Texas Needs To Prepare For Power Outages From Heat Snow And Heat Cold Or Something

The climate cult craziness just continues. Sadly, so many people have been indoctrinated that they actually believe that heat trapping greenhouse gases can make snow, ice, and cold weather

Texas scientists: Power outages show why Texas must prepare for climate change

The two writers are climate cultists Katherine Hayhoe, who also pretends to use her Christian religion to push her climate cult beliefs, and loves blocking everyone who dares ask her a question, even though she has stated she wants a robust debate (did you realize she also teaches Political Science? Go figure), along with Ginny Catania, a professor with the Jackson School of Geosciences at the University of Texas at Austin. While Hayhoe could charitably be called a “climate scientist”, with a Masters in atmospheric science (also, in Philosophy), Catania has a PHD in Geophysics, so, not a direct climate science degree. And we were told we should only listen to people with degrees in climate science, right? They managed to get a whole bunch of Comrades at their schools to sign on. Have anyone of them given up their own use of fossil fuels?

stop global warmingLast week, ice, snow and record-breaking cold left millions across Texas without electricity, heat or water, and with homes damaged or destroyed. Roughly 4 million homes and up to 15 million people had no power for several days, and 13 million homes had no water or poor water quality.

Like our fellow Texans, we were also victims of this preventable disaster; as always, however, this extreme weather-related disaster disproportionately impacted our most vulnerable populations. The compounding failures of interconnected life-sustaining resources created a dangerous crisis for millions, particularly those living in poverty and acutely suffering the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic.

A massive winter storm was preventable? Really? We’re supposed to take this stuff seriously.

Some may say that no one could have foreseen such severe weather. Although Texas experiences extreme cold events, it is indeed unusual to have a winter storm advisory for the whole state at once. However, given the well-known and very large fluctuations of winter temperatures in this part of the country and the scale of this storm, it is surprising that there was no clear preparation ahead of time. Meteorologists predicted the storm’s arrival for more than a week in advance, yet Texans still faced empty grocery stores, shuttered pharmacies and hospitals without power, water or adequate water pressure needed for critical operations and procedures. (snip through the tedious explanation of how you eating a burger causes the Arctic to warm and cause winter weather)

Human decisions can exacerbate these risks: Urbanization can increase runoff from rainfall, and development in low-lying areas and coastal regions makes us more vulnerable to floods. Preparing for future disasters requires a systematic analysis of future — not just historical — risks. Texas must prepare for these risks. Such planning is critical for the state to remain financially resilient in the face of climate change. (snip)

Unlike the power outage crisis, climate change will be difficult or near impossible to reverse in the near-term. The state’s leaders need to accept climate science and begin using research to build a more resilient Texas. Texas has always experienced heat and cold, drought and flood. But today, climate change is loading the dice against us. For decades, climate researchers have projected — and are now observing — that extreme climate events (of many kinds) will become more frequent or more intense as our planet continues to warm.

It’s long past time to start asking these climate cultists to prove their assertions and prognostication, along with whether they’ve changed their own lives to match their beliefs.

Read: Texas Needs To Prepare For Power Outages From Heat Snow And Heat Cold Or Something »

House To Vote On The “Destroying Women’s Sports” And Limiting Religious Freedom Act

Well, not just sports. But, their safety and security in locker rooms, showers, and bathrooms, along with taking away scholarships and so much more. And blowing up the 1st Amendment on religious freedom. Because Democrats priorities do not include getting America back on it’s feet from the pandemic

House To Vote On Equality Act: Here’s What The Law Would Do

The House of Representatives is set to vote this week on the Equality Act, a bill that would ban discrimination against people based on sexual orientation and gender identity. It would also substantially expand the areas to which those discrimination protections apply.

It’s a bill that President Biden said on the campaign trail would be one of his top legislative priorities for the first 100 days of his presidency.

When House Democrats introduced the bill last week, Biden reiterated his support in a statement: “I urge Congress to swiftly pass this historic legislation,” he wrote. “Every person should be treated with dignity and respect, and this bill represents a critical step toward ensuring that America lives up to our foundational values of equality and freedom for all.”

