‘We’ve just heard too many stories’: Here’s the crisis that moves Gov. Abbott to tears | Opinion

Gov. Greg Abbott is not typically an emotional politician.

So, it was a surprise when he suddenly, briefly teared up during his state of the state address last week. What could move him that much — so much that he began welling up again Monday when asked about it during an interview?

The scourge of fentanyl. A glimpse at a woman in the audience, Veronica Kaprosy, who lost a child to the drug.

“I don’t know what y’all could see, but right in front of me was the mother, and she had a picture of her daughter,” the governor said. “So when I looked at her” — Abbott’s eyes welled with tears again, his face became flushed, and he seemed taken aback at his sudden emotions again —“It’s so sad when you see so many people … you think how you’d feel if you lost your kid.”

Abbott said that the moment “caught me by surprise. It’s making me almost tear up right now.” His face scrunched up and he gathered himself for a second.

“Were you thinking of your daughter, too?” I asked, referring to 26 year-old Audrey Abbott.

“Just look at that right there,” Abbott said, pointing to a photo of the two of them on the wall of his office at the Capitol. “You do think about your own kid.”

A tear rolled down his cheek and he quickly brushed it away. He seemed a little confounded that even just re-living hearing the story of her death and recounting it for the first time had brought him to tears again.

Abbott’s office started a fentanyl campaign a few months ago after hearing one too many of these stories. Stories like Veronica Karposy’s. She told Abbott last year that her daughter Danica died at age 17 from fentanyl poisoning. Abbott’s campaign could apply to anyone, as fentanyl doesn’t discriminate, but it targets teenagers who are particularly susceptible to taking substances without prescriptions or asking questions. “One Pill Can Kill” posters now adorn many public high school walls.

Mentioning families who inspire policies in a speech is a common political tactic, and to be honest, it’s often viewed as a stunt, an appeal to emotion or sentimentalism, even an attempt to look human for a moment. But it was clear in the moment this was no ploy.

It’s even more unusual for a politician with the reputation Abbott has: factual, no-nonsense, data-driven.

Most of the time, that’s the case, especially when it comes to the border. In fact, Abbott is so determined to translate the horrific numbers of illegal crossings into a secure Texas border that he appointed a border czar, former U.S. Border Patrol leader Mike Banks, to oversee his ongoing Operation Lone Star.

The governor is so sure that Mexican drug cartels are one of the primary instigators of chaos at the border — they facilitate illegal border crossing attempts and shuffle fentanyl-laced pills that often look like regular medicine or even candy — he’s dubbed them terrorist organizations. And he doesn’t mean that as a euphemism.

He’s right to take that seriously. Fentanyl poisoning is killing young people across the U.S. and especially in Texas. In 2020, 883 people in Texas died from fentanyl-related poisoning in 2020. The following year, that number had climbed to 1,672 deaths — an 89% increase. According to Abbott’s office, the Texas Department of Public Safety has seized enough fentanyl near the border to kill every man, woman, and child in the United States.

Texas Health and Human Services reports fentanyl is particularly potent. It’s a synthetic opioid that’s “50 times stronger than heroin and 100 times stronger than morphine,” safe when prescribed by a doctor to treat pain but potentially lethal when laced in counterfeit pills, heroin, cocaine or methamphetamine and taken without a user’s knowledge.

Abbott has received immense scrutiny and criticism for the way he’s chosen to handle the Texas border, taking matters into state hands — like building a border wall — and being an outspoken critic of Biden administration policies that have made the border more porous. But it’s not all billion dollar budgets, busting drug cartels and apprehending immigrants entering illegally: For Abbott, the lack of border security carries with it a hefty humanitarian cost.

The cost comes in the form of children here alone, crimes against Texans and horrific abuse of migrants, and drug poisoning of young adults whose families are crushed by sudden, inexplicable deaths.

“It’s not just [the Kaprosy family]. We’ve heard too many stories,” Abbott said.