Doug Ducey, the ice cream man hired by Koch Industries to run their Southwest subsidiary formerly known as the state of Arizona, has a fantasy about running for president in 2024. (Ducey denies that he is running for the U.S. Senate.)
If Ducey does run for the U.S. Senate, he will lose in the GQP primary to a radical seditionist. He was recently censured by the seditionists in his party for having certified Arizona’s Electoral College vote for Joe Biden. “Dear Leader” Donald Trump attacked him on Twitter: “What is going on with @dougducey?” Trump posted on Twitter. “Republicans will long remember!” These same radicals are also anti-maskers and anti-vaxxers and COVID deniers who have been trying to strip the governor of his emergency powers to deal with the coronavirus pandemic, for which Ducey has been a miserable failure and negligently responsible for many deaths.
As for running for president, Doug Ducey should familiarize himself with the sage advice the late Senator John McCain gave to Jay Leno on the Tonight Show:
Senator John McCain: I gotta tell you one quick story about Arizona. As you know, the great state of Arizona I’ve had the honor to represent. And we have a problem in Arizona. It’s really kind of a sad thing, because Barry Goldwater from Arizona ran for President of the United States. Morris Udall from Arizona ran for President of the United States. Bruce Babbitt from Arizona ran for President of the United States. I, twice. Arizona may be the only state in America where mothers don’t tell their children that some day they can grow up and be President of the United States. (Laughter.) I mean, that’s a sad story.
Delusional Doug nevertheless persists in his presidential fantasy. In White Christian Nationalists Republican primary politics, this means xenophobic and racist anti-immigrant demonization; even better if it is young children separated from their parents. As Adam Serwer observed, for Republicans The Cruelty Is the Point:
Trump’s only true skill is the con; his only fundamental belief is that the United States is the birthright of straight, white, Christian men, and his only real, authentic pleasure is in cruelty. It is that cruelty, and the delight it brings them, that binds his most ardent supporters to him, in shared scorn for those they hate and fear: immigrants, black voters, feminists, and treasonous white men who empathize with any of those who would steal their birthright. The president’s ability to execute that cruelty through word and deed makes them euphoric. It makes them feel good, it makes them feel proud, it makes them feel happy, it makes them feel united. And as long as he makes them feel that way, they will let him get away with anything, no matter what it costs them.
Delusional Doug, like Trump Fluffer Lindsey Graham, wants to “harness the magic” of that Trump cruelty in the GQP, so he made the obligatory trek to the U.S.-Mexico border to engage in xenophobic and racist anti-immigrant demonization of children seeking legal asylum, and to blame Democrats, of course. Ducey accuses Biden of creating border crisis:
Surrounded by Republican politicians, Gov. Doug Ducey on Friday insisted that everything that is now going wrong on the border is the fault of President Biden, his administration and the Democratic Congress.
Using sometimes blistering words, Ducey called the current influx of migrants “a man-made crisis caused by elites in Washington, D.C. who are totally divorced from the reality on the ground.
It starts, the governor said, with the administration’s decision to repeal the “migrant protection protocols.” In essence, this program required anyone seeking admission to this country, even with a claim of asylum, was required to remain in Mexico.
“The repeal of these protocols have directly resulted in a significant influx of unvetted individuals into the United States from Central America,” Ducey said. “And we know it’s going to get dramatically worse before it gets better.”
The governor cited figures from Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas that the Border Patrol is on pace to reach the highest number of apprehensions in 20 years. [Or at least since 2019].
“Yet where has the secretary been?” Ducey said, chiding Mayorkas by saying “this is where the action is, not Washington, D.C.”
Alejandro Mayorkas was only confirmed by the Senate on February 2.
And then there’s the fact that Biden ordered a halt to further wall construction.
“It’s clear that this administration is anti-wall and AWOL, absent without leave,” the governor said.
“They have been absent from the field,” he continued. “And their bad policies and lack of leadership have resulted in this crisis.”
Ducey brushed aside questions about data that showed there already was an increase in people trying to cross the border last April, when Republican Donald Trump was still president.
Oh, Delusional Doug, you’re such a douchebag.
A bipartisan group of senators also went to the border this weekend, including Sen Chris Murphy, Chairman of the U.S. Senate Appropriations Subcommittee on Homeland Security, who knows a damn sight more about what the federal government is doing than some ice cream man from Koch Industries.