But it’s also controversial — while the Equality Act has broad support among Democrats, many Republicans oppose it, fearing that it would infringe upon religious objections. (snip)

The Civil Rights Act covered discrimination in certain areas, like employment and housing. The Equality Act would expand that to cover federally funded programs, as well as “public accommodations” — a broad category including retail stores and stadiums, for example.

(“Public accommodations” is also a category that the bill broadens, to include online retailers and transportation providers, for example. Because of that, many types of discrimination the Civil Rights Act currently prohibits — like racial or religious discrimination — would now also be explicitly covered at those types of establishments.)

One upshot of all of this, then, is that the Equality Act would affect businesses like flower shops and bakeries that have been at the center of discrimination court cases in recent years — for example, a baker who doesn’t want to provide a cake for a same-sex wedding.

Importantly, the bill also explicitly says that it trumps the Religious Freedom Restoration Act (commonly known by its acronym RFRA). The law, passed in 1993, set a higher bar for the government to defend laws if people argued those laws infringed upon religious freedom.

Well, you’ll have almost every single Republican in the House voting against it, and you won’t get 60 Senators to vote for ending debate. The only way to attempt to pass it in the Senate is by nuking the filibuster, and Dems might not get 50 votes for passage even with the nuking. And would expressly violate the 1st Amendment, leading to an immediate constitutional challenge going right to the Supreme Court. The NPR article barely touches upon the other big question

The Equality Act Makes Women Unequal

All people are created equal, but Congress is considering a bill that would make some people more equal than others.

H.R. 5, styled the Equality Act, would redefine “sex” under federal civil-rights laws to include “sexual orientation” and “gender identity,” overriding basic biology along with millennia of tradition.

This isn’t only a question of semantics. Nor is it merely an attempt to prohibit employment discrimination against sexual minorities. A 2020 ruling by the U.S. Supreme Court already does that.

The Equality Act would go much further by making it illegal to distinguish “identity” from biology and thereby prioritize transgender people over women. By erasing sex as a distinct legal category, the measure threatens to open up female-only spaces and opportunities designed to increase representation for girls to biological men, which can endanger the safety of women and girls.

The Equality Act would threaten the existence of women’s prisons, public-school girls’ locker rooms, and women’s and girls’ sports teams. It would limit freedom of speech, freedom of association, accurate data collection, and scientific inquiry. It would threaten the rights of physicians who doubt the wisdom of performing life-changing, reproduction-limiting procedures, and parents who seek to protect their minor children from such treatment.

This isn’t hyperbole. Similar state laws have already resulted in such harm. In California, Catholic hospitals have faced lawsuits for declining to perform life-altering “gender affirmation” surgery in September 2016. In Connecticut, two biologically male athletes won a combined 15 girls state championship races, allegedly taking opportunities for further competition and scholarships from female runners in June 2019. Alaska’s Equal Rights Commission opened an investigation into a women’s shelter after it turned away a biological male in September 2019. H.R. 5 would impose the most extreme form of these laws on the whole country.

Hey, female Democrats and female Republican Trump haters, this is what you voted for. Are you good with Democrats taking away so much from women? Are you good with women losing college scholarships and more to biological males with mental issues who believe they’re female? Do you want them in your female only places? Instead of voting for the $1,400 checks (didn’t Biden promise $2,000 specifically?) and important recovery measures, they want to destroy women.

Arkansas is the latest state to be working on a law to protect women from trans males in K-12. Many other states will soon go the same route, having to pass laws that, in years past, would have been unnecessary because Americans had common sense and understood the difference between male and female. It’s insane that we even have to have a discussion on this.

Read More »

Read: House To Vote On The “Destroying Women’s Sports” And Limiting Religious Freedom Act »

A Warming World Will Make Winters Worse Or Something

Remember the days when they said global warming was going to be the end of snow, that they’d be so much warmer? Of course you do. Unless you’re a climate cultist, then, you need Reasons to explain just why greenhouse gases are going to make winters worse. And, with what happened in Texas and other parts of the South, you need some good cult dogma, so, here comes yet another “explainer”. Remember when we just got news from the news, along with a very separate opinion section?

