FIRST ON FOX – GOP state attorneys general previewed their upcoming meeting Friday at the Department of Justice, where President Donald Trump and U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi will discuss collaborating with state top cops to combat crime.
Fox News Digital is told much of the conversation is expected to focus on fighting the scourge of fentanyl in communities.
Trump spoke to reporters in the Oval Office on Thursday previewing his Justice Department speech. He nodded to problems faced in cities, such as subway violence. “We don’t want to have crime in the streets. We don’t want to have people pushed into subways and killed,” Trump said. “We want to have safety in our cities, as well as in our communities, and we’ll be talking about immigration. We’ll be talking about a lot of things. The complete gamut.”
Virginia Attorney General Jason Miyares championed Bondi’s “proactive” approach, saying he had received more calls from the DOJ in Trump’s first 30 days in office than he did in his prior three years of service under the Biden administration.
“They keep open lines of communication. Whereas, before, the only time I ever heard from Merrick Garland was if he was trying to sue Virginia for some reason,” Miyares told Fox News Digital.
Miyares said he viewed the fentanyl epidemic as both a national security and domestic challenge, citing how an average of 105,000 Americans were dying every 12 months of addiction deaths at the peak of the crisis. By contrast, over 50,000 Americans died in the Vietnam War over the course of 15 years. “It was two Vietnam wars happening every 12 months in this country to absolutely devastating impact. Virginia was not lost on that,” Miyares said.
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Virginia has seen a 40% reduction in addiction deaths since 2021, one of the most significant drops in the country, Miyares said, arguing he and Gov. Glenn Youngkin’s three-prong approach of prosecution, prevention and treatment can be applied nationally. He noted that Trump’s nominee to lead the Drug Enforcement Administration, Terry Cole, is currently serving as Virginia’s Secretary of Public Safety and Homeland Security.
“He’s going to be an exceptional, exceptional head of a DEA,” Miyares said. “He knows what we’ve done in Virginia because he’s been part of it. I look forward to seeing him bring that nationwide.”
Miyares praised Trump’s Inauguration Day executive order designating cartels as foreign terrorist organizations. As for the Biden administration, Miyares said he “never felt that they took it as seriously.” He said one federal agent told him the Biden administration discouraged posting about drug busts online, describing the attitude at the top of the bureaucracy as signaling,[ “We don’t want to admit we have a drug problem in this country.”
“It was almost like an ostrich with its head in the sand. The other problem was the border. More fentanyl was crossing our southern border in one year to kill every man, woman and child in America three or four times over. It was staggering,” Miyares said. “The reality is the Sinaloa Cartel is the single most dangerous criminal enterprise, I would argue, in the history of the world, they have a reach that is staggering.”
“It was President Trump who has declared the cartels a foreign terrorist organization. The Biden administration could have done so,” Miyares said. “These were criminal enterprises that, in my opinion, were conducting chemical warfare on everyday Americans to levels that we don’t see even lost in war or happening to our kids, our friends and our neighbors. They are terrorist organizations.”
With Democrats having lost control of both houses of Congress, Democratic attorneys general have led their party’s charge against the Trump administration’s agenda on a number of issues, including immigration. Miyares urged fellow state top cops across the aisle to “lock arms and work together” when it comes to the fentanyl epidemic, because “it affects every American Republican or Democrat, red state or blue state.”
“Make sure you do that partnership so we can save lives, because our real enemy is not the other political party,” he said. “Our real enemy are the cartels and these dealers poisoning our kids.”
Pennsylvania Attorney General Dave Sunday told Fox News Digital that keeping families together is a crucial component to public safety. He also said that Republicans must have a greater presence in inner cities long controlled by Democrats.
“The only way that we can maximize outcomes to keep people safe in this country is when we all work together. And having a Justice Department that’s aligned with my philosophy of public safety, that without safe communities, nothing else matters, it puts us in a position where we can take that collaboration to the next level,” Sunday said. “Citizens have the absolute right to demand that their government works to keep them safe.”