2/ The desperation these kids and families are fleeing is hard to describe. The memory of that 13 yr old girl will be w me forever. So long as conditions are abysmal in places south, people will find a way to get here, no matter how high the wall is or how many border agents.
— Chris Murphy 🟧 (@ChrisMurphyCT) March 19, 2021
Sen. Chris Murphy Gives Firsthand Account of Border Trip on NPR’s Weekend Edition (excerpt):
U.S. Senator Chris Murphy (D-Conn.), Chairman of the U.S. Senate Appropriations Subcommittee on Homeland Security, on Saturday joined NPR Weekend Edition to discuss his recent trip to the U.S.-Mexico border to assess resource needs and ongoing humanitarian and security challenges at the southern border.
“[T]he rise in children coming to the border has happened so quickly that it has been difficult to move them out of these detention facilities in under three days. Right now as we speak, [the Biden administration is] building new capacity to be able to house these children and filling new slots in the HHS system. So they are also trying to rebuild a program that the Trump administration ended in Central America to allow for kids to apply for asylum there,” Murphy said.
Murphy continued: “You know what Donald Trump did was essentially tear down the entire asylum system. And so when you had this massive increase in children coming to the border, first at the end of last year, continuing with the Biden administration, it was very difficult to be able to move these kids out of detention in that 72 hour period. So the Biden administration has been working very fast to try to rebuild the asylum systems, trying to let these kids once again apply to stay in this country if their lives are truly in danger back home in Guatemala or Honduras, but they inherited an absolute mess, a wreck from the Trump administration. They’re trying to do better as quickly as they can. So they’re going to be opening up new facilities for these kids throughout the Southwest border in the coming weeks. Hopefully you’ll be able to see these times go back down below 72 hours very quickly. They’re doing their best.”
On the conditions Murphy saw at the border, he said: “…[T]his is better than what we saw in 2019. These are not kids in so-called cages. They are not being separated from their family at the border. But these are facilities you wouldn’t want your child in for more than 10 minutes. They are big, open rooms. The kids are, you’re sleeping on thin mattresses on the floor. They are sort of bunched, you know, about six inches to a foot from each other. We’ve got to ultimately do better. These are conditions that can just build on the trauma that these kids have already experienced in their own countries and on the long transit to the United States. The Biden administration’s trying as quickly as they can to process these kids in a humane way.”
On Friday, Murphy traveled to El Paso, Texas with U.S. Senator Shelley Moore Capito (R-W.V.), Ranking Member of the Appropriations Subcommittee on Homeland Security, U.S. Senators Gary Peters (D-Mich.) and Rob Portman (R-Ohio), Chairman and Ranking Member of the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, and Secretary of Homeland Security Alejandro Mayorkas to tour several border facilities in El Paso to help inform efforts in Congress to address these ongoing concerns. The group toured the Paso del Norte International Crossing, the newly constructed Centralized Processing Center, the CHS Trail House Shelter, and the VA Medical Center where they thanked health care workers for their work in helping vaccinate DHS employees during the COVID-19 pandemic. You can read the Senators’ readout of the trip here and the Secretary’s readout of the trip here.
The House passed legislation earlier this week that would offer legal status for young undocumented immigrants (Dreamers) and agricultural workers already in the United States (essential workers).
The House will consider other related bills in the coming weeks, as Democratic leaders begin rounding up support for President Biden’s comprehensive immigration reform proposal.
Heather at CrooksAndLiars has a thoughtful post, Reframing The Debate On The Humanitarian Crisis At Our Southern Border:
The right has decided to turn the humanitarian crisis at the southern border in the United States into their next Benghazi!, with Fox running hundreds of segments a day, breathlessly “reporting” on the recent influx of unaccompanied migrant children who are fleeing Central America and fearmongering that terrorists are coming across the U.S.-Mexico border:
This week, Republican members of Congress went to the U.S.-Mexico border with the intent of hammering President Joe Biden on the recent increase in migrant crossings at the border, and House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) suggested that suspected terrorists are trying to cross. Despite a lack of evidence, right-wing media are echoing the Republican lawmakers in fearmongering that terrorists were crossing the border, at times suggesting migrants from countries such as Yemen, Turkey, or Iran pose a threat by nature of their home countries. […]
The assertion that terrorists are crossing the southern border is not new on the right, and former President Donald Trump’s administration and his right-wing allies frequently pushed the scare tactic even though it has been repeatedly debunked. Now, right-wing media are helping Republicans take advantage of an increase in migrants coming across the border to fearmonger that migrants coming from countries like Yemen, Turkey, and Iran are terrorists.