Climate change explainer: Earth is warming but winters could get worse – here’s why

Welcome back to the In This Climate Newsletter! I’m Ken. I launched this newsletter to bring climate change to the neighborhood level. How is climate change impacting Michigan right now — and how will it impact Michigan in the future? What can we do about it? (snip)

Today, you’ll hear from one of the country’s top meteorologists – Local 4′s Paul Gross. He has studied weather and climate for decades, and has been reporting on climate change since the early 1990s (before it was on other meteorologist’s radar). He’s our go-to guy to help understand the science behind the weather. Paul is one of only six meteorologists in the world ever to be named an AMS Fellow, Certified Broadcast Meteorologist, and Certified Consulting Meteorologist, and is recognized as one of the nation’s leaders in explaining the scientific truth about global warming without any political bias.

After the winter chaos across the south, specifically Texas, last week, I asked Paul to help us understand — if the Earth is warming up, why are winters getting more dangerous?

The science is settled on one aspect of climate change: humans have changed the composition of our planet’s atmosphere, and those changes have initiated an unusual warming of Earth’s climate. How that warming affects the actual weather you and I experience is becoming apparent, although finer details obviously are yet to be determined. But is global warming changing our winters? The answer is rather intriguing!

If the science is so settled then why the majority of Warmists fail to change their own lives to match their beliefs? Why is it that the vast majority of the policies be about taxation and taking away people’s liberty, freedom, and choice, and handing it to government?

Another impact of warmer winters is on snow. I suppose it’s obvious to state that we tend to get less snow and more rain and ice in a warmer winter…that’s not good if you’re a winter enthusiast and love hitting the slopes, doing some sledding, or just getting out and building a good ‘ol snowman. However, the warming climate is causing more and more ocean water to evaporate into the atmosphere, and that moisture is what winter storms use to generate snow.

The result? Snowstorms are dropping more snow! So, in those winters where the storm track is close to us, we are getting more snow than we used to. In fact, five of Detroit’s top-ten snowiest winters have occurred since 2004 and, not only have six of Detroit’s top-ten snowiest Februaries occurred since 2008, our current month of February is very close to cracking the top ten!

So, does this mean that snow doesn’t fall when it gets very cold? That the last ice age was due to being too hot? Cult. Anyhow, you’re welcome to read the rest of the talking points from the Cult of Climastrology if you want, nothing really different.

Read: A Warming World Will Make Winters Worse Or Something »

If All You See…

…are horrible carbon pollution created clouds causing Bad Weather, you might just be a Warmist

The blog of the day is Gen Z Conservative, with a post on how to invest in non-Wake companies.

Read: If All You See… »

Surprise: Study Shows Mass Solar Farms Could Cause Lots Of Environmental And Warming Issues

Let me ask: what happens when you take an area, cut down most of the trees, put up tons of homes with all sorts of roadways and sidewalks? You get an artificial increase in the local temperature, as you’ve changed the land. This is part of the land use theory on climatic change. It’s also linked to the Urban Heat Island effect (UHI). You’re changing the ability of the land to receive and radiate solar radiance, with asphalt, concrete, and buildings to hold that heat longer, while changing the way the air flows over the area, which causes slight changes in the weather. And eliminated wildlife areas. What happens when you slap up a ton of solar panels?

Study warns solar farms could unleash unintended consequences on the environment, including global warming

A new study finds there could be unintended consequences of constructing massive solar farms in deserts around the world. The eye-opening research claims that huge solar farms, such as in the Sahara, could usher in environmental crises, including altering the climate and causing global warming.

The study was carried out by Zhengyao Lu, a researcher in Physical Geography at Lund University, and Benjamin Smith, director of research at the Hawkesbury Institute for the Environment at Western Sydney University. The results of their research were published in a Feb. 11 article in The Conversation.

Solar panels are darker colors such as black and blue to attract and absorb more heat, but they are usually much darker than the ground around the solar panel. The post cites an article that claims most solar panels are between 15% and 20% efficient in converting sunlight into usable energy. The researchers assert that the rest of the sunlight is returned to the surrounding environment as heat, “affecting the climate.”

The article notes that in order to replace fossil fuels, solar farms would need to be enormous — covering thousands of square miles, according to this article. Solar farms of this magnitude potentially present environmental consequences, not just locally but globally.

Not to mention all the industrial digging that would need to be done to get the rare earth elements and pollution left behind by production and from damaged and useless and end of life panels.

