From a Jan. 27 article by the editorial board of The Washington Post: “A few weeks ago, federal prosecutors in Arizona secured a conviction against four humanitarian aid workers who left water in the desert for migrants who might otherwise die of heat exposure and thirst. Separately, they dropped manslaughter charges against a U. S. Border Patrol agent who fired 16 times across the border, killing a teenage Mexican boy.
“That is a snapshot of twisted frontier justice in the age of Trump. Save a migrant’s life, and you risk becoming a political prisoner. Kill a Mexican teenager, and you walk free.”
The aid workers were four women volunteers from the organization No More Deaths. They drove into the desert about 100 miles southwest of Phoenix to leave water and canned beans. They face a fine and up to six months in jail, while the Border Patrol officer faces no further legal consequences. “Since the turn of century, more than 2,100 undocumented migrants have died in the sun-scorched region of southern Arizona, according to Humane Borders . . .”
The public needs more factual perspective and much less exposure to the mindless blathering of Donald Trump, and to that end America’s free press has been laboring hard.
Meanwhile, books already have been written about the high lies and misdeeds emanating from Donald Trump’s unrestrained and boundless vanity. Many of his major lies are general in nature and are a misrepresentation of reality he tries to plant in the public mind to serve his political agenda. A prime example is his talk of “drugs pouring across the border” in the same breath that he is describing the “need for a wall.”
In reality, drugs are not being packed through the desert on foot by individual migrants fighting heat and thirst. A wall would do next no nothing in prevent drug trafficking. Tons of illegal drugs are being seized by the Coast Guard and at highway entry checkpoints.
It’s ironic that the Coast Guard was one agency defunded by Donald’s egoistic partial government shutdown in his power-mad attempt to bully Congress into funding his ego-serving but useless signature wall project. The latest major drug interdiction (late January) included 254 pounds of deadly fentanyl seized aboard a truck under a load of produce at a traffic checkpoint in Nogales, Arizona (a combined 650 pounds of methamphetamine and fentanyl), worth nearly $4.6 million dollars. The bust included the aid of such things as drug-sniffing dogs. Wall opponents in Congress are offering increased funding for border security that smacks less of xenophobia and concentrates more on technology (dogs, drones, x-rays, trained personnel) at border checkpoints and elsewhere. And it certainly would help to give more credit and support to the U.S. Coast Guard.
Here is a very lengthy, excellently illustrated web site describing major drug seizures art border checkpoints during 2018: https://tucson.com/news/local/crime/photos-border-busts/collection_fa781d56-fb1b-11e7-bc69-571662449ef3.html#31
And here’s a site describing that late-January 2019 greatest fentanyl drug bust in U.S. history: https://abcnews.go.com/beta-story-container/Politics/border-protection-agents-make-largest-fentanyl-bust-us/story?id=60758594
Fentanyl is a highly addictive synthetic opioid that the U.S. Center for Disease Control and Prevention says is 50 to 100 times as potent as morphine. The CDC notes that fentanyl is often sold as heroin, or at least mixed with it; and in pill form, fentanyl is often mistaken for other potent painkillers. For all of these reasons, alarmingly, fentanyl has emerged as the cause of nearly half of all drug overdose deaths in the U.S.
Coast Guard unloads 11 tons of cocaine in San Diego: https://www.navytimes.com/news/your-navy/2018/10/04/coast-guard-unloads-11-tons-of-cocaine-in-san-diego/
USCG cutter home after seizing $61 million worth of drugs: https://navaltoday.com/2018/09/26/uscg-cutter-home-after-seizing-61-million-worth-of-drugs/
16.7 tons of cocaine seized by US Coast Guard: https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/cocaine-drugs-bust-us-coast-guard-185-tonnes-a8638886.html
Another weakness in Donald’s wall/fence plan: In Nogales, where a 25-foot already exists, authorities discovered three tunnels in recent weeks.
Will Donald remain so determined to waste $30 billion or more of taxpayer money to build a monument to himself that he’ll try to conjure up a fake “national emergency” to justify drawing funds from the national defense budget (which he inflated last time around)? Personally, I think that’s an empty threat and he knows that it wouldn’t hold up in court.
