Inhumane border policies cannot be laid solely at the feet of the GOP.

Friday, June 2, 2023
BY JULIA CLAIRE & CROOKED MEDIA

- Disgraced former president Donald Trump ([link removed]) doing some classic word salad during his Fox News town hall with Sean Hannity

Some variation on “CHAOS AT THE BORDER” is a staple phrase in the Fox News chyron. But the source of that chaos is not who they want you to think it is.

* The Trump-era policy known as Title 42—which allowed American border agents to rapidly expel many migrants to Mexico or other countries to request asylum—expired in May, and conservative media whipped its viewership into a frenzy anticipating a huge increase in illegal crossings at the Southern border. That hasn’t happened. What has happened is a crisis of a different kind.

* An internal Border Patrol investigation found that medical staff “declined” (refused) to review the file of an eight-year-old girl with a chronic heart condition and a rare blood disorder before she had a fatal seizure ([link removed]) on her ninth day in custody. Her parents had shared her medical history with authorities the second day the family was in custody. Anadith Alvarez was the daughter of Honduran immigrants, born with a congenital heart defect that required surgery three years ago. The day before she died, the girl had a fever of almost 105 degrees.

* The video surveillance system where the girl’s family was detained in Harlingen, TX, had been out of service for over one month, a violation of federal law that prevented authorities from collecting evidence, but interviews with Border Patrol agents and medical personnel there raised enough troubling questions to trigger an investigation into the girl’s nine days in custody. The agency’s own limit to detain migrants is 72 hours. The Office of Professional Responsibility (which is like Border Patrol’s office of internal affairs) reported that despite the girl’s rapidly deteriorating condition, her mothers concerns, “and the series of treatments required to manage her condition, contracted medical personnel did not transfer her to a hospital for higher-level care.”

This is far from the first report of this kind detailing inhumane treatment of migrants at the U.S.-Mexico border.

* Adding to the unstable conditions at the border, the head of the U.S. Border Patrol, Chief Raul Ortiz, announced his retirement Tuesday night ([link removed]) , which will take effect on June 30. It is unclear who will replace him. Ortiz oversaw Border Patrol’s nearly 20,000 agents during the pandemic and through the implementation of Title 42 after beginning his tenure in August 2021 following the ouster of MAGA-head Rodney Scott, who fully embraced Trump’s policies including #BuildTheWall. But the malpractice plainly did not end with Scott’s removal.

* During the Biden administration, agents have continued to engage in “unnecessary use of force” against non-threatening Haitian migrants. Biden’s own DOJ defended the continuation of Trump’s family-separation policy in court ([link removed]) , despite his past criticisms of the policy as “criminal.” Since taking office, Biden has tightened standards for asylum seekers at the border to the degree that some argue he has all but eliminated the right to seek asylum on American soil. Seeking asylum is an internationally protected right, so it doesn’t feel particularly radical to criticize the policy choices that led to this.

President Biden, like President Obama before him, made a wager: that tough border policies and deportations will buy good will from conservatives or neutralize their bad-faith attacks. Except, it didn’t, and it won’t. Conservative media and GOP lawmakers will always portray Democratic presidents, falsely, as open-borders fanatics, no matter how strict their actual immigration policies are. Multiple GOP governors thousands of miles from the border have deployed national guardsmen to Texas, absent a big uptick in crossings, as a propaganda feint, to create the false perception of disorder. Democrats can’t beat that approach by meeting it in the ever-shifting middle, and they shouldn’t try.

It’s Pride month, and the Crooked Store has a whole collection of merch to help you celebrate and fight back against the total freaks obsessed with what we wear and where we put it. The collection has everything from tees to bags, so you can stock up. I’m not going to tell you how to celebrate Pride, but I will say that if you don’t ruin at least one article of clothing this month, you could be doing more. So grab an extra tee.