From The Conversation:

The model revealed that when the size of the solar farm reaches 20% of the total area of the Sahara, it triggers a feedback loop. Heat emitted by the darker solar panels (compared to the highly reflective desert soil) creates a steep temperature difference between the land and the surrounding oceans that ultimately lowers surface air pressure and causes moist air to rise and condense into raindrops. With more monsoon rainfall, plants grow and the desert reflects less of the sun’s energy, since vegetation absorbs light better than sand and soil. With more plants present, more water is evaporated, creating a more humid environment that causes vegetation to spread.Turning the Sahara desert into a lush, green oasis could have climate ramifications around the planet, including affecting the atmosphere, the ocean, the land, changing entire ecosystems, altering precipitation in Amazon’s rainforests, inducing droughts, and potentially triggering more tropical cyclones.

The Sahara has been lush in the past. Would it really be bad if it was again? The only way to truly know would be to make it happen. But, we do know that covering vast swaths of the Sahara, and other deserts, into solar farms would increase the night-time warmth, instead of seeing the big radiative cooling that is the norm. Deserts often get cool to cold in the night. What kind of effect will this have if you keep it warmer at night? Might it create more hurricanes and tropical systems? Or create less?

The good-intentioned effort to lower the world’s temperature could potentially do the opposite and increase the planet’s temperature, according to the researchers.

Covering 20% of the Sahara with solar farms raises local temperatures in the desert by 1.5°C according to our model. At 50% coverage, the temperature increase is 2.5°C. This warming is eventually spread around the globe by atmosphere and ocean movement, raising the world’s average temperature by 0.16°C for 20% coverage, and 0.39°C for 50% coverage. The global temperature shift is not uniform though – the polar regions would warm more than the tropics, increasing sea ice loss in the Arctic. This could further accelerate warming, as melting sea ice exposes dark water which absorbs much more solar energy.

Oops? This is how you turn land use/UHI into a global issue, much like we see with urban and suburban areas around the world. It’s not global, but appears global. This is the Law Of Unintended Consequences, of Unintended Good Intentions. It would be so much easier if Warmists just gave up their own use of fossil fuels, stopped eating meat, and move into off the grid homes.

Also, instead of spending huge amounts of money slapping up wind and solar projects willy nilly, use it for R&D to make better, more environmentally friendly solar and wind, along with ways to store the energy.

Read: Surprise: Study Shows Mass Solar Farms Could Cause Lots Of Environmental And Warming Issues »

Federal Judge To China Joe: No, You Cannot Stop Deportations For 100 Days

Of course, don’t expect the China Joe admin to listen, and Texas to have to sue again sometime in the next few months

Judge bans enforcement of Biden’s 100-day deportation pause

A federal judge late Tuesday indefinitely banned President Joe Biden’s administration from enforcing a 100-day moratorium on most deportations.

U.S. District Judge Drew Tipton issued a preliminary injunction sought by Texas, which argued the moratorium violated federal law and risked imposing additional costs on the state.

Biden proposed the 100-day pause on deportations during his campaign as part of a larger review of immigration enforcement and an attempt to reverse the priorities of former President Donald Trump. Biden has proposed a sweeping immigration bill that would allow the legalization of an estimated 11 million people living in the U.S. illegally. He has also instituted other guidelines on whom immigration and border agents should target for enforcement.

Tipton, a Trump appointee, initially ruled on Jan. 26 that the moratorium violated federal law on administrative procedure and that the U.S. failed to show why a deportation pause was justified. A temporary restraining order the judge issued was set to expire Tuesday.

Any larger review would determine that…..federal law requires that any illegal who doesn’t qualify for asylum, which is the vast majority, should be deported. And anyone shielding them, helping them, is in violation of federal law. Democrats like to yammer on that the president isn’t above the law (projecting what their own presidents do onto Republicans), so, the president needs to follow the law. Don’t like the law? Ask the duly elected Legislative branch to change the laws.

Tipton’s ruling did not require deportations to resume at their previous pace. Even without a moratorium, immigration agencies have wide latitude in enforcing removals and processing cases.

