Marcella Sorg
Role at the time: Research professor and medical and forensic anthropologist at the University of Maine, writing in an email to PolitiFact
Challenged the characterization
Response to this claim
Maine’s decrease in overdose deaths in 2025 and 2026 occurred because the Trump administration sealed the border.
“The evidence supports multiple factors for this reduction in overdose deaths, especially fentanyl deaths, rather than pointing to a closing the US border as a single cause.”
Open source (opens in a new tab)Maine drug overdoses are down. Is Vance right that Trump’s border policies are the cause?Expert interviews and ruling
Reports named interviews with University of Maine, Carnegie Mellon, University of Maryland, Georgetown, and Brown drug-policy and public-health researchers, plus a response from the vice president’s office.
Why we used this label
The statement directly rejects the characterization of border closure as the sole established cause.