Recently I found myself walking around my neighborhood in Chicago as I was talking on the phone with a relative in Nebraska. Increasingly, I feel that these two very different parts of my universe are actually deeply connected. I cannot help but make connections between what is going on in Chicago and what is going on in Nebraska. Chicago is in the midst of being targeted by Trump’s immigration raids. Meanwhile, the remote corner of southeastern Nebraska where some of my relatives live has become a major artery for drug trafficking.
In Nebraska, seizures of meth increased 293% between 2018 and 2022. Law enforcement across southeastern Nebraska in particular have continued to report “staggering numbers” of drug confiscations so far in 2025. Some family members have expressed sadness at witnessing the power of drug trafficking grow within small towns in the area. In July 2025, one of the most-wanted kingpins of the El Salvadorean cartel MS-13 was arrested near Omaha. Federal officials have since revealed that he and other high-level MS-13 members had been living in the southeastern Nebraska region for the last few years. MS-13 is not alone—the Midwestern High Intensity Drug Trafficking Area taskforce has identified over 1,000 drug trafficking organizations operating in the region.
Nebraska is not alone in this trend, the same pattern is playing out across America. Meth use looked like it was receding when the 2010s hit, but since 2013, has rebounded with a vengeance. This is in no small part due to cartel superlabs figuring out how to make an extra potent and refined version of meth that has taken the nation by storm. An unintended consequence of marijuana legalization in much of the United States was that many Mexican marijuana growers switched to producing this new, concentrated meth, and cartels adjusted their operations accordingly. Meth overdoses in the United States reached a historic peak in 2022.
In recent years, many more people are suffering from both meth and opioid addictions at the same time, and increasingly more meth is laced with fentanyl. Nationally, opioid overdose deaths were ten times higher in 2023 than they were in 1999. Between 2018 and 2022 alone, the rate of overdoses rose more than 60%, largely due to fentanyl.
In 2021, America passed the grim milestone of over 100,000 overdose deaths in a single year. And that staggering rate of death has persisted. Over 500,000 people died of overdoses just from 2020-2024. These 500,000+ deaths are over half of all overdose deaths that have happened since 1999. Over half of drug overdoses in the 21st century have occurred just in the last 5 years.
This level of death and destruction must leave a scar. But I hear very few people talking about what scar may have been created just within the past 5 years of drug overdoses, let alone the entire 21st century so far.
I wonder about how the over 500,000 dead may have influenced the 2024 election. There’s something curious about the 2024 election results that I have not heard ANY political commentators explore. In both 2016 and 2020, Trump lost the vote of people who make less than $50,000 a year. He won it in 2024.
Every single time Trump has run for office over the last decade (good lord, it’s been that long), he has promised to go after the criminal networks pumping drugs into the country. He has sworn to go after the “bad hombres,” the “dangerous criminals,” the “worst of the worst.” He has made promises to go after cartels with particular vengeance.
The left tends to call out these statements as racist dog whistles. Immigrant communities, regardless of how conservative or liberal their personal politics are, know the pain of how these statements can be used to scapegoat all immigrants. And there seems to be a particular national interest in stereotyping people from Latin America and the Caribbean as drug dealers, criminals, and gang members.
Meanwhile, a lot of America is actually being devastated by cartel meth and fentanyl. Many different types of communities bear the scars of our political failures to address drug addiction and poverty. Some swathes of rural and small town America and some inner-city neighborhoods are now joined in the tragic bond of being labeled High Intensity Drug Trafficking areas.
Our rate of drug deaths is astronomically higher than most of the rest of the world. We lost the War on Drugs. It’s a failure of American society. But powerful, dangerous criminals like cartels are taking us for a ride. Our failures feed them. The U.S.’s inability to address entrenched social problems and the cartels’ ruthless ability to enable misery are in a perverse dance of death.
We have reached staggering levels of life lost. I don’t really know what an appropriate comparison is, or if comparing death is ever appropriate, but here’s a few for starters: America suffered 291,557 combat deaths in WWII and 204,100 combat deaths in the Civil War. Just within the past 5 years, we have lost more Americans to drug overdoses than the combat deaths of both of those wars combined. As over 69,000 Palestinians have been killed in the last two years of U.S.-funded genocide in Gaza, we have also been suffering mass death of a much different kind right here at home.
I was living with someone who struggled with drug addiction during some of these bad years. For two and a half years, between 2021-2023, my household witnessed national carnage on the canvas of our roommate’s body. We nearly lost her multiple times. If you have never witnessed an opioid overdose before, you may be under the impression that it is an uneventful thing to watch, a quiet slipping away of sorts. The reality is a bit more like drowning. During these years, I also developed a new domestic ritual. Every time I take the trash out, I do a lap around our garage to check if there are any bodies. We are aware that people use the alley behind our house, and sometimes our garage itself, as refuge. I have found people on my strange weekly laps, but thankfully all of them have still been alive so far. I am aware the story has ended differently for far too many people, especially in recent years.