Many of the illegals are very, very bad people. Arson, rape, child sexual assault, murder, violence, and more. Many have ruined the lives of U.S. citizens through identity theft. These are who Joe wants to keep in. Will he quietly have his agencies slow walk referring cases to courts for deportation, along with those who’ve already been ordered deported? Most of the law enforcement agencies will Resist.

It was not immediately clear if the Biden administration will appeal Tipton’s latest ruling. The Justice Department did not seek a stay of Tipton’s earlier temporary restraining order.

Because China Joe will most likely ignore the order. And the media won’t say he’s authoritarian and “destroying democracy,” right?

Read: Federal Judge To China Joe: No, You Cannot Stop Deportations For 100 Days »

If All You See…

…is an evil golf course sucking up huge amounts of water, you might just be a Warmist

The blog of the day is The H2, with a post on space age love meme.

Read: If All You See… »

Yes, They Do Want You To Wear A Mask Even After Vaccination

What’s the point of the vaccination if you can’t ditch the mask and start living your life?

Why get COVID-19 vaccination if you still have to wear a mask? It beats getting sick, health experts say.

Get a COVID-19 vaccine and you’ll be counseled to keep wearing a mask and keep staying away from other people. So, what’s the point?

There’s an immediate benefit to the individual who gets a vaccine, said Andy Slavitt, White House senior advisor on the COVID-19 response. “People are interested in taking the vaccine,” he said at a Monday news conference, because “they don’t want to be sick and they don’t want to die.”

Getting two shots of either the Moderna or Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine reduces an individual’s risk of developing symptomatic COVID-19 by about 95%, according to large research trials.

But life won’t get back to something like normal for the broader society until national infection rates come down further, according to Dr. Anthony Fauci, the nation’s top infectious disease expert, and Dr. Rochelle Walensky, the head of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Yeah, but, if I get the shot, why am I worried about getting a sickness that has a low rate of death if I don’t wear a mask? Especially since masks have pretty much not worked, based on infections skyrocketing after masks became required in 31 states, D.C., and Puerto Rico.

It’s also possible, though research increasingly suggests it’s unlikely, that vaccinated people could still transmit the virus, even if they don’t fall ill themselves. “For that reason, we want to make sure that people continue to wear masks despite the fact that they’re vaccinated,” Fauci said.

Wait, weren’t we told that masks stop us from catching it? Or, are we going back to the original standard the CDC put out prior to May 31, that people who think they are sick should be the ones who wear them? Either way, it’s hard to think that this is anymore than Government wanting to make us comfortable with them telling us how to live our lives with COVID so we’re comfortable with more control.

The CDC is still working out exactly what is safe and what isn’t for those who are vaccinated.

They’ll let us know at some point. Maybe next year. So, keep locking down and stuff, Comrades!

Meanwhile, Excitable Rev William Barber, who likes to grab women flight attendants and fight with people on airplanes, is looking to take advantage of 500k American deaths

500,000 Americans have died of Covid. Will we wake up to our own callousness?

As the United States marks the terrible milestone of half a million souls lost to Covid-19, these deaths demand a grown-up conversation about the policies that shape our public life. When we look at the impact of this pandemic on other wealthy nations around the world, the disproportionate death toll we have sustained in the US exposes a basic failure of national security. Though we spend more than the next several nations combined on our military budget, our government was unable to protect its citizens against a deadly pathogen.

So, Government is bad, Bill?

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) reported this week that, during the first six months of the pandemic, life expectancy for the average American dropped by a full year. For African Americans, the impact was nearly three times as severe, exposing persistent systemic racism that was not corrected when corporations agreed to say “Black Lives Matter”. We have not simply suffered a disaster. This disaster has unveiled dysfunction in our society.

Strange that most of that occurs in areas run by Democrats.

It is insulting to a people who have lost half a million parents, grandparents, siblings and partners to continue talking about the root causes of a national crisis in simplistic terms that do not fit the reality we can all see. In the US Congress, where the issue of raising the minimum wage to $15 an hour is being debated as part of Biden’s American Rescue Plan, we are told that “moderate” Democrats are hesitant to support the measure. But what is moderate about denying just wages to the frontline service workers whom we’ve called “essential” throughout this pandemic? These poor workers are disproportionately Black and Latino, though the largest racial group in raw numbers is white. Senators like West Virginia’s Joe Manