How Fentanyl Deaths Are Making Some Grieving Parents Embrace Trump

Dawn Allen wasn’t just a Democrat who voted at the polls. She also knocked on doors and donated money, including to President Joe Biden.

But after her son died of fentanyl poisoning last year, she grew frustrated with what she saw as Biden’s hands-off approach to the opioid crisis. Now she says she won’t vote for a Democrat and is more aligned with the candidate who has focused heavily on the deadly fentanyl epidemic: former President Donald Trump.

“It feels like a really bad breakup,” the 47-year-old mother of three other children said from her home in a Chicago suburb. “I’m really, really hurt.”

Allen is part of a network of families affected by opioids who are pushing government officials to do more to address what experts call the worst drug epidemic in U.S. history. According to a series of interviews with activists and grieving family members, many in that group say Trump’s tough talk on drugs resonates with them, even as fentanyl deaths have nearly doubled during his administration.

The fentanyl awareness movement “leans to the right — no question about it,” said Andrea Thomas, who lost a daughter in 2018 and has become a leader of grieving parents seeking to bolster the government’s response to the crisis. “Our U.S. government is almost complicit, and now there’s such an unlimited supply of this poison here that it’s a sign of hoarding.”

The government says fentanyl kills about 70,000 Americans a year — more than car crashes and shootings combined. The crisis has affected Americans of all regions, income levels, races and political persuasions.

But Republicans appear to have placed more emphasis on the issue in their public messaging. For example, the GOP national convention in July featured an emotional prime-time speech from a mother who lost a child to fentanyl. By contrast, not a single prime-time speaker at the Democratic National Convention mentioned the opioid crisis.

Trump speaks regularly about fentanyl, Harris less so.

“We will break up and dismantle the gangs, the vicious criminal networks, the bloodthirsty cartels. And we will stop the fentanyl,” Trump said during a recent campaign appearance in Michigan.

Trump has called for expanding the death penalty for drug dealers, deploying the military to crack down on Mexican drug cartels and banning illegal border crossings to curb drug imports.

Many experts say none of that would stop the flow of the dangerous chemical. The federal death penalty is rarely carried out, even when Trump was president; Mexican cartel leaders have vast resources at their disposal to hide even if Trump takes the radical step of upending U.S.-Mexico relations by carrying out unilateral attacks; and the government says most fentanyl is smuggled in by Americans, through legal entry points.

“It’s just not realistic to expect that fentanyl will no longer come into the United States,” said Vanda Felbab-Brown, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution who has studied illicit drugs for decades.

But fentanyl activists say Trump is at least drawing attention to the problem, while the Biden administration, they say, is not.

“We don’t feel seen, we don’t feel heard,” Allen said. “I’m amazed that anyone doesn’t realize or consider that this is a huge population of people that if we believe that you’re going to respond to this and do something about it, you can very easily earn our favor.”

White House officials dispute the idea that the Biden administration has failed to address the fentanyl crisis, saying they have implemented sound policies to address it. They say they have met with hundreds of families affected by opioids, made historic investments in treatment and seized record amounts of fentanyl at the border.

“President Biden and Vice President Harris have taken more action and provided more funding to address this crisis than ever before,” said President Biden’s Director of National Drug Control Policy, Dr. Rahul Gupta.

Some grieving families are frustrated with both sides. Jim Rauh, who lost his son Thomas to fentanyl poisoning, leads a group called Families Against Fentanyl, which has placed billboards with messages at both political convention sites to draw attention to the crisis.

He said he tries to take an impartial approach in his advocacy, but, he added, “it’s clear who brings it up more often.”

No miracle cure

The reality is that neither side has a silver bullet for fentanyl.

Fentanyl is a legal drug with medicinal uses as a powerful painkiller that has been around for years. For a long time, it wasn’t a major factor in America’s opioid crisis. But because it’s cheap to make and potent in small doses — and therefore easy to smuggle — drug dealers started selling it to opioid addicts and laced it with other drugs.

Overdoses and poisonings began to spike. In 2017, the year Trump took office, there were 28,000 deaths from fentanyl. By the time he left office in January 2021, the number had risen to 50,000.

