AUSTIN, Texas (July 6, 2020) — The Center for Immigration Studies reports that some percentage of the Texas Covid-19 hospitalizations, likely a significant one, comes from an ongoing influx of seriously ill patients who caught the virus in Covid-exploding Mexico and are legally and illegally crossing the border to flee that country's completely overrun health system. Refusal to acknowledge this ground truth and to excavate the data necessary to inform the right policy choices presents a danger to life that is more real than any imagined political offense by stating that Mexico is a source.
Todd Bensman, the Center's senior national security fellow, writes, "Enough evidence is now on hand that severely ill patients are pouring over from Mexico and adding to the American counts of hospitalization and death, probably coinciding with regular community spread resulting from recent mass protests. What's needed now is acknowledgement that there are at least two merging streams, not to be conflated with one another."
Texas is experiencing similar crisis conditions as other borders states, but Texas is receiving very different media coverage. Covid-19 patients have been flooding through California and Arizona border ports of entry from Mexico (some illegally) – by the thousands – since at least mid-May as the virus struck our southern neighbor a month or two behind the United States. It was no coincidence that at the same time the Baja and Sonora state hospital systems were seizing up in worst-case scenarios of deadly convulsions. Texas media have entirely abdicated reporting on the Mexico origins of patients overloading border care facilities, or even referencing the earlier reports by fellow journalists at the Times, the Post, and the Wall Street Journal.
Mexico's Tamaulipas state hospitals right across from the Texas ones are seizing up, in Matamoros, across from Brownsville; in Reynosa, across from McAllen; in Nuevo Laredo, across from Laredo; and in Juarez, across from El Paso.
Bensman reports, "On Friday, a Border Patrol agent who works the Rio Grande Valley in south Texas told me his leadership had informed agents that more than 350 of their ranks had been pulled off the line in just that sector and placed in quarantine, including 120 confirmed agent cases."
Meanwhile, with almost every hospital along the Texas border chronically full of Covid patients, medical leaders are transporting them to Houston, San Antonio, Dallas, and probably to other cities now reporting that they, too, are filling up ICU beds, just as reported in California.
America needs to know the reason for the spread, so effective policies can be implemented. The Trump administration may need to revisit the March 20 emergency border closure and determine whether it should be quickly revised and toughened to better protect American hospital systems. Elected state and local leaders like Governor Abbott and mayors in Texas cities may not need to reinstitute lock-downs, especially if significant percentages of the cases turn out to be a largely imported problem.
The data needed resides with the admitting hospitals at the border and in the interior of the state and, for the CBP hospital transports, obviously with CBP. But none has been made public.
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