As the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) reported this week, despite the fact that the Trump administration carried out the “cruelest anti-migration policies in decades,” they also “presided over the largest flows of migration at the U.S.-Mexico border since the mid-2000s.”
They also put the Mexico “border crisis” narrative being pushed by the right into context:
The increased numbers of people crossing the border right now is something that border experts have predicted for some time now.
[…]
The increased border crossings was predictable, not because of Biden administration policies like winding down “Remain with Mexico,” but because of the dangers put in place by Trump’s cruel and illegal policies of deterrence.
[…]
Of the 96,974 migrants whom Border Patrol “encountered” in February, it quickly expelled 72 percent—down only slightly from the end of the Trump administration, which expelled 85 percent in December and 83 percent in January. The remainder whom Border Patrol actually had to process last month—26,791 migrants—was the 77th most out of the past 114 months. Being in 77th place hardly constitutes a crisis.
There is a serious capacity issue right now, though, for one especially vulnerable category of migrant: children who arrive unaccompanied by a parent or guardian.
And as journalist Maria Hinojosa discussed with MSNBC’s Ali Velshi in the segment below [https://crooksandliars.com/cltv/2021/03/maria-hinojosa-humanitarian-crisis], this humanitarian crisis is nothing new:
HINOJOSA: What’s going on at the border is a humanitarian crisis. It is not a conundrum. I’m sorry, with all due respect, I love you, not a surge we use to talk about troops in Iraq, not a surge. So people need to understand why is this happening? When you have had over the last six years, the end of the Obama administration, entirety of the Trump administration really pushing down on shutting this completely down in terms of the border or any kind of movement, people are not sitting there saying, huh, okay, there’s a Democrat that’s been elected, let me go ahead and do this now. no. What it is is bubbling up of extreme trauma.
Hinojosa urged President Biden to change the narrative on why these children are fleeing to America and to focus on the humanitarian aspect of the crisis, and the fact that it’s fear and desperation driving people here, not the desire to come to the United States to pick vegetables.
When MSNBC’s Ali Velshi rightfully noted that the Trump administration’s response to the humanitarian crisis was to make it worse, Hinojosa pointed out that sadly, this is nothing new, and U.S. foreign policy in Central America has been making things worse for decades. She hopes the Biden administration responds by not only trying to change the narrative on the crisis, but by taking responsibility for the role the United States played in creating the crisis as well.
IPS reported on the change in policy we may see from the Biden administration back in December: Joe Biden’s war on corruption in Central America :
Unlike migrants, corrupt elites in Central America had nothing to fear under Trump. Joe Biden wants to change that — and the elites are closing ranks
For four long years Donald Trump, as US President, harassed Central American migrants with ever more innovative methods. In particular, it was people from the countries of the ‘northern triangle’ of Central America who suffered under Trump. When migrants from Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador fled poverty, violence and corruption in their home countries, and hundreds of thousands made their way north in huge caravans, the then US President vilified them as ‘criminals’ and had children separated from their parents in US detention centres.
[…]
‘The United States’ greatest interest in Central America is to curb migration,’ explains Álvaro Montenegro, Guatemalan columnist and co-founder of the citizens’ movement Justicia Ya, which fights for transparent policies in Guatemala. Barack Obama had already given top priority to the issue of migration – but the approach was different to Trump’s term in office. ‘Back then, the US government also focused on reasons for fleeing, such as widespread corruption,’ Montenegro recalls. ‘So it was primarily about strengthening state institutions and supporting civil society.’
[…]
During the Trump administration, they worked to roll back important advances in the fight against corruption to safeguard their own political and economic interests. With a lot of money and perseverance, they tried to discredit the CICIG in Washington as an allegedly partisan commission with a left-wing agenda – and in the end their effort succeeded. When Guatemalan President Jimmy Morales allowed the commission’s mandate to expire in 2019, Washington did not intervene. ‘For Trump, the Guatemalan government and the country’s businessmen were the only allies,’ explains Montenegro. ‘Now, with Biden taking office, civil society can finally be heard again.’
