EXCLUSIVE — A Michigan woman who lost her two sons to fentanyl poisoning in 2020 said she is still waiting on President Joe Biden to apologize for suggesting her children's deaths were not his fault because they did not occur on his watch.
Rebecca Kiessling spoke with the Washington Examiner on Thursday about a video she posted on Facebook late Wednesday after she learned Biden appeared indifferent about her pain.
"I was completely disturbed. I had to respond. He still needs to apologize to all of us," Kiessling told the Washington Examiner.
Kiessling visited Washington on Tuesday and testified before the House Homeland Security Committee about her family’s experience losing two children to fentanyl poisoning in July 2020 while President Donald Trump was still in office.
Kiessling's 18-year-old son, Kyler, and 20-year-old son, Caleb, died after they consumed fake prescription pills that contained fatal levels of synthetic fentanyl.
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During questioning by lawmakers at the House hearing Tuesday, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) proposed to Kiessling that her sons would still be alive if the Biden administration had taken different actions to enforce immigration policies at the U.S.-Mexico border, where more than 5 million immigrants have been encountered attempting to enter illegally over the past two years as the same federal police at the border intercepted more fentanyl from smugglers than any other period in history.
"[Greene] was saying that a poor mother who lost two kids to fentanyl — that I killed her sons. Well, the interesting thing is that fentanyl they took came during the last administration,” Biden said at a Democratic gathering in Baltimore on Wednesday evening in reference to Trump.
Kiessling immediately took to Facebook and responded to Biden.
“How dare you? What is the matter with you? Almost every Democrat on the committee offered condolences. They at least had the decency to do that,” Kiessling said in the Facebook video. “You can’t even do that? You have to mock my pain?”
The experience, appearing before the country's senior-most lawmakers, left Kiessling convinced that Congress would not take meaningful action to address the fentanyl epidemic, either at the nation's borders, offshore as the ingredients are shipped from China to Mexico, or within the country.
"I felt kind of a little bit hopeless there listening to all of the Democrats. I just felt like, 'Wow, they're not going to do anything.' Like they are not going to do anything about this border problem," Kiessling said in a Zoom interview with the Washington Examiner on Thursday.
Kiessling was also bothered by how Democrats spent their five-minute allotments to speak — lecturing witnesses and primarily questioning a witness from a libertarian think tank rather than asking her questions.
"Every member of the committee ended up taking five minutes to speak," Kiessling said.
Several Democrats did start their remarks by expressing their condolences to Kiessling. However, she said their comments indicated that they did not understand the urgency or severity of the fentanyl epidemic.
"They all had the same talking points," Kiessling said. "Then they were saying that, you know, 'Oh, we're having the biggest drug busts ever.'"
"No, you're having more deaths now than ever because more fentanyl is coming across the border," she said. "It's delusional to think that ... we've got it under control."
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Biden announced in his State of the Union address in February that he intended to crack down on the fentanyl epidemic. He visited the land ports of entry in El Paso, Texas, in January and called for more technology at the ports so that federal police can seize more fentanyl as smugglers attempt to push it across the border.