At the risk of angering a CNN anchor who has excoriated conservatives for noticing the intersection of the border and COVID crises in Texas, the city of Laredo is fueling this "demonization" with additional facts. Officials now say that the jurisdiction has turned away buses filled with migrants after discovering that approximately four-in-ten have tested positive for COVID. The unmitigated mess at the border is a caricature of failed "progressive" governance:
“The city of Laredo, Texas, has refused to take in migrants who have been bused in from elsewhere on the border after discovering 40% of them tested positive for the coronavirus…” https://t.co/KgDbtAxip4
— Guy Benson (@guypbenson) August 12, 2021
“That [percentage] was very high,” Laredo Mayor Pete Saenz said in an interview, referring to the infection rate among migrants dropped off by the Border Patrol last week. Laredo health authority, Dr. Victor Trevino, confirmed the numbers. The 40% infection rate is the highest known positivity rate along the U.S.-Mexico border. Last week, McAllen, Texas, reported a 15% positivity rate among migrants released from custody. Concerned that migrants arriving in Laredo would further strain hospital resources, Laredo officials contracted private bus companies to transport migrants arriving from the Rio Grande Valley to larger cities across the state. By not admitting migrants on the McAllen buses, the city is not required to test them for the coronavirus and could forward the families elsewhere.
Progressives are screaming at Texas for not imposing enough COVID mandates -- though various mitigation and vaccination efforts are active -- while also denying and incentivizing the ongoing border crisis, leading to results and nutty policies like this. Nobody should be claiming that America's COVID wave is being driven by immigrants. That's not true. But the Democratic administration's failing immigration policies would be insane in non-pandemic times; they are breathtakingly reckless in the current environment. The White House is in no position to lecture Texas over COVID while the administration's spiraling border disaster is contributing to it. Summer "seasonality" was supposed to slow down the unsustainable, overwhelming influx of illegal immigrants at the southern border. The opposite has happened, with numbers climbing even higher in July. and the administration is now simply releasing tens of thousands of these migrants into the country with no court dates:
About 50,000 migrants who crossed the southern border illegally have now been released in the United States without a court date. Although they are told to report to an Immigration and Customs Enforcement office instead, just 13% have shown up so far, Axios has learned...The sizable numbers are a sign of just how overwhelmed some sectors of the U.S.-Mexico border continue to be: A single stretch covering the Rio Grande Valley had 20,000 apprehensions in a week. The figures also show the shortcomings of recent emergency decisions to release migrants. It's unprecedented for agents to release migrants without an official notice to appear in court. Where it has occurred recently, migrants have instead been given a list of addresses and contacts for ICE offices across the country and told to report to one of them. Just 6,700 migrants who crossed between mid-March and mid-July showed up at ICE offices as of Monday
The terms "unsustainable" and "overwhelming" are not at all hyperbolic:
Video of an overcrowded Border Patrol facility in the Rio Grande Valley Sector from this week.
— Julio Rosas (@Julio_Rosas11) August 11, 2021
From the source: "This has surpassed the point of sustainability — this is lunacy."
Fed-up BP agents are taking videos/pics to show what's really happening --> https://t.co/cT4uWOQqSf pic.twitter.com/Z1fu6D9M9S
This would be bad enough under normal circumstances, but you're putting a lot of lives at-risk with this during a pandemic. The Biden admin's border policies, which have actively encouraged a crisis (despite the opposite rhetoric), are indefensible. https://t.co/qkIvEMWN6V
— AG (@AGHamilton29) August 12, 2021
Strangely, certain politicians who not long ago went to great lengths to demonstrate how deeply troubled they were by the plight of undocumented migrants have been notably muted or silent on the issue lately. The crisis has only intensified, yet we're not seeing anguished photo shoots or grave pronouncements about "crimes against humanity." Gosh, what changed? I'll leave you with this:
FOX NEWS POLL: Biden’s Job Performance On Immigration #FoxNewsPoll #Immigration pic.twitter.com/215Q7wZ7IA
— Wyatt Dobrovich (@WyattDobrovich) August 12, 2021
No wonder the president is reportedly worried about Republicans taking advantage of this issue. He's in a position to turn it around, but he can't. Doing so would infuriate his open borders base (and a global pandemic has not deterred their fanaticism on this), so the most powerful man in the world is reduced to hand-wringing.
