EXCLUSIVE: Fentanyl Ravaging New Mexico – ‘It’s Enslaved the Community’

Border Hawk

Fentanyl is pouring over the U.S. southern border as drug cartels push the deadly synthetic opioid throughout North America, destroying countless lives in the process.

New Mexico has been hit particularly hard by the drug, which has transformed “The Land of Enchantment” into a dystopic wasteland crawling with fentanyl ‘zombies’ who wander the streets in search of their next fix.

Border Hawk senior correspondent Wid Lyman embedded with the Las Cruces Police Department for a night on patrol, during which he documented a slew of encounters with vagrants, drug addicts, and even an illegal alien involved in a weapons-related incident.

We then spent a day with James Chavez Floyd, a ninth generation New Mexican and owner of Nessa’s Cafe in Las Cruces, which lies roughly 50 miles north of the Mexico border on Interstate 10.

Floyd says the fentanyl scourge has ravaged his hometown, where children can no longer roam safely as prostitutes and addicts have made “every corner and every alleyway extremely dangerous.”

He showed us around the grounds of the cafe, where he constantly removes remnants of fentanyl abuse – a highly dangerous task that could expose him to a fatal overdose at any moment.

“Every morning, I have to come out here and clean up tin foil and make sure that there’s no paraphernalia around that any of my customers or their animals could possibly touch and die from. It’s a daily occurrence and it’s escalated for about three and a half years now, to a point where it’s just taken over our streets and our community is hurting,” Floyd explained.

Floyd took us for a long drive around Las Cruces, showing us multiple homeless encampments, public spaces and parks overrun by drug-addicted derelicts, and even a well-known fentanyl dealer den known locally as “The Castle.”

Dirt-cheap fentanyl has “enslaved the whole homeless community. They’re literally the ones on the frontlines now,” Floyd asserted.

He shared tales of charred, naked addicts wandering through the parking lot of his cafe after apparently passing out over open flames while cooking and smoking fentanyl.

“Due to our politicians, we can’t seem to get help for them. They just want to continue to let them fight in a war they cannot win,” Floyd said.

Las Cruces authorities say they first encountered fentanyl in 2018. In 2020, they confiscated a total of 461 pills.

In 2021, the first year of the Biden administration, fentanyl seizures exploded to more than 22,600 – and continued rising: roughly 70,000 pills were seized in 2022 and nearly 86,000 in 2023.

“It wasn’t in Las Cruces, and then it was, and then it was everywhere. In 2021, it really intensified and we’ve seen that the past few years. During that same period from 2018 to 2021, we saw a huge increase in crime: an 85% increase in violent crime and a 71% increase in property crime,” Las Cruces Chief of Police Jeremy Story stated last year during a virtual press conference on New Mexico’s fentanyl epidemic.

“If you overlay the data for fentanyl seizures, crime increase and homelessness in Las Cruces, they overlay perfectly. And although there are many other factors that of course contribute to those things, I truly believe that fentanyl is the biggest factor impacting these things.”

More than 100,000 Americans are now dying of drug overdoses in the U.S. every year.