A Patchwork of Leaky Seals

 Most of y’all know I deliberately don’t harp on what I see on my daily feed of the unconstitutional, illegal and downright vile efforts being made to Keep America Great for White Americans by sealing the southern border tighter than the secrecy around presidential tax returns. But today three items in the feed make up a theme.

 The theme is that we may all be in this together, but we don’t include foreign thems.

 So when deportee planes from the United States began arriving full of COCID-19 sufferers, and Guatemala complained, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) did what you would expect red-blooded Americans to do:  It sent a team from the Center for Disease Control down to Guatemala to find out what they hell is wrong with their tests.
 We give them a medical test before we send them back. But we are Americans. We don’t test ourselves for coronavirus very well. So Guatemala must be doing something wrong.

 Actually, it is we who are doing something wrong. Truck drivers and students are let in, but not asylum seekers. COVID-19 can't tell an asylum seeker from a truck driver. And, really, neither can our border guardians.


Sealing the border against asylum seekers is, according to an exhaustive study in Just Security unconstitutional, illegal, dumb, useless and cruel:

People fleeing persecution are protected under U.S. and international law, and the United Nations Refugee Agency (UNHCR) has confirmed that countries must not deny entry to asylum seekers solely because of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Nonetheless, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), relying on logistical claims by the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and Customs and Border Protection (CBP), issued an order on March 20 purporting to allow the U.S. government to immediately turn back asylum seekers and unaccompanied children at the border. Some 10,000 migrants have been sent back to Mexico since then, joining the tens of thousands the administration has already returned to dangerous border towns through the “Remain in Mexico” program.

The Don believes in walls and travel bans. He began his reign, you will recall, by banning travel to and from several Muslim countries on grounds of himself. That didn’t sit well with the courts or even some of his American God religious faithful, so he had to shuffle some countries and make the ban even more idiotic than it started out to be.




And then there is the bold, foresightful, brilliant, life-saving travel restrictions he announced Jan. 31 on China (but nowhere else) to start Feb. 2. It is one of his proudest accomplishments. Has said it saved "a lot of lives" (March 5), "a tremendous number of lives" (March 17), "probably tens of thousands" (March 24) and "hundreds of thousands" (April 7). FactCheck couldn't get the White House to explain where the snowball of medical success was coming from. But in fact, it came from nowhere. Just another effort to keep The Don happy in his ignorance.
 Besides, the strain bedeviling New York came from Europe.