U.S. border officials have caught more people with eggs than fentanyl this year

Egg Farmers of Canada policy chair Bruce Muirhead explains why egg smuggling into the U.S. is rising and how Canada can leverage its production in the trade war

U.S. President Donald Trump has made stopping fentanyl at both the northern and southern borders one of his administration’s top priorities, but American law enforcement data shows that another commodity appears far more often in seizures: eggs.

In the first two months of 2025, U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) seized fentanyl on 134 occasions, down from 197 seizures in the same time frame in 2024. Meanwhile, CBP intercepted egg products on 3,254 occasions this January and February, compared to 1,508 occasions in the first two months of 2024.

CTVNews.ca has reached out to U.S. Customs and Border Protection for comment.

A dozen eggs cost American consumers US$5.90 in February, almost double what it was in 2024. Many U.S. residents are paying significantly more, especially in California, where prices climbed to nearly US$10 in some stores. Prices are expected to increase another 41.1 per cent in 2025, U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) data shows.

In Canada, the average price for a dozen eggs was C$4.89 (US$3.41) in January, making illegal imports tempting for travellers unaware of strict agricultural restrictions.

Some kind of crackdown?

Bringing fresh eggs, raw chicken and other unprocessed bird products into the U.S. is illegal, due to concerns about diseases; a problem sharpened in recent months by the outbreak of avian influenza across North America.

Bruce Muirhead, public policy research chair with Egg Farmers of Canada, told CTV Your Morning in an interview Thursday that the outbreak and its resulting egg shortages are to blame for the current number of egg seizures at the U.S. border.

“In the state of Iowa, it’s the largest egg-producing state ... the average farm size is two million birds,” he explained. “When it’s hit with avian influenza, the entire farm has to be euthanized, simply because avian influenza is such a virulent epidemic and virus. So, when that happens, of course, it removes millions of eggs from the (U.S.) national inventory.”

Canada’s system is better protected against those shocks, Muirhead says, in part because of a supply management regime that keeps production totals close to what Canadians consume. This reduces spikes in price but also means there’s barely any surplus on this side of the border.

“The kind of agriculture they have in the U.S., which emphasizes bigness above all else, isn’t really sustainable in this world of climate change, of – it seems – increasingly virulent viruses being spread around the world,” he said.

The one per cent

The increase in egg seizures comes as Trump wages a trade war with Canada after declaring an emergency over fentanyl at the northern border – repeatedly held up as justification for the president’s sweeping tariffs on Canadian imports.

“Justin Trudeau, of Canada, called me to ask what could be done about Tariffs,” he wrote in a post to Truth Social in early March amid a frenetic stop-and-start of executive orders, exemptions and delays on tariffs.

“I told him that many people have died from Fentanyl that came through the Borders of Canada and Mexico, and nothing has convinced me that it has stopped,” he continued.

But CBP data shows only a small volume of fentanyl crosses illegally into the U.S. from Canada, with just 13.6 grams of fentanyl seized by U.S. border staff in the month of January, and less than 20 kilograms in all of the past year of tracking.

Of the 4,376 total fentanyl seizures counted by CBP between October 2021 and February 2025, just 241 occurred at Canada-U.S. boundaries, and only 162 of those were along the land border between the two countries.

Former prime minister Justin Trudeau, who oversaw the initial weeks of the trade war before stepping down on March 14, had fired back by noting that “less than one per cent of the fentanyl intercepted at the U.S. border comes from Canada,” and that between December 2024 and January 2025, seizures at the Canada-U.S. border had fallen by 97 per cent.

“The legal pretext (the U.S.) government is using to bring in these tariffs is that Canada is apparently unwilling to help in the fight against illegal fentanyl,” Trudeau said in a press conference March 4.

“Well, that is totally false.”

With files from CTV News’ Rachel Aiello and Allison Bamford