The Progressive Populist Today Blog: 2021-08-08

Saturday, August 14, 2021

Editorial: R’s Test Positive for Hate

Republican leaders aren’t ashamed of Donald Trump’s deep vein of lies. Far from it: They’re vying to become the next Trump, following his example of misleading and distracting.

Texas Gov. Greg Abott (R) got an early start on blaming President Biden for the COVID resurgence, accusing him in March of “recklessly releasing hundreds” of COVID-positive undocumented immigrants into the country. Biden had condemned as “Neanderthal” Abbott’s decision to “reopen” Texas and restrict local governments from requiring mask use. He also signed a bill that prohibits Texas businesses from requiring “vaccine passports.” At that time, cases were declining in Texas as vaccines spread among the population.

Then, on July 28, as the Delta variant led a surge in infections, Abbott took the initiative of issuing an executive order instructing the Texas National Guard to assist law enforcement officers in stopping civilian drivers, including federal contractors, who appeared to be transporting migrants. If drivers refused to cooperate, Abbott’s executive order instructed that officers might seize their vehicles.

That order lasted a week before US District Judge Kathleen Cardone blocked Abbott’s order, ruling that it posed “irreparable harm,” after US Attorney Gen. Merrick Garland filed a lawsuit that called Abbott’s order unconstitutional, stating that it threatened to impede contractors working on behalf of the federal government, as well as interfering with the federal government’s “broad, undoubted power over the subject of immigration.”

Abbott’s order had stakeholders, including city and county officials, confused about how it would be carried out. Civil rights and legal experts warned the order would cause racial profiling. “Would any car carrying Latino passengers in Texas be subjected to a traffic stop? Given that the state is home to more than 11 million Latinos, according to the US Census, comprising more than 40% of the population, that seems like a Texas-size recipe for the violation of Latinos’ civil rights,” wrote CNN columnist Raul Reyes.

Meanwhile, in Florida, Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) rejected any responsibility for the surge on COVID cases in his state after he had forbidden state or local officials from requiring masks to be worn in public. He even threatened businesses that tried to require customers to provide proof of vaccination. Instead, DeSantis also blamed Biden for the surge. “Joe Biden has the nerve to tell me to get out of the way on COVID while he lets COVID-infected migrants pour over our southern border by the hundreds of thousands. No elected official is doing more to enable the transmission of COVID in America than Joe Biden with his open borders policies,” DeSantis wrote in a fundraising letter Aug. 4. In a bit of projection, he also suggested Biden was a “power-hungry tyrant.”

In a news conference, DeSantis added, “He’s imported more virus from around the world by having a wide-open southern border.” He challenged Biden, “Why don’t you do your job? Why don’t you get this border secure? “And until you do that, I don’t want to hear a blip about COVID from you.”

DeSantis insisted he’s handled the crisis well, even as he has fought against COVID vaccine mandates and barred schools from requiring students and staff to wear masks, while hospitals fill up.

Iowa Gov. Kim Reynolds (R), who sent state troopers to Texas to help Abbott patrol the border, also dodged responsibility for the COVID surge in her state by blaming immigrants entering the country over the US-Mexico border. “Part of the problem is the southern border is open and we’ve got 88 countries that are coming across the border and they don’t have vaccines so none of them are vaccinated and they’re getting dispersed throughout the country,” Reynolds said at an Aug. 3 news conference.

Republicans have managed to convince 32% of respondents to an Axios/Ipsos poll that “people from other countries traveling to the US” are to blame for the current surge in coronavirus cases. But 58% of respondents correctly blamed unvaccinated Americans and 28% noted former President Trump shares the blame.

The Washington Post noted in an Aug. 6 Fact Check that there has been an increase in the number of people seeking to cross the southern border, but the US Border Patrol has apprehended more than a million migrants since last October, and the Department of Homeland Security expects a record number of encounters this fiscal year. But under a public health emergency declaration, the department also is returning a record number of migrants to Mexico. For example, the Border Patrol caught 178,416 in June, and expelled more than 100,000 of them — mainly individual adults traveling alone.

The Rio Grande Valley has experienced a disproportionate share of those encounters, and city officials in McAllen, in Hidalgo County, said 87,000 migrants have passed through the city limits so far in 2021. Mayor Javier Villalobos, a Republican, has joined fellow Republicans in blaming migrants for an increase in COVID cases, with more than 7,000 migrants confirmed positive for coronavirus since February (a positivity rate of about 8%). But even as the COVID positivity rate among migrants increased to 13.1% in late July, that is still lower than the 18.55% positivity rate among tested residents in Hidalgo County. And migrants who test positive for the virus are immediately quarantined, along with any family members who might have been exposed but test negative. They are not released until they test negative, so infected migrants have little interaction with the community.

Philip Bump of the Washington Post noted that the current surge in coronavirus cases doesn’t overlap with the surge in immigration or with the locations where those immigrants end up. “The surge in new cases began in late June. The increase in immigration began in March, when coronavirus cases in the United States were going down.”

Then there’s the geography. “The places that are hardest-hit by the virus at this point are mostly not along the border with Mexico. Instead, they’re on the Gulf Coast, in Florida and stretching north from Louisiana up through Arkansas and Missouri.”

Bump added, “Of the 10 counties that are currently experiencing the highest rates of new infections relative to population, eight are more densely White than the United States as a whole and nine are less densely Hispanic. That doesn’t suggest that they are likely destinations for migrants.”

“Obviously, there will be migrants who have COVID, and it would be ridiculous for anyone to say that migrants are not susceptible to COVID. Of course they are,” US Rep. Veronica Escobar, D-El Paso, told the Dallas Morning News. “But based on the numbers I’ve seen, the percentages of migrants who have COVID are very low. … The governor of Texas knows that this kind of xenophobia, racism and hate fuels hate crime. That’s something we in El Paso know all too well.”

On Aug. 3, 2019, a gunman, apparently inspired by Trump’s rants about invading immigrants, drove 10 hours from a Dallas suburb to El Paso, where he killed 23 people and wounded dozens more at a Walmart. In a manifesto the alleged shooter posted online before the shooting, he echoed Trump’s comments on immigration and said he made the trip to “stop the Hispanic invasion of Texas.”

Abbott, DeSantis and other GQPers should know better than accuse immigrants of spreading COVID, given the Republican Party’s recent history of race-baiting, but they went there anyway. — JMC