Tuesday, January 16, 2024

Migrant Buses and the Governments inability to respond to a crisis - Part 2: Ice is just water in another form to drown Migrants for Greg Abbott

So, Chicago is gripped in an epic freeze with temperatures reaching negative 15 for several days in a row.  Illinois Governor J.B. Pritzker implored Greg Abbott to not send bus and plane loads of migrants to Rockford and Chicago.

Governor Abbott,

The ongoing international migration crisis that our nation faces demands a strong, compassionate, and humane response. We agree that our nation needs immigration reform, but instead of advocating for that, you have chosen to sow chaos in an attempt to score political points. You are now sending asylum seekers from Texas to the Upper Midwest in the middle of winter — many without coats, without shoes to protect them from the snow — to a city whose shelters are already overfilled with migrants you sent here. Chicago’s temperatures this weekend are forecast to drop below zero. Your callousness, sending buses and planes full of migrants in this weather, is now life-threatening to every one of the arrivals. Hundreds of children’s and families’ health and survival are at risk due to your actions.

We refuse to play your political game of exploiting the most vulnerable for the sake of culture wars.

But, to the cold-blooded Abbott this signals weakness and that his strategy is winning.  And I must admit, frightening white people about immigration and demonizing migrants is a winning strategy for Republicans.  In the just completed Iowa Caucuses,

About 4 in 10 GOP caucusgoers chose immigration as the most important issue facing the country, according to AP VoteCast. About one-third said it was the economy. Fewer people named other priorities, including foreign policy, health care, abortion or energy.

The vast majority, about three-quarters, say immigrants are a negative for the country, an indication that caucusgoers are not only seeking more order on the U.S. southern border but major cuts on how many foreigners can come into the country.

"The vast majority say immigrants are a negative for the country..."  For many years Republicans have slowly warped rightwingers minds about immigration and laws.  Rightwingers angrily declare 'Those people are breaking the law' and when white people believe a Person of Color (PoC) is breaking the law whites demand government agencies and law enforcement exact maximum punishment including extrajudicial execution on the spot.

To Greg Abbott that's a Siren's Call to action.  Abbott has been accused by multiple local, state, and federal agents of ordering migrants crossing to be pushed back into the river.  Well, Abbott can claim 3 bodies.

Three migrants, a woman and two children, drowned in the Rio Grande in Eagle Pass, Texas – very recently the epicenter of the migrant crisis – just days after state authorities blocked the US Border Patrol from accessing miles of the US-Mexico border in that area, officials said.

Yet... Greg Abbott and Republicans in Texas will proudly call themselves the Party of Life and defender of children.  Of course, Abbott is blaming Biden for this just like his Lt. Governor Dan Patrick claimed Biden is the Real Insurrection!

“The only thing that we're not doing is we're not shooting people who come across the border, because of course, the Biden administration would charge us with murder,” Abbott said during the Jan. 5 radio interview with Dana Loesch, a former editor at Breitbart News and spokesperson for the National Rifle Association.

Now, Dana Loesch used to be the "Hawt" Republican babe who through clenched jaw and cracked teeth spit out rightwing invective and propaganda.  Loesch has been strangely silent on the ouster of Wayne LaPierre from her employer the NRA (Nasty Russian A$$holes) gun club after 47 years in Washington DC.  But, she apparently has a radio show to continue pumping out her love of gun violence.

Rightwingers like to claim they are simply dispassionately applying the law, objectively and without any bias this is captured in the missive by Ben SShaprio that "Facts don't care about your feelings".   In reality, rightwingers are ill-mannered emotional terrorists, easily triggered, and readily offended when the law is applied to them.  Because they demand the most lenient application for themselves and the most rigid ruthless interpretation for others.  This is aptly demonstrated by the Republican insistence that January 6th criminals and seditious insurrectionists are, in fact, "Hostages" of the weaponized Biden DoJ.

So, Abbott is going to keep up his human trafficking campaign sending ill-equipped people north into deep sub zero temperatures and applaud himself for all the people who will become just another hidden death from the cold in Cook County.

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