Texas county at center of border fight is overwhelmed by migrant deaths

[ZERTErYNOthe]

WHERE DO WE PUT THE BODIES?
(no paywall) https://wapo.st/4aU5ZhH
Texas county at center of border fight is overwhelmed by migrant deaths

EAGLE PASS, Tex. — The undertaker lighted a cigarette and held it between his latex-gloved fingers as he stood over the bloated body bag lying in the bed of his battered pickup truck.

The woman had been fished out of the Rio Grande minutes earlier. Now, her body lay stiff as mortician Jesus “Chuy” Gonzalez drove away from the muddy boat ramp and toward an overcrowded freezer, passing mobile homes and a casino along the way.

Maverick County purchased the trailer during the pandemic to handle covid-19 victims. It was designed to hold 20 bodies but on this day held 28 — the putrefied remains testifying to two dozen shattered dreams of reaching the United States. Only half had names.

Gonzalez didn’t flinch as he swung the freezer’s doors open. He has been around so much death that the stench of decomposition no longer bothers him. A large silver Virgen de Guadalupe dangled from his chest as he maneuvered the woman into a wooden barrack.

Nearby lay the body of a man whose arms were frozen as if he were blocking a blow. His jeans and shoes were still covered in river mud and his face marbled with sickly discoloration. Several members of a Venezuelan family who drowned together were also scattered inside the trailer. They had been there since mid-November.
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This is just the first 5 paragraphs from the article. It's interesting that two failures of Republican policy (Covid 19, Border/immigration policy) intersect: The need for a refrigerated trailer to handle bodies because of the republican Covid 19 policy is now used to handle the bodies because of the past and current Republican border policy.

[Lovie777]

1. The GQP claim to be Christians.............................

and yet they treat the migrants as inhuman.

[Barry Markson]

2. The contrast between humanitarian President Joseph R. Biden and trump has never been more stark.

Migrants thank Biden for letting them in as US Border Patrol’s San Diego processing centers reach eye-popping 245% capacity

SAN DIEGO, California — The US Border Patrol has more than twice as many migrants as they can hold in the San Diego area of the southern border — and immigrants there were thanking President Biden for letting them in.

The agency’s processing centers in the region are 245% capacity, as 1,812 migrants were being detained as of Friday in facilities normally meant to hold 750, according to agency data exclusively obtained by The Post.

With the influx — and the fact that migrants can only be held 72 hours — there’s been more than 125,000 migrants released onto the streets of San Diego since September.

https://nypost.com/2024/04/12/us-news/migrants-thank-biden-for-letting-them-in-as-us-border-patrols-san-diego-processing-centers-reach-eye-popping-245-capacity/

[róisín_dubh]

3. If anyone wants to read a truly sad book about this...

Luis Urrea wrote Devil's Highway awhile back. It doesn't deal with the Texas part of the border, but instead Arizona. But the deaths are no less horrible (in fact they described in grotesque detail in terms of what happens when you die in the desert).
Fuck all these people who subject desperate folks to inhumane torture.

[struggle4progress]

4. ... This past Thanksgiving, 11-year-old Cristal Tercero Medrano of Nicaragua drowned

while wearing a bright-yellow Tweety Bird sweater. Horta worked with Border Patrol agents to identify her. Not long after, they found the girl’s family. Relatives sent in a photo of Cristal wearing the same yellow sweater.

“I get mad, as the father of a little girl,” Horta said. “There should be a process that isn’t the river. It gets to me, but I have to be a professional” ...

https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/interactive/2024/texas-border-eagle-pass-migrant-deaths