Appearing Tuesday on the Fox News Channel, Nogales Police Chief Roy Bermudez described the fentanyl epidemic at the U.S.-Mexico border as a “pandemic.”

A partial transcript is as follows:

BILL HEMMER: Here are the numbers on fentanyl throughout America from February 2019 to 2020: 39,000 deaths, next year 61,000, and year after that, 72,758. We’re going in the wrong direction, chief.

ROY BERMUDEZ: I agree. This is turning into a pandemic. It got to the point that our overdoses increasing, even locally. Our officers are carrying NARCAN and we’ve saved quite a bit of lives using it. I’ve been in this business for 38 years and I never thought I was going to see this day that officers were going to be saving lives of people who were overdosing because of a pandemic that was so outreaching.