Missouri Politicians Campaign Against Illegal Immigration. Why? | State News

The U.S.-Mexico border is about 1,000 miles from mid-Missouri at any point. Yet the problem of illegal immigration is something that mid-Missouri residents hear a lot about from politicians. One of those politicians is Republican U.S. Senator Josh Hawley.

He is running for re-election this year against Democratic challenger Lucas Kunce. While state officials running for office campaign on illegal immigration and border security, they have very limited leverage on the issue and require Immigration Customs Enforcement to actually deport undocumented immigrants.

Although Hawley and Kunce are running in a statewide election, the U.S. Senate has far broader powers than statewide jobs, including authority over immigration policy. Hawley proposed legislation in 2022 to allow states to deport undocumented immigrants. It did not pass.

Kunce has also spoken out on the issue. As Missourians decide which of two candidates will represent them in the nation’s highest governing body in November, KOMU 8 looked at how illegal immigration is affecting people in mid-Missouri.

“I don’t know anything about the border; I have no experience,” said Columbia resident Jose Rojas. He and his wife own and operate COMO Arepas, a Venezuelan restaurant and coffee shop in Columbia. “In this state, here, I don’t think it’s a big problem.”

Rojas and his family left Venezuela amid political instability in the country in 2019. That instability is now boiling over, with Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro claiming he won the most recent election, despite opposition groups claiming they have found evidence showing his rival, Edmundo Gonzalez, won by a 2-to-1 margin.

“I fill out every paper,” Rojas said. “I sent (them) to immigration and got approved. It was a good way to do everything,”

He said he and his family are here on a temporary work permit until they get a green card.

From the perspective of someone who understands the legal immigration process and has been through it himself, Rojas said this about illegal immigration: “It’s not the same in Columbia as it is in New York and Florida; it’s different.

“This is a very nice community, very small… I don’t think we have many problems with immigration here. Because when you said to me, ‘What do you think about immigration here in Columbia?’ all I see are good people working, trying to build businesses and do everything right.”

According to an estimate by the Pew Research Center, there are 70,000 illegal immigrants living in Missouri, which is just 1.1 percent of the state’s population.

Rojas in Columbia believes illegal immigration is not a major problem for Missourians, but Hawley disagrees.

“Oh, it’s huge,” Hawley said at a campaign rally in Boonville in early August. “It’s huge. Listen, we’ve had illegal immigrants, immigrants stabbing people in our state. We’ve had multiple people who have been murdered, including, I mentioned Travis Wolfe, a terrible tragedy.”

Hawley cited one specific incident. Fox News Channel reported on the death of 12-year-old Travis Wolfe after a head-on collision with the car he was in in St. Louis County in December 2023. The driver of the other vehicle was a Venezuelan immigrant living in the U.S. illegally and was charged with involuntary manslaughter.

Lucas Kunce also mentioned the crash when talking about illegal immigration.

“What happened to Travis and the Wolfe family is an absolute tragedy, and people need to be held accountable for that — and I think anyone who commits a crime in our state needs to be held accountable for that,” Kunce told KOMU 8.

While both candidates discussed the incident, there is no evidence that crimes committed by illegal immigrants are a systemic problem in Missouri.

KOMU 8 contacted the Missouri State Highway Patrol, the official agency for collecting crime information for the entire state. It did not have any data on an illegal immigrant crime rate and referred KOMU 8 to the FBI. The FBI’s Kansas City Bureau also could not provide an illegal immigrant crime rate for Missouri and referred KOMU 8 to the U.S. Department of Justice’s Bureau of Justice Statistics. It also had no information on the matter and suggested that KOMU 8 contact the U.S. Department of Homeland Security. KOMU 8 has not received, and has not yet received, any data on illegal immigrant crime for the entire state.

The Department of Homeland Security reports that the U.S. Border Patrol apprehended 14,697 noncitizen criminals in the United States in fiscal year 2024 (beginning October 1, 2023). However, more than half of those noncitizen criminals (8,997) are charged with illegal entry or re-entry. The second highest-level crime category for which the Border Patrol apprehended noncitizens was drunk driving, with 2,428 noncitizens facing criminal charges.

Yet violent crime is not the only issue blamed on immigrants without legal status during the campaign.

“And then you talk about the drugs,” Hawley said. “You think about the amount of drugs.”

Kunce is also concerned about one specific drug.

“I think fentanyl and the border are a problem, and I think there is a crisis,” Kunce told KOMU 8.