“As I go into this meeting tomorrow, I view this through a positive lens. This is an opportunity for us,” he told Fox News Digital. “This epidemic not only is killing people. It’s destroying our economy, and it’s tearing families apart. And that’s one of the absolute worst parts of this. You know that the family in America is one of the most crucial components to a thriving community and public safety.”
“When you have addiction permeating our community, that tears families apart. And it’s something that I absolutely do not want to see,” Sunday said. “Local law enforcement cannot do the job by themselves.”
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He said from his experience as a local prosecutor that some of the “most painful meetings I’ve ever had are with parents who’ve lost their children to addiction.”
“The thought of having to watch a child slip away into the web of addiction and become someone that’s not even, you know, the person that you knew. It’s so gut-wrenching,” he said.
Sunday said part of the conservative values important to him is “keeping families together,” explaining that he views his role as a father as “my most important job.” And fatherhood and family can be applied through a public safety lens. “There’s a lot of kids out there, especially in violent communities, that don’t have any mentorship. They don’t have anyone that looks after them,” Sunday said.
Sunday praised the Trump administration’s prioritization of border security, noting that fentanyl coming across from Mexico “takes probably less than maybe 24 hours to arrive here in Pennsylvania.”
As Pennsylvania experienced the turning of a red tide in the last election, Sunday said his focus as attorney general included inner cities plagued by open-air drug markets and other quality of life concerns. He spoke to Fox News Digital on Thursday from Philadelphia, where he was getting ready to attend the mayor’s budget address “so that people see the Republican attorney general is a part of Philadelphia.”
“I’m here, and I’m not going away, and my resources are going to be here, and they’re not going away because the citizens in Philadelphia have every right to demand that I work hard for them, just like anyone else,” Sunday said. “When you have, you know, one party like the Democrat control over a city like this, without the influence, you know, of, I’ll say, a Republican prosecutor, that creates a situation like we’ve dealt with.”
Sunday said he values both holding people accountable and redemption programs. A former district attorney in York County, Pennsylvania, which sits outside of Baltimore, Maryland, he said he worked every single day with the Black Ministers Association and with Latino organizations “because they’re victims of crime, just like everyone’s a victim of crime.”
“We live in this world right now where, you know, people make judgments about other people solely based on, you know, their political party,” Sunday said. “And there are a lot of citizens here that probably have never dealt with a Republican attorney general, even physically being here . . . I have seen amazing things happen when people talk to each other.”
Ahead of Friday’s meeting at the DOJ, Missouri Attorney General Andrew Bailey championed the Trump administration’s crackdown on China in fighting the fentanyl crisis.
“We must address the fentanyl crisis at its source and hold China accountable. They continue to supply Mexican drug cartels and terrorist organizations with the necessary components for fentanyl production, resulting in the deaths of hundreds of thousands and causing untold suffering in our communities,” Bailey said in a statement to Fox News Digital. “Our recent $25 billion judgment against China for unleashing COVID-19 on the world is just one example of how attorneys general across the nation can begin fighting back against foreign actors who threaten our way of life.”
Mississippi Attorney General Lynn Fitch also applauded Trump “for using tariffs as tools to take decisive action against the fentanyl crisis and put Americans’ safety and our national security first.”
“In Mississippi, we are primed and ready to partner with him,” Fitch told Fox News Digital. “We are raising awareness of the dangers of fentanyl and equipping citizens with the knowledge and tools to stop an overdose with our One Pill Can Kill Campaign. We are creating a network of law enforcement through our Fentanyl Strike Force to get this deadly drug and its dealers off the streets.”
Tennessee Attorney General Jonathan Skrmetti said in a statement to Fox News Digital that “fentanyl has killed hundreds of thousands of Americans and kills thousands more Tennesseans each year, a death toll that demands an uncompromising response.” He said he was grateful that Trump and Bondi “recognize the urgency of this crisis and are acting forcefully to save lives.”
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