Let’s hope they’re right. Don’t expect anything to change the drumbeat on the right. They’re going to flog this all the way into the midterm election, because lies, race-baiting and fearmongering are all they’ve got to run on. The last thing they want to discuss is the root of the problem, and the role the United States has played in creating it, making it worse, or what we do now to try to fix it.
The only thing you heard from Doug Ducey was xenophobic and racist anti-immigrant bashing of children seeking asylum from violence in their home countries from corrupt governments, and from drug gangs financed by Americans’ insatiable drug consumption. There is also a devastating drought in the central triangle from climate change, which Republicans also deny exists. Climate change is devastating Central America, driving migrants to the U.S. border.
Ducey does not demonstrate any intellectual capacity to understand the complex set of reasons why young Central Americans are seeking asylum in the United States. Because that would mean having to acknowledge the complicity of the United States in creating the very conditions and drivers for immigration from Central America.
President Joe Biden has pledged to address the root causes of immigration, and that is going to take some time. Joe Biden’s Immigration Bill Aims to Address the Root Causes of Migration. Especially when Republicans like Doug Ducey are uninterested in bipartisan cooperation or acting in good faith to do the just and fair thing … for children.
UPDATE: “Ahead of his visit to the border, intended to draw attention to what he has called a security problem of increasing immigration, Arizona Gov. Doug Ducey’s office issued a news release Thursday touting drug busts supposedly made by its Border Strike Force,” the Arizona Republic reports.
“However, each of the highlighted seizures appeared to have been made through the solid, and routine, work of troopers patrolling the state’s highways. And none took place near the border.”
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Tim Steller column, “Investigative commentary: Signs show border panic is overblown, politically motivated”, https://tucson.com/news/local/investigative-commentary-signs-show-border-panic-is-overblown-politically-motivated/article_e34e0904-2b8a-5dcb-a558-7000d7ac3748.html#tracking-source=home-trending
[T]he border backdrop is just the familiar set for a plot some politicians eagerly play out time and again. These days, we’re seeing another stage remake of the “Border Crisis” dramas we’ve seen so many times before.
Yes, there are real problems occurring in some places along the U.S.-Mexico border now. Many more families and unaccompanied children are seeking refuge in the United States than were crossing last year during pandemic restrictions. If the usual pattern holds, the numbers will grow for a few more months before descending later this summer.
It’s a real riddle to be solved with new thinking about immigration. Instead, today’s border crisis as portrayed by politicians is another version of the same play about dangerous threats that we’ve seen before, with a few plot twists.
Nobody has made that clearer than Ducey, with his awkward effort to capitalize on the situation. But across the country it has become a plain-sight campaign of disinformation and exaggeration for political gain.
Here are five ways you can tell today’s border panic is trumped up [pun intended].
Standing in Douglas on March 19, with a wall built in the Obama era behind him, Ducey said, “I’ve been governor under three presidents, and this is by far the worst situation we’ve seen.”
It isn’t.
Ducey has been governor since January 2015, and just two years ago, in spring 2019, the situation was much more challenging for Arizona. That’s when families from Central America and southern Mexico were filling the Benedictine Monastery, at 800 N. Country Club Road, which Tucsonans turned into a temporary shelter.
During the first half of 2019, up to 350 people a day were arriving in Tucson, Teresa Cavendish of Catholic Community Services told me. And Tucson was just receiving a narrow subset of the migrants coming into Arizona at the time.
Now there are around 80 per day, she said, and Tucson is receiving them from areas that stretch from Douglas to Yuma.
Only a couple of small towns in Southern Arizona have had serious issues so far: Ajo in western Pima County and Gila Bend, 45 miles north of Ajo in Maricopa County. Border Patrol officials have dropped off large groups of migrants in these towns that are ill-equipped to help them.
Gila Bend Mayor Chris Riggs declared an emergency in his town, asking the governor to declare a statewide emergency so that Gila Bend could tap available funds from the Federal Emergency Management Agency. But Riggs didn’t get a response to the emails he sent the governor, not to mention a visit, he said.
“It’s funny that he went to a place that wasn’t really seeing the issue, (instead of) Ajo and Gila Bend,” Riggs said.
