. government efforts to stop this third iteration of the opioid crisis. Street drugs are being laced with fentanyl, making all types of illicit drugs unsafe.

“Everything is potentially deadly right now, and people need to be aware,” DEA Administrator Anne Milgram told ABC’s “This Week” in a recent interview.

CPB officials first reported seizing fentanyl — two pounds’ worth — in 2013. But last year, border authorities nabbed an eye-popping 11,500 pounds, and keep in mind, much more than that is making it into the country because fentanyl overdose deaths continue to rise as well.

But here’s the really interesting — and angering part: China is largely responsible for these deaths, and here’s how per the Washington Examiner:

Mexican cartels purchase the ingredients for fentanyl from labs in Wuhan, China . The cartels will produce the fentanyl from those ingredients and push it into the U.S. Chinese-based financiers launder the profits for the cartels out of the U.S., back to China, and on to Mexico.

“The real problem are the criminal drug networks in Mexico that are mass-producing fentanyl, which is driving the overdose deaths,” said Milgram. “Those networks want to sell drugs to Americans. It’s how they profit. They will exploit any vulnerability that they can to get those drugs in the United States.”

The U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission confirms this China-fentanyl link, which intelligence analysts are calling a form of “gray zone warfare” Beijing employs against us.

“Mass quantities of fentanyl, a low-cost and highly potent synthetic drug, are being produced in China and brought illegally to the United States, contributing to a growing U.S. opioid crisis. The rise of fentanyl in the United States can be traced back to China’s large chemical and pharmaceutical industries, which manufacture vast quantities of the drug and its analogs to export to the western hemisphere with little regulatory oversight,” the commission noted — back in 2017.

Now you know why former President Trump was so tough with China; he knew what the Chinese government was doing.

For his part, Fox News host Tucker Carlson is one of the few voices making the connection between Biden’s open-border policies and the rise in American fentanyl overdoses.

“So why are we telling you all this about fentanyl? Because the rise in the consumption of fentanyl mirrors the rise in the availability of fentanyl, which is causing the massive rise in deaths by fentanyl ODs,” he told his viewers in mid-October.

“And all of that is a result of the Biden administration’s immigration policy. When you open the borders, it’s not just people who come in, it’s massive amounts of fentanyl and other illegal drugs,” he added.