American lawmakers must be "very thoughtful" before agreeing to a plan to use U.S. troops against drug cartels in Mexico, Rep. Rich McCormick, R-Ga., said Tuesday on Newsmax in response to a plan by Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C.
"I just want to be careful that when we commit our troops, men and women in arms, that we're very thoughtful about that," McCormick said on Newsmax's "American Agenda." "I think too often we have a knee-jerk reaction that we're going to solve the world's problems by committing American troops. These are our sons and daughters."
Graham's call comes after the kidnapping of four Americans over the weekend in Mexico. Two were killed, and McCormick told Newsmax that the crime was the "tip of the iceberg" after the thousands of people who have died from fentanyl overdoses brought about by the border crisis.
"For every one person that dies of a drug overdose, let's call it what it is: it's fentanyl poisoning," McCormick said. "A lot of that stuff comes from Chinese-made ingredients. It's fueling crime. It's fueling illegal crossings on the border. It's impossible to control right now."
Because of the porous border, the four people were kidnapped after Mexican cartel members mistook them for drug smugglers from Haiti, said McCormick.
"We have massive problems with our southern border," he said. "We haven't addressed it properly. It's killing more people than wars. We've lost more people to drug overdoses than we've lost two wars in the last two decades, then more than the Ukrainians have lost in the war against Russia.
"This is a massive problem, and for every person that struggles with drug overdoses, there are probably about 100 people that are struggling with it [addiction]."
A relative of one of the four who was kidnapped in Mexico said they traveled from South Carolina so one of the women could get a tummy-tuck operation in Matamoros, a border city across from Brownsville, Texas.
McCormick said that such violence is proof that the southern border needs to be secured.
"We're fueling crime down there when the government of Mexico has less money than the drug traffickers," said McCormick, adding that Mexico has "all the advantages to be a prosperous nation" but its "inept government" is overrun by money from Americans buying drugs from the cartels.
"We should be raising our kids to know from the time they're little kids that drugs are bad," said McCormick. "We're wasting all our time teaching our kids all the wrong things, and we should secure our southern border. We need to be hard on crime and hard on criminals."
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