Kentucky’s Republican Attorney General Russell Coleman joined other GOP attorneys general in Arizona on Wednesday at the U.S. border with Mexico in a show of support for Trump administration efforts to increase border security.
During the press conference, which was livestreamed by the Republican Attorneys General Association, the Bluegrass State’s top prosecutor was flanked by nearly a dozen of his counterparts from around the country, including AGs from Alabama, Indiana, Kansas, Mississippi and South Carolina.
The message that many of the officials echoed, including Coleman, was that “every state is a border state.”
Beforehand, in a post on X, the Kentucky attorney general wrote that the group was coming together with Trump “to secure the southwest border and keep deadly drugs and violent criminals out of Kentucky.”
“The border’s a long way from Bourbon Country. It’s a long way from Kentucky. But we lost 1,400 Kentuckians last year to drug-related death – 2,000 the year before. Every one of those from poison that came over a border that looks just like this,” Coleman said. “The lack of border security has resulted in empty chairs at kitchen tables, empty seats at pews and workers not clocking in in the Commonwealth of Kentucky.”
According to the most recent Kentucky Drug Overdose Fatality Report, fentanyl was present in more than 62% of overdose deaths in the Commonwealth. More than 10 tons of fentanyl was seized by the U.S. Customs and Border Protection in 2024 – nearly all of it at the country’s southern border.
Coleman said that he had been told in a briefing that the Yuma border site the group visited had an average of 1,500 illegal crossings a day during the Biden administration, and that during the Trump administration that number had dropped down to as few as four a day.
Coleman said that the result comes from “solid leadership” by President Donald Trump.
The Republican attorney general was among the officials who aligned with Texas Republican Gov. Greg Abbott against the Biden administration over the U.S. Border Patrol being blocked from a portion of the state’s shared border with Mexico. Coleman also joined fellow GOP attorneys general in court this year in support of Trump administration efforts to deport migrants from Venezuela.