Rates of substance use overall are similar between urban and rural settings, but the severity of outcomes is different. For example, while rates of using any substance (such as alcohol and marijuana) are roughly equal between urban and rural youth, rural youth are 35x more likely to use opioids than their urban counterparts. Additionally, per-capita overdose rates tend to be higher in rural areas than in urban ones.
Is this perhaps one of the reasons Trump won the <$50K vote he previously had never secured? I’m also trying to remember the 2024 election cycle…what exactly was the Democratic strategy for drugs and cartels? I can’t remember any kind of plan. Did Democrats help give voice to why so many families are angry about crime and drugs, but why we don’t need racist fairytales for people’s real stories to be heard? Did Democrats offer clear and consistent messaging about who the real culprits are? With so many people desperate to keep their loved ones alive, did Democrats offer these Americans an alternative to Trump’s strongman bravado? I can’t remember any memorable attempts. And it truly is millions of Americans who have been impacted by…
500,000+ PEOPLE DEAD OVER THE LAST 5 YEARS.
I keep repeating this number over and over again. That’s so much human life lost.
Was Trump the only one speaking to this?
Obviously, Trump is acting in bad faith and has made entirely false promises to anyone who genuinely wanted him to take on the cartels. He is only using the War on Drugs as cover for a White Christian Nationalist Agenda™ (which in and of itself may be cover for nihilistic greed that knows no creed?)
And the proof of this? You would think right-wing media would have a FIELD DAY about high-level MS-13 operatives being arrested in Nebraska. You would think they would jump on this gleefully and salivate at the opportunity to trot this story out before cameras. But it happened largely without a peep from the administration, at least to my knowledge. But just think about it. If word got out, it would immediately beg the question…
Why aren’t they sending ICE and the National Guard to Nebraska to take on MS-13 and the 1,000+ criminal operations passing mind-boggling amounts of drugs through the area? Why are they, instead, teargassing families at grocery stores and kidnapping teachers from daycares in Chicago, hmm?
Hmm???
It would immediately reveal that all these ICE and Border Patrol goons would rather be body-slamming teens than actually tangling with the actual, real “bad hombres” they’ve loved to talk so much about.
I think people who voted for Trump need to contend with the brutality and viciousness of the White Christian Nationalist Agenda™ that they signed off on.
I think people who voted for Harris need to contend with the failures of our society that have resulted in over 900,000 people dying of overdoses since 1999, over half of them in the last 5 years alone, and how much inner-city neighborhoods and rural/small town America are actually connected in this national tragedy.
So many people are being hurt by the failures of those in power. The use of everyone’s pain to only cause more pain is disgusting.
We should be horrified that ICE is teargassing children and kidnapping their parents, many of whom came to this country fleeing the violence of these same cartels. We should be horrified that immigrants are being scapegoated for social and political failures that they did not create.
And we should be horrified that such catastrophic levels of death have been allowed to happen from drugs in this country, and with so much callused apathy. We should be horrified that cartels are capitalizing on our failures and that their growing power here does pose a threat to real people and real communities.
All of these things are morally obscene.
Not only that, but from a practical standpoint, anyone who wants to help organize the next generation of the American working class is going to have to take up ALL of this pain. You’re going to need to understand this bigger picture. You, whoever you are, will be organizing the children of the dead as well as the children of the deported. You will be organizing children who found their parents’ lifeless bodies and children who watched their parents be dragged away by masked men. The young people of America are carrying all of this and anyone trying to build working class solidarity over the next decade will need to carry all of this too.
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Speaking of organizing in working class America, I would like to take a closer look at the idea that people making under <$50K a year are perhaps the least-understood, potential “swing voters” in this country.
Using the most recent data available from the Brookings Institute, 140 million Americans qualify as poor or low-income, which is 43% of the population. Low-income America is a plurality of races, ethnicities, and geographies. There is no majority identity at “the bottom of the pyramid” of society. Of the 140 million Americans who are poor or low-income, 24 million are Black (17%), 66 million are white (47%), and 50 million (36%) are all other races. While the “top of the pyramid” is almost exclusively white men, the “bottom of the pyramid” includes some of everyone. However, this diverse base of the American population is the least likely to vote. Consider the following:
Trump’s electoral successes are frequently credited to white voters without college degrees, particularly those in rural areas and small towns. However, for 2016 and 2020, Trump only won over such white voters still making more than $50K a year - a blue collar extending into the middle class. Truly poor and low-income rural white people have mostly just not been voting at all.