In 2019, the Trump administration scored a major victory by getting China to regulate fentanyl production, leading to a reduction in illegal exports from there. But Mexican cartels then began importing the chemical ingredients needed to make the drug from China. And experts say those cartels made the business decision that an increase in deaths among their customers was a small price to pay for the profitability of using fentanyl in almost every illegal drug.

Today, the powerful substance can be found in all sorts of drugs and counterfeit pills. People who think they are buying cocaine, methamphetamine or Percocet often end up swallowing fentanyl, sometimes with deadly consequences.

In 2021, during Biden’s first year in office — when many Americans were still at home due to the pandemic — fentanyl deaths rose 23% to more than 70,000.

According to Felbab-Brown, the government has responded, among other things, by removing barriers to drug treatment and increasing its funding.

“The Biden administration, following on from what was started in the Obama administration, has critically expanded coverage, medical coverage, insurance coverage to include substance use disorders,” she said. “That is absolutely critical to getting people into treatment.”

Last year, fentanyl deaths fell 2%, which experts say is likely due to the increased use of Narcan, an overdose reversal drug made widely available by Biden.

Under Biden, fentanyl seizures have steadily increased, and U.S. law enforcement agencies have arrested three major Mexican players in the fentanyl trade. Biden has also targeted Chinese makers of precursor chemicals, though that has not stopped their flow into Mexico.

Felbab-Brown said the administration deserves a lot of credit for re-engaging with China on fentanyl, but, she said, “where I think the policy really falls short is in how we engage with the Mexican government.”

Even when Mexico’s president publicly and falsely stated that fentanyl was not produced in Mexico, the Biden administration hesitated to publicly criticize him. Analysts say the Biden team has treated Mexico with great care, even amid the inaction and corruption that has allowed it to flourish.

Felbab-Brown and others say that’s largely because the U.S. urgently needs Mexico’s help to slow the flow of migrants to the U.S. southern border, an issue that has become a major political problem for Democrats.

Trump has repeatedly blamed the surge in fentanyl deaths on the influx of 10 million migrants who crossed the border under Biden. But statistics on fentanyl seizures by U.S. Customs and Border Protection tell a different story.

More than 95% of the fentanyl seized at the border is actually brought in by U.S. citizens, the government says. Last year, less than 2% of those cars were scanned for fentanyl.

In 2021, the Department of Homeland Security purchased machines to scan passenger vehicles for fentanyl, but a significant number have still not been installed.

NBC News reported in March that 56 of the more than 100 scanners had sat unused for three years due to a lack of funding for their installation. Shortly after, Congress approved $200 million to install the machines. Since then, the percentage of scanned cars crossing the border has risen to 8%, a senior DHS official said.

A compromise border security bill would have provided more money for more machines, but the bill died after Trump told his allies to oppose it.

A spokesperson for Vice President Kamala Harris’ campaign said she will continue Biden’s drug-fighting policies. Harris also wants to revive the border security law and seek more funding for drug treatment, the spokesperson said.

“While Donald Trump killed the strongest bipartisan border bill in decades, which would have dramatically expanded our ability to stop fentanyl at the border — siding with fentanyl traffickers over Border Patrol and the American people — the Vice President and President have committed resources to stop fentanyl at every stage of the supply chain and fought for greater support for Americans battling addiction,” a spokesperson said in a statement to NBC News.

Karoline Leavitt, a spokesperson for the Trump campaign, said the campaign is regularly contacted by families who have lost loved ones to fentanyl.

“Fentanyl overdose is the leading cause of death among Americans and Kamala Harris and Joe Biden aren’t talking about it,” she said.

Grieving families will not stop raising awareness about this issue

As politicians bicker, April Babcock said she will keep pressure on whoever is in power.

After losing her son in 2019, she founded an advocacy group, Lost Voices of Fentanyl, which now has nearly 35,000 followers on Facebook.

She said she is glad to see the death toll going down, but attributed that to Narcan, adding: “We are not going to Narcan our way out of this.”

Her group met with former Trump Homeland Security officials this summer at the foot of the Washington Monument to voice their concerns about border security.

Babcock said parents in her organization have already set a date for their 2025 D.C. rally. “Whoever gets into that office, we’re going to push them,” she said. “Even if it’s Trump.”