But Ducey’s decision is understandable: A politician couldn’t get much buzz from standing in front of the Gila Bend Visitors Center & Museum talking about the need for more migrant buses.
[U]p to now, the rise in border crossings hasn’t had anywhere near the effect on Arizona that the migrant arrivals of just two years ago did.
Don’t take my word for it. Take the words of the mayor of Douglas and the sheriffs of Santa Cruz and Pima counties. All of them told me not much unusual has been going on in their jurisdictions, though of course that could change.
In Douglas, Mayor Donald Huish said, local churches and groups have got together to ensure migrants find their way through.
“The community has come together,” he said. “Our biggest concern right now is transportation. As we all know, Douglas isn’t their end game. They want to go be with family in Chicago, Salt Lake City or wherever.”
Santa Cruz County Sheriff David Hathaway said, “We haven’t had any kind of surge here. We’ve just had the usual evidence of migrant crossing.”
“What is a crisis is the border having been shut for 12 months for legal border crossers,” he added. “It’s killing our local economy here and in all our border towns.”
-There is much more in this report debunking Governor Ducey. Key takeaway:
If Donald Trump taught politicians one tactic, it was the value of endlessly repeating simple slogans and concepts to make an impact on the public.
We are already seeing this employed across the country to bolster the idea we are in a “border crisis.” Not just any border crisis, though — “Joe Biden’s border crisis,” as Ducey called it. It even has its own social media hashtag: #BidenBorderCrisis.
Ducey also has repeatedly trotted out this prepared zinger: “The Biden administration has been anti-wall and they have been AWOL, absent without leave, on this issue.”
Politicians from Cruz to Ducey are trying to connect the three words Biden, border and crisis in voters’ minds.
Governor Ducey should be dissing the former guy. NBC News reports, “‘Sitting on their hands’: Biden transition officials say Trump officials delayed action on child migrant surge”, https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/immigration/sitting-their-hands-biden-transition-officials-say-trump-officials-delayed-n1261934
In early December, the Biden transition team and career government officials began sounding an alarm on the need to increase shelter space for the large number of migrant children expected to soon be crossing the border, but the Trump administration didn’t take action until just days before the inauguration, according to two Biden transition officials and a U.S. official with knowledge of the discussions.
“They were sitting on their hands,” said one of the transition officials, who does not currently work for the Biden administration and spoke on the condition of anonymity. “It was incredibly frustrating.”
The Biden transition team made its concerns about the lack of shelter space known to Trump officials both at the Department of Health and Human Services and the Department of Homeland Security, laying out the need to open an influx shelter in Carrizo Springs, Texas, and to issue what’s known as a “request for assistance” that would start the process of surveying new sites for expanded shelters, according to the transition officials.
It was not until Jan. 15 that then-HHS Secretary Alex Azar issued the request for assistance, which started the multiweek process of surveying and choosing new sites. The Biden administration opened the Carrizo Springs facility Feb. 22 and announced this week that it would be expanding the capacity of that site.
As of February, HHS was only able to use about half of its congressionally funded capacity because of Covid-19 protocols and a shuttering of facilities under the administration of former President Donald Trump.
Because of HHS’ extremely limited capacity, unaccompanied children are now backlogged in overcrowded Border Patrol stations, reaching a record high of 5,200 children in custody last week, with hundreds held past the three-day legal limit.
The transition official said the need to open more shelter space was clear in December 2020, based on a growing trend of unaccompanied minors crossing the border that began to emerge in the late fall, and it was communicated to Trump officials in multiple meetings, multiple times a week.
Ryan Cooper writes at The Week, “There is no immigration crisis”, https://theweek.com/articles/973376/there-no-immigration-crisis
If you’ve been reading or watching mainstream media over the past week or so, you’ve undoubtedly heard a lot about a supposed screaming emergency on the U.S.-Mexico border. More migrants are trying to cross the border, which all three network Sunday shows gave frantic saturation coverage — ABC’s This Week nonsensically held a panel segment on the border itself, as if that would somehow lend gravitas to a bunch of talking heads. On Monday, the networks’ big morning shows all ran segments calling the story a “crisis” once more. CNN even ran a video of a repeated boat crossing that, as numerous experts testified to The American Prospect, gave every indication of being staged, possibly even by the Border Patrol.
