Republican House candidate Nick Begich of Alaska released an ad Tuesday featuring a local mom criticizing the Biden administration’s border policies that she said led to her son’s fentanyl overdose.
Begich’s ad, obtained exclusively by the Daily Caller News Foundation, features Alaska mom Athena Fulton recountingher son, Braeden’s, death, who passed away from a fentanyl overdose at the age of 20. Fulton said that drug addiction and fentanyl, in particular, is “ravaging” communities in Alaska, noting that the crisis came to a head when President Joe Biden was elected and “opened up the border.”
“I am willing to talk about it if it means saving a life,” Fulton said. “Drug addiction, drug use, fentanyl in particular, is ravaging our county. And it wasn’t until the Biden administration came along and pretty much on day one they opened up the border. They’re bringing all kinds of things, it’s not just fentanyl. Lawmakers need to do what they say they’re going to.”
Since Biden took office, there have been over eight million migrant encounters on the southern border, according to data from the U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP). In that same time frame, over 60,000 pounds of fentanyl have been seized by the CBP.
It takes just two milligrams of fentanyl to kill an adult.
“My son was 20 years old when he passed,” Fulton said early in the ad. “I found my son dead. He has his own apartment. I knocked on the door and he didn’t answer, so I went and opened it because I had a key. And that’s where I found him passed away. He had been dead for hours.”
Over 340 Alaskans died from overdoses in 2023, which is a 40% increase from the numbers in 2022, according to the Alaska Beacon. Over 260 of those deaths were from fentanyl, which was a dramatic increase from the 151 fentanyl-related deaths in 2022.
Biden met with Chinese President Xi Jinping in November 2023, who agreed to halt the production of fentanyl. There has been “no evidence of new criminal enforcement actions” against fentanyl manufacturers and traffickers, according to an April report from the House Select Committee on the CCP.
Nationally more than 150,000 Americans have died from fentanyl in 2023 and 2022 combined, according to the National Center for Health Statistics.
“I support Nick Begich for Congress because I believe that Nick Begich will show up and really try to tackle this,” Fulton said. “He wants to make Alaska a better place. If I can use Braeden’s name to bring awareness to the fentanyl problem, it’s worth it.”
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