President Donald Trump seems like he’ll never let an opportunity slip by to put his racism on display. This Saturday, at an abruptly announced press conference about the latest developments in the ongoing Coronavirus situation, Trump announced that the administration was considering closing the southern border in what would supposedly be an effort to keep the virus out of the United States as much as possible. The problem is that there’s no actual evidence — not a shred — suggesting any kind of imminent threat from the virus at the southern border. It’s from China, and currently, Canada has more confirmed cases than all of Latin America combined.
Nevertheless, in response to a journalist who asked about Trump’s perspective on southern border security and possibly closing it up — which reporting from Reuters suggested he might do — the president rambled:
‘We are looking at southern border… we are thinking about southern border. We have received a lot of power on the southern border over the last couple years from the courts, but we are looking at that very strongly.’
Watch:
"We have received a lot of power on the southern border over the last couple years from the courts" — Trump says he's considering closing the southern border in response to coronavirus (no cases have come from Mexico) pic.twitter.com/NTpLIlZ1CP
— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) February 29, 2020
Ironically, the day before Trump made these remarks, a court actually blocked a key Trump administration asylum policy: the so-called “Remain in Mexico” program, under which asylum seekers were sent to Mexico to await their cases playing out in the U.S. system. Many asylum seekers had already been sent back over the border to Mexico under the policy before the court reversal.
The White House criticized the ruling, insisting:
‘If today’s ruling is allowed to stand, these successes will be reversed, which threatens to flood the Nation’s immigration system, present unchecked coronavirus entry risk, deeply damage our positive relationship with the Government of Mexico and other regional partners, and reignite the humanitarian and security crisis at the border.’
There’s simply no evidence that allowing asylum seekers actually into the country where they’re seeking asylum — meaning the U.S. — will present “unchecked coronavirus entry risk.” The evidence is simply not there, although that issue has never exactly stopped Trump in the past. He has previously claimed that undocumented immigrants posed some kind of special criminal threat to the U.S., but the evidence wasn’t there for that claim either.
That hasn’t stopped subservient Congressional Republicans from falling in line. On Friday, a group of eleven of them wrote:
‘Given the porous nature of our border, and the continued lack of operational control due to the influence of dangerous cartels, it is foreseeable, indeed predictable, that any outbreak in Central America or Mexico could cause a rush to our border.’
So has Trump been successful as he’s claimed with his efforts to curtail the supposed crises at the border, or is there still a desperately out of control situation because of the cartels? The narrative seems like it’s shifting to fit whatever Trump and his allies happen to be pushing at the moment.
All of this nonsense is, of course, transpiring while actual lives hang in the balance, and Trump seems like he’s still having a hard time getting past the fact that coverage of the situation isn’t a conspiracy against him.