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Head to crooked.com/store ([link removed]) to check out the whole Pride collection.
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A series of investigations found that Allina Health System, a “nonprofit” that runs more than 100 hospitals and clinics in Minnesota and Wisconsin has repeatedly withheld care from patients who have unpaid medical bills as a draconian bill-collecting tactic ([link removed]) . The network rakes in over $4 billion in annual revenue. In the for-profit American healthcare system, many hospitals are known to take aggressive measures to collect medical debt, including taking patients to court, garnishing their wages, or even seizing their tax refunds. Allina Health System, on the other hand, has an explicit policy to completely shut off non-emergency health services for patients with at least $4,500 in unpaid medical debt, and not allow them to resume receiving treatment until it’s paid off in full. At point, the electronic health-records system locks so that staff cannot schedule future appointments for
those patients, even ones with chronic conditions requiring regular attention like diabetes and cancer. That confronts those patients with a choice between getting a loan approved through the hospital or filing for bankruptcy. Anyone in this country who has ever been on the wrong side of a health-insurance dispute knows how easy it is to rack up $4,500 in medical debt. Almost one-in-three Americans have medical debt, which accounts for about half of all outstanding debt in this country. Because Allina Health System is a “nonprofit” it was able to avoid $266 million in state, local, and federal taxes in 2020 alone. Another perfect day in the American health-care industrial complex!

The Department of Labor’s monthly jobs report showed the 29th straight month of strong job growth, with employers adding 339,000 jobs in May ([link removed]) .


The U.S. Senate passed the bipartisan ransom note to suspend the debt limit, averting what would have been the nation’s first-ever default ([link removed]) . The bill now heads to President Biden’s desk for signature.


The Senate voted to rescind President Biden’s student-loan forgiveness program ([link removed]) , a measure the president is (obviously) expected to veto.


YouTube will reverse its election-integrity policy, and allow election-denial videos on the platform ([link removed]) . Great! I love when corporations sacrifice democracy to extract just a little bit more profit.


Disgraced former president Donald Trump’s lawyers have informed the DOJ that they *can’t find* the classified document about military operations in Iran that Trump was recorded referencing ([link removed]) . Very likely story!


The Justice Department will not seek charges against former Vice President Mike Pence for his possession of potentially classified government documents ([link removed]) , and the investigation has been closed.


The Fulton County, GA, District Attorney’s investigation of disgraced former president Donald Trump and his efforts to overturn the 2020 election has expanded to include activities in Washington, DC ([link removed]) , and several other states.


More than 800 million trees have been cut down in the Amazon rainforest ([link removed]) in just the past six years to meet global beef demand.


Gov. Bill Lee (R-TN) accused the National Rifle Association of seeking to use involuntary commitment laws “to round up mentally ill people and deprive them of other liberties,” ([link removed]) a rare criticism of the NRA from a Republican.


An investigation into child sexual-abuse claims in Spain’s Catholic Church found 728 abusers among members of the clergy and non-clerical staff and 927 victims since the 1940’s ([link removed]) .


A 19-year-old in the United Kingdom who converted to extremist Islam during the pandemic and planned to carry out a terrorist attack was given six years in prison ([link removed]) .

The Canadian province of Nova Scotia is experiencing its worst-ever wildfire season ([link removed]) , with more than 200 so far this year.

The Discord disclosures of highly classified national security documents by former Massacheusetts Air National Guardsman/racist freak Jack Teixeira contain one particularly startling revelation: Iran, according to U.S. intelligence, plan to enlist militants in Syria to step up roadside attacks against U.S. military personnel, ([link removed]) including through the use of armor-piercing munitions. The escalation is reportedly part of a broader strategic effort between Iran and Russia to drive the U.S. from the region (don’t threaten us with a good time!) but could also lead to escalating hostilities between the U.S. and Iran—and just in time for the Republican presidential primary, which will be chockablock with bloodthirsty war hawks who would happily exploit carnage in the region to revamp the GOP push for war.
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A Baltimore couple, both nurses, saved a fellow passenger’s life on their flight back from a Florida vacation ([link removed]) .


Fort Bragg, the major military base in North Carolina named after General Braxton Bragg—a Confederate general who owned slaves—was renamed Fort Liberty ([link removed]) . Not sure why anyone thought it was a good idea to name a base after a guy who lost so many battles and is “widely regarded among historians as a poor leader who did not have the respect of his troops” in the first place!

Roberto Minuta, a member of the far-right Oath Keepers who was part of the security detail for longtime Trump adviser/The Riddler Roger Stone, was sentenced to more than four years in prison for seditious conspiracy related to his involvement in the January 6 insurrection ([link removed]) .
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