The lowest voter turnout in the U.S. is in rural counties and small towns. Low-income people who are eligible to vote but do not vote make up about 20% of the total electorate in states like Nebraska, Indiana, Montana, and Texas and over 25% of the total electorate in states like Kentucky, Tennessee, West Virginia, Arkansas, and Mississippi.
Fact of the matter is, poor white people are not Trump’s main voter base, and largely don’t participate in elections. But what happens when they do?
One recent example is the case of the current Democratic governor in Kentucky, Andy Beshear. Gov. Beshear ran in 2019 on a platform of expanding access to healthcare, raising the minimum wage, and combating voter repression. A massive campaign to register poor people to vote helped Beshear claim victory. He won by a mere 5,100 votes. He subsequently restored voting rights to over 140,000 formerly incarcerated individuals in Kentucky. He also reduced work requirements for Medicaid in the state. In this case, poor white rural voters mobilized and swung Democratic.
The opposite seems to have been the case in the most recent presidential election. The 2024 election saw historic rural voter turnout. This higher rural voter turnout swung in favor of Trump, potentially handing him his win of the <$50K vote for the first time in his political career. I am speculating here, as I have not seen ANY political commentators or researchers make this connection yet. But is it possible the 500,000+ drug overdose deaths between 2020 and 2024 had anything to do with this?
I understand a myriad of factors probably contributed to the 2024 election. For example, The Economist found that the second largest predictor of being a swing voter who switched from Biden in 2020 to Trump in 2024 was being a non-white parent of school-age children. Urban, liberal areas kept schools closed for much longer during the COVID pandemic despite research from other parts of the world that school closures carried high sociological costs with comparatively little disease control benefit. Polling suggests that prolonged school closures disproportionately hurt working class communities of color in more liberal, urban areas and may have been a significant factor in the right-ward shift of non-white, working class parents.
So, I’m not trying to claim that one thing and only one thing explains the 2024 election. Multiple things can be true at once. I see this as a “yes and” situation.
Did misogynoir hurt Kamala Harris in the election?
Yes and.
Have the strategists behind Project 2025 been quietly amassing power and resources to advance their agenda at every level of government and successfully out-organizing everyone else?
Yes and.
Have our failures to address poverty and addiction created the conditions where in 2024 Trump appealed to a lot of people who were not on his side even just 4 years prior?
In my opinion, yes and.
I wish there was more “yes and” in the way we talk about these issues. The way partisan politics works these days, it feels like…
If you talk about fighting against cartels, it must mean you support ICE teargassing a children’s Halloween parade in Chicago.
And if you talk about fighting against ICE, it must mean you think stories about the cartels are mostly racist fairytales told to scare white suburbia.
When in reality -
The Trump administration’s claim about raiding that South Shore apartment complex because it was overrun by Tren de Aragua was a load of crock.
But the MS-13 arrests in Nebraska were very real.
ICE agents rounding up and zip-tying citizens at that South Shore apartment complex was very real.
So were the astronomical drug seizures on the highway four miles west of where some of my relatives farm in southeastern Nebraska.
The way I see it - we should all get to talk about our pain and that shouldn’t be a risky, divisive thing. It should be a way of making sure that the real culprits here don’t get let off the hook.
We should be able to speak about the danger of organized crime and all the geopolitical reasons cartels have been able to succeed. (Anyone wanna talk about U.S. intervention in Latin America that has destabilized the region for generations? Anyone? Anyone?)
We should be able to speak about the abject failure of America to take care of its own people and all of the death and misery that has resulted from poverty and drugs. Our nation’s “addiction to unnecessary death,” as Reverend Dr. William Barber II has put it.
We should be able to speak about how most of the people Trump has deported so far in 2025 are overwhelmingly NOT violent criminals but rather are targets of an ethnic cleansing campaign. (Only 35% have any criminal conviction, and most with criminal records are not the “worst of the worst” the administration is claiming to target.)
We should be able to speak about ICE beating up teenage girls who were protecting their cancer-survivor mother from deportation then disappearing those girls to the FBI headquarters in Chicago and arresting bystanders who tried to help the girls. And how this brutal political theatre doesn’t solve any of our nation’s problems - it helps no one.
We should talk about all of it. Afterall, aren’t these all different sides of the same problem?
“The U.S. is a deeply divided nation. These divisions are having significant negative implications for everyone. Especially troubling is the increased difficulty in achieving democratic solutions to major issues.” - Don E. Albrecht, Journal of Rural Studies, 2022
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That’s all I have to share for now, but if you are hungry to read more about how all of these issues are connected, I do have an article that just got published through the University of Nebraska College of Law. I’m hoping my next episode will be a read-through of this very article. It’s called “Truth Comes Before Reconciliation: An Exercise In American Truth-Telling,” and it’s publicly available in the Nebraska Journal on Advancing Justice. If you really want to get a head start on it, you can read it HERE. Otherwise, I will get the audio read-through posted soon, inshallah.
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