This is nonsense. There is a problem at the border, but it is not remotely a “crisis.” It’s an administrative challenge that could be solved easily with more resources and clear policy — not even ranking with, say, the importance of securing loose nuclear material, much less the ongoing global pandemic, or the truly civilization-threatening crisis of climate change. The mainstream media is in effect collaborating with Republicans to stoke unreasoning xenophobic panic.
[I]t’s true that it would be much cheaper and simpler to deflate the frenzy of media hysteria by doing what Trump did — basically closing the border, throwing penniless refugees back over it, and forcing Mexico to deal with the problem. Dealing with migrants in a fair and humane fashion will require money, patience, and good administration. But how better to solve a fake crisis created by Republicans and bored occupants of green rooms in Washington, D.C. than with a fake solution?
The Washington Post looked at data from U.S. Customs and Border Protection to see whether there’s a “crisis” — or even a “surge,” as many news outlets have characterized it. We analyzed monthly CBP data from 2012 to now and found no crisis or surge that can be attributed to Biden administration policies. Rather, the current increase in apprehensions fits a predictable pattern of seasonal changes in undocumented immigration combined with a backlog of demand because of 2020’s coronavirus border closure.
It’s not a surge. It’s the usual seasonal increase.
“There’s no migrant ‘surge’ at the U.S. southern border. Here’s the data.”, https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2021/03/23/theres-no-migrant-surge-us-southern-border-heres-data/
So why are the “access media” and Sunday morning bobbleheads parroting the GQP’s anti-immigrant talking points?
The Post’s Jennifer Rubin adds, “Biden should fact-check the White House press corps”, https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2021/03/24/biden-should-fact-check-white-house-press-corps/
The White House press corps, ginned up by Republican hype, has for weeks hounded White House press secretary Jen Psaki and anyone else from the Biden administration who comes into the briefing room about what is happening at the border. Don’t we have a crisis at the border? Why won’t you call it a crisis? Are Republicans right that we have an “open border”? (Spoiler: No.)
As my Post colleague Margaret Sullivan writes, “The burgeoning number of migrants — including thousands of children — is a legitimate concern and a valid story. But much of the news media seems to be using it to show that they intend to present [President] Biden in just as critical a light as they often did Trump — regardless of whether that’s deserved.” What’s more: The media storyline has been factually misleading.
In reality, there has been no surge of arrivals outside the normal fluctuation of migration. “It’s the usual seasonal increase,” according to three academics who write in The Post’s Monkey Cage, using data from U.S. Customs and Border Protection. “There’s no migrant ‘surge’ at the U.S. southern border. Here’s the data.”, https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2021/03/23/theres-no-migrant-surge-us-southern-border-heres-data/
[It] seems that reporters have not yet adjusted to the post-45th-president era … Moreover, they seem determined to create the same level of emotion and conflict in an administration that is emotionally contained and de-escalates conflict. The administration is worried! No, it’s struggling! No, make that besieged!
Every president must be covered with a critical eye, but the constant bias for drama leads to misleading coverage when the Oval Office inhabitant is not drama-prone.
Finally, the media continues to take Republicans seriously and cover them as though they are acting in good faith. Simply repeating the hyperventilation from Republicans desperate to change the subject from the American Rescue Plan is not journalism. There is an obligation to independently verify data and do some homework before launching into a linguistic argument about what constitutes a “crisis.”
The lesson here for the administration is to debunk and rebut a false Republican-driven narrative quickly … It is now also incumbent on the media to review its coverage and come clean with viewers and readers. When its breathless coverage turns out to be deeply misleading, it should explain how and why they got it wrong.
–Yeah, that’ll happen!
Axios reports, “Border crisis not as bad as 2019… for now”, https://www.axios.com/data-biden-border-crisis-migrant-children-families-fb4e15f0-d819-4bef-a942-88ef8782025d.html
“[T]he migrant crisis plaguing the Biden administration still pales in comparison to another peak under then-President Trump in 2019, the trends are alarming and only expected to get worse with warmer weather.”
-I’m sorry, a “migrant crisis,” as if we are talking about a plague of locusts? Access media, which has a decidedly Republican bias, needs to learn to report this accurately: it is a “humanitarian crisis” in Central America, for which the U.S. is complicit, that we are not addressing because Republicans prefer to demonize Latinos to rile up their white nationalist base of voters.