John Schrock, an assistant special agent in charge of the Kansas City District Office of the Drug Enforcement Administration, said fentanyl is cheap to produce and offers significant profit margins. He also said the opioid is easy to smuggle, particularly in fill form, and that the DEA sees it in both powder and pill form.

In 2023, the DEA reported that fentanyl was responsible for 59,019 overdose deaths in the U.S., nearly twice as many as the drug responsible for the second most overdose deaths in the U.S., methamphetamine, with 28,261 deaths.

So far in 2024, the DEA has seized more than 33.4 million fentanyl pills and more than 4,574 pounds of fentanyl, the report said. That represents 227 million lethal doses seized so far this year alone — enough to kill more than two-thirds of the U.S. population.

According to Schrock, the cartels are using a highly strategic and calculated global operation to get fentanyl into the United States.

“The raw materials used to make fentanyl come from China and are used to produce the final product of fentanyl in Mexico,” he said.

The DEA’s 2024 National Drug Threat Assessment specifically identified two cartels, the Sinaloa Cartel and the Jalisco Cartel (CJNG), as primarily responsible for the flow of fentanyl into the United States.

“For the organizations we investigate, most of the seizures are on the southwest border and we also see a fair number in Southern California and Arizona,” Schrock said.

The Department of Homeland Security, which oversees U.S. Customs and Border Protection and ICE, reports that more than 90 percent of seized fentanyl is stopped at border crossings, where drug cartels attempt to smuggle fentanyl primarily in vehicles driven by U.S. citizens.

Schrock said once fentanyl crosses the border, it is transported into Missouri in a variety of ways, including by car, bus, plane and through the mail.

There is no data from federal law enforcement agencies indicating that illegal immigration is the primary factor driving the flow of fentanyl across the border.

Yet there are politicians who do not separate the issues.

“It’s coming across the southern border,” Hawley said. “Fentanyl is the leading cause of death for children over the age of 18. That’s all across the southern border. That’s all because of what’s happening there with the open border wall.”

Kunce criticizes his opponent’s border police.

“This guy is not real,” Kunce said. “He wants this as a campaign issue. He’s a show horse, not a work horse.”

Hawley voted against a border protection bill this year that would have expanded DHS’s powers and given it additional resources to handle the processing of non-U.S. nationals.

Kunce discussed border policy proposals, including installing more fentanyl scanners at legal border crossings.

Yet he has not shied away from using the border problems for his own political gain by criticizing Hawley.

“The irony is that Josh Hawley voted against measures that would have stopped everything he’s talking about, whether they happen or not,” Kunce said.

Agencies like the DEA, which specifically focus on drugs, treat the problem as one that extends far beyond the southern border.

“For the DEA, it’s a global problem,” Schrock said.

Operation Overdrive, which aims to crack down on drug dealers in U.S. cities, has made 1,200 arrests in the first half of 2023 and linked local drug trafficking networks to the Sinaloa and Jalisco cartels. The agency also seeks legal consequences and was responsible for prosecuting Jianxing Chen, a Belize-based money launderer with a network that was connected back to mainland China. He pleaded guilty to U.S. Department of Justice charges of money laundering in 2023.

Schrock said the DEA will continue to combat all of America’s drug problems, but that the agency still has much work to do when it comes to fentanyl.

“Optimistically, I think if we address the threat, we’ll see a change in how it’s presented on the streets,” Schrock said. “The number of overdoses. The amount that’s out there — but we’ll see. We’re still working on it.”

In Missouri, 1,948 people died from overdoses in 2023, mostly from non-heroin opioids, including fentanyl. And in mid-Missouri, Boone County had the most overdose deaths, with 48 deaths last year.

It’s clear that drugs are a threat to people across the state, including Mid-Missouri. But Jose Rojas says when politicians try to tie problems at the border like drugs and crime to illegal immigration, it doesn’t help the community.

Still, the campaign statements do not harm legitimate Latino-owned businesses like his.

“We get opinions about illegals or something, but if you go to the city of Columbia … the workers are very open to helping,” he said.

Rojas, who immigrated to America from Venezuela, doesn’t think illegal immigration is a big problem in Central Missouri.

“I come from a community or a culture that was open to receiving,” Rojas said. “In Venezuela, it’s common to receive a lot of diversity of cultures. American, Italian, and we receive a lot of influence — not only in food, in technology, in everything. We receive a lot of ways to improve, and we improve as a country. But I think when the country is open to receiving other cultures, it’s richer.”

Hawley and Kunce will face off in the general election on November 5.