Donald Trump and maga Republicans must not put innocent immigrants in warehouses like Nazi concentration camps

Echo opinion published in the Los Angeles Times by Paul R. Reyes, attorney.

Across the country, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (aka "evil ICE") is acquiring industrial warehouses to be converted into detention facilities for people swept up in the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown. 

ICE has bought at least seven facilities so far, some of which are projected to hold thousands of people. One warehouse in an Arizona town is the size of seven football fields. The new facilities are slated to be up and running by November.

These plans amount to a lose-lose proposition. Warehouses crammed full of people will not be good for local communities, nor for the detainees housed inside the facilities. Literally warehousing people is a terrible idea❗ (They are modeled after Nazi concentration camps.)

According to Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse, in February there were about 68,000 people in immigration detention. Three-quarters of these folks have no criminal convictions. Now the administration plans to spend $38 billion to boost detention capacity to 92,000 beds.

ICE will be opening its new detention centers in Socorro, Texas, and Social Circle, Georgia., among other sites. These facilities will likely generate more problems than benefits. 

When the federal government takes over a property, it is removed from the tax rolls, so communities will lose potential tax revenue. Large detention facilities will strain local infrastructure, including water supply, sewage and emergency services. The sites may attract protests, diverting law enforcement resources away from protecting area residents.

It’s no wonder that there has been bipartisan pushback against ICE warehouses, with some sellers backing out of deals in response to public opposition.

ICE’s website states that “detention is non-punitive,” and that it is for holding people while they await court dates or deportation. 

Yet, placing people in vast buildings designed for packages will put men, women and children in danger of disease and abuse. 

Warehouses are often drafty, poorly ventilated structures with hard floors. It’s difficult to see how they can be rapidly retrofitted into safe living spaces for detainees who, the government estimates, could be held for an average of 60 days there.

The scope of ICE’s planned detention network is staggering. The agency has already bought two warehouses with capacity for 8,500 people each; by comparison, the country’s largest federal prison holds roughly 4,000 inmates.

The U.S. has not imprisoned people on such a large scale since World War II, when camps were set up to detain Japanese citizens and Japanese Americans.

Buying so many warehouses poses the risk that such facilities could be kept filled to meet quotas in an attempt to justify the huge waste of taxpayer money — a maneuver that would waste even more money. And the multimillion-dollar prices that the government is paying for these spaces don’t include the costs of equipping the buildings with restrooms, showers, kitchens, medical facilities and recreation areas. Our government is pursuing these expensive plans while many Americans struggle to pay for groceries and healthcare.

ICE is defending its decision to ramp up detention capacity. “These will not be warehouses,” an ICE spokesperson told USA Today. “They will be very well-structured detention facilities meeting our regular detention standards.”

However, ICE has shown that it already struggles to meet its own “regular detention standards.” 

Detention centers are known for overcrowding, physical and sexual abuse, unsanitary conditions, and inadequate medical care. ICE is not taking proper care of the people it currently has in custody, and scaling up detention will only scale up its human costs.

Both of the country’s largest detention facilities, Alligator Alcatraz in Florida and Camp East Montana in El Paso, Texas, are plagued with health and safety issues. In February, there were reports of cases of COVID-19, measles and TB (tuberculosis) in immigration detention. Last year 32 people died in ICE custody, making it the agency’s deadliest year in more than two decades.

If the administration’s goal is to remove as many undocumented people from the country as possible, why is it investing in a national gulag of warehouses to house them? The gulag strategy underscores that expanding ICE detention is not about public safety or going after “the worst of the worst.” This is an overreaching government forcing its unpopular agenda on the public and wasting taxpayer money simply because it was allotted a ridiculous $75 billion in last summer’s reckless spending bill. A January Reuters poll found that 58% of Americans say ICE crackdowns have gone too far. Only 39% approve of Trump’s immigration policies.

