New York Post Op-Ed by Tim Scott: How I'll secure the border and end the fentanyl crisis killing our towns

Under President Joe Biden, America has become a nation in retreat.

We have retreated from strength abroad, safe streets at home and even from our own sovereign borders.

Illegal border crossings have set record highs each year of the Biden presidency.

Fentanyl is also flowing across the border and into our neighborhoods at record highs. Overdose deaths are on the rise.

If you couldn't control who came in through your back door, your house wouldn't really be your house.

When we don't control our southern border, it's not our country.

More than 7 million people and counting have crossed our border illegally on Biden's watch, including nearly 200 on the terrorist watch list — and those are just the ones we caught.

Estimates suggest an additional 1.2 million illegal immigrants have crossed the border but evaded capture and simply vanished into the interior.

That adds up to more than 8 million illegal border crossers under this administration.

That is more people than the population of 38 states, including my home state of South Carolina.

It's more than the populations of Iowa and New Hampshire combined.

I am witnessing this disaster firsthand this week in Yuma, Arizona.

I'm meeting with the law-enforcement agents, doctors, nurses and property owners who spend every day on the front lines of Biden's border crisis.

But the truth is there are not just four southern-border states. There are 50.

Every county in America is a border county.

Every time I visit Iowa — where overdose deaths among those under 25 have more than doubled just since 2019 — I am in a border county.

Every time I visit New Hampshire — which has the nation's fastest-rising overdose-death rate — I am in a border county.

Every time I'm back in South Carolina, speaking with grieving parents — like my friend Alan Shao, the former dean of the College of Charleston business school who lost his 27-year-old son and namesake to fentanyl — I am in a border county.

Each year, fentanyl claims 70,000 American lives.

That means we lose more Americans to this one illegal drug every 10 months than we lost in the entire Vietnam War.

But Biden is missing in action.

He has no plan to secure the border.

He has no plan to disrupt the supply chain that connects Chinese chemicals to Mexican drug cartels and creates fentanyl.

He has no energy, no ideas and no vision for ending this shameful retreat from our own sovereign soil and getting control of our back door.

This shouldn't be hard. And when I am commander in chief, it won't be.

I will restart construction to finish the border wall and deploy the latest and greatest military-grade technology to crack down on drug smuggling and human trafficking at our entry ports.

I will cancel Biden's 87,000 new IRS agents and double Border Patrol and Immigration and Customs Enforcement to 87,000 agents instead.

Democrats' priority is auditing and harassing American taxpayers and small businesses. My priority is stopping the people and drugs pouring into our country illegally.

The far left had no problem closing your children's schools and your family's church to supposedly slow a virus' spread.

But they refuse to close our border to reduce crime and stop illegal drugs that are killing more young people than COVID ever did.

I have already authored a bill to reinstate Title 42 and fast deportations until we have a handle on the fentanyl emergency. When I'm in the Oval Office, I'll sign it into law.

I will delete the Biden administration's new smartphone app that provides concierge service to illegal immigrants, end catch-and-release and hire 1,000 new immigration judges so we can stop releasing people into our heartland with a polite invitation to a hearing often multiple years away.

I will implement a zero-tolerance policy for illegal immigrants with criminal records.

If you've broken the law to get here and you break our laws again, the day your prison sentence ends, you aren't going free on American soil — you're going back where you came from.

I'm sure the far left will call this radical. Everybody else calls it common sense.

And I will be the commander in chief who takes off the kid gloves and treats the Mexican drug cartels killing Americans like the foreign terrorist organizations they are.

I will freeze their assets, sanction their bank accounts, break their supply chains and use every power of the presidency to end the cartels before they end more American lives.

The far left says caring about the border is racist.

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez claims even talking about our illegal-immigration emergency is "white supremacy."

I can't wait until they try to play that card on me.

Every single American deserves safe streets, drug-free neighborhoods and secure borders.

And when I'm in the White House, they'll get them.