Concerned citizens must continue to fight the placement of ICE detention warehouses in their backyards. As a political standoff drags on a shutdown of some Homeland Security functions, lawmakers should exert pressure on ICE to redirect taxpayer money away from warehouse projects — and toward more productive efforts, such as improving existing detention conditions or financing immigration courts adequately so that individuals can get their day in court rather than languishing in a warehouse.

ICE’s planned detention expansion will be cruel, costly and harmful. Human beings do not belong in warehouses.

Raul A. Reyes is an immigration attorney and television commentator in New York City. X: @RaulAReyes; Instagram: @raulareyes1

Measles Misinformation To File: You cannot make this shit up! Anti-Vaxxers are lunatics

Anti-Vaxxers Say 'Bioweapon' Started Measles Outbreak

By Rachel Robertson

Anti-vaxxers 😕are now saying whaaaaa❓

As a registered nurse, I spent many a long day and night studying about diseases and caring for people who acquired infectious illnesses. Tuberculosis continues to be a very stubborn disease because the bacterium becomes drug resistant over time. At one time, we actually believed the Measles virus had been conquered, until RFKjr 😱and his anti-vaxxer roaches started their dangerous anti-vaxxer campaign.

 

But this misinformaiton reported by MedPage Today is like out of a science fiction 👽horror movie:

Anti-vaccine activists have been profiting from ongoing measles outbreaks by selling bogus treatments, and some claim the West Texas outbreak was a bioweapon targeting the Mennonite community there, according to reporting in Wired.

Many of them have close ties to HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., like Mikki Willis, the conspiracy filmmaker known for the misinformation-filled "Plandemic" pseudo-documentaries, which were partially funded by Children's Health Defense, the anti-vaccine group founded by RFKjr- Kennedy.

"I'm not going to be careful by calling it a virus," Willis said in a recent webinar. "I'm going to call it what it is, and that is a bioweapon, and my belief after interviewing these families is that this has been manipulated and targeted towards a community that is a threat because of their natural way of living."

The webinar was hosted by the supplement company Willis cofounded, which, for hundreds of dollars, sells a "measles treatment and prevention protocol" that he recommended during the webinar. Richard Bartlett, MD, one of the doctors Kennedy commendedopens in a new tab or window for giving measles patients unproven treatments, also participated in the webinar.

Pierre Kory, MD, known for promoting (snake oil❗) ivermectin as a treatment for COVID-19, has also claimed the measles crisis was a targeted attack and that the deaths of two children in Texas were not caused by measles.

"This is the standard radical anti-vaccine extremist playbook," Imran Ahmed, CEO of the Center for Countering Digital Hate, told Wired. "You can see RFK Jr. has translated his anti-vaccine lies into political power. You can see others have converted it into economic power."

Truth: Measles spreads primarily through the air when an infected person coughs, sneezes, or talks, releasing droplets containing the virus. These droplets can remain airborne for up to two hours. Additionally, measles can spread by touching contaminated surfaces and then touching one's eyes, nose, or mouth.

Antivaxxers are promoting preventable illnesses

Echo opinion letter published in the Kingman Miner newspaper, in Kingman, Arizona.  (Kingmanminer.com)

"

"All viruses have one mission  and that's to survive," Andy Worth.

Sad how many slept through seventh-grade science class.

All viruses have one mission and that’s to survive. The more it is allowed to survive in infected people, the more it learns to adapt to our antibodies and vaccines, and become uncontrollable and much more deadly.

Also, airborne means you may be infected and not know it so you are spreading this virus again allowing it to grow stronger and adapt, and soon a death sentence for just getting it.

COVID anti-vaxers are by default pro polio, pro small pox (all childhood diseases) and anti-science so we can return to the Dark Ages where plagues killed half of the world’s population.

Working in healthcare in Los Angeles for 20 years, in the 1970s my father had Tuberculosis as a bartender and was locked up in a TB hospital for a year. Since then, a cure vaccine has been produced to end TB but as many homeless would only receive half the treatment then leave the hospital to go get drunk or score drugs, this TB was not killed and was allowed to adapt to the cure so now of course we have a non-curable new strain of TB returned to medicine, as well as flesh-eating infections that are now non-curable for the same reason.

Andy Worth,
Kingman Arizona

Tuberculosis: Infectious Diseases and Your Taxes

http://www.thedailybeast.com/cheats/2012/07/10/tb-outbreak-ignored-in-florida.html?utm_medium=email&utm_source=newsletter&utm_campaign=cheatsheet_afternoon&cid=newsletter%3Bemail%3Bcheatsheet_afternoon&utm_term=Cheat%20Sheet
or http://tinyurl.com/765daqu


Taxes pay for lots of programs the T-Party claims they want to cut. Taxes also pay to protect people, even the T-Party zealots, from harm.


When the Mayor of Harrisburg Pennsylvania cut all public service workers pay, including his own, because there's not enough tax revenues in the bank to sustain payrolls, he's truly putting his constituents in danger.  They're all in harms way.  Not only will people in Harrisburg be harmed as a result of this catastrophic emergency order, but he puts all the public's safety at risk when something unexpected happens and the city has few people on hand to respond.


Jacksonville Florida is an example, where tuberculosis and flooding put citizens in harms way.


Torrential rains with flooding, as a result of an early Tropical Storm Debby, has caused evacuations, while the city is now faced with a tuberculosis outbreak. http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/47958727/ns/weather/t/debbys-deluge-feet-rain-thousands-flee-floods/
http://tinyurl.com/765daqu


Storms are often routine weather situations in Florida, but emergency responses to these natural disasters are probably not equipped to handle a concurrent outbreak of an infectious disease.  


Floods will come and go, but tuberculosis is stubborn.  It doesn't go away.  


Instead, tuberculosis hides. When it re-emerges, it comes back in a more virulent form than when it temporarily disappeared. In fact, it often morphs into multi-drug resistant tuberculosis (MDRT).  Recently, a multi-drug resistent tuberculosis in India was found to be completely drug resistant.  In other words, the disease morphed into an untreatable infection. 


Obviously, no one believes Harrisburg Pennsylvania needs to experience a tropical storm disaster or an infectious disease outbreak to draw attention to the city's revenue emergency.  Hopefully, diligent public health officials or epidemiologists will track the harm caused by the mayor's emergency cut to public sector salaries.  For example, if rescue personnel can earn more money flipping burgers or greeting Wal-Mart patrons than on the municipal ambulance, then who will be there when a multi-truck pile up happens near the rail road tracks?  Someone must account for this risk.


Yet, there's an enormous difference between Jacksonville, Florida and Harrisburg, Pennsylvania; it's called the federal government.  Jacksonville has about a $1 billion (one billion) dollar payroll associated with multiple US Navy and Coast Guard bases positioned throughout Duval County and in Southeastern Georgia.


Resources provided by the Navy, Coast Guard and other government agencies will provide the resources needed to evaluate the tuberculosis outbreak.  Public health money will be made available to address those infected, for the short term, anyway.  


Ditto for the floods.


In the long term, however, if due diligence is not supported, the tuberculosis outbreak will simply morph into something worse.  Likewise for the flood victims, who will need sustaining support to get some semblance of normality.


But, for the time being, federal monies, available to residents of Jacksonville, will get them through these current emergencies.


Harrisburg doesn't have access to the same source of federal dollars, because there are no Navy bases in 
Dauphine County, Pennsylvania.


And the moral of this blog is:  Who will T-Party zealots turn to when they or their families are exposed to tuberculosis, or multi-drug resistant tuberculosis or are victims of floods?


Taxes for public health and safety are revenue sharing that helps all people, regardless of our citizenship, ability to care for ourselves or our individual resources.  


When levied equitably, paying taxes is our patriotic and moral responsibility to give back to our nation, and the government that allows us to enjoy freedom and prosperity.  


Harrisburg's Mayor must raise revenues or his entire city will become unlivable.  Maybe, T-Party zealots will become a morphed "occupy" movement. They can claim the city of Harrisburg as being mortality # 1 of their outrageous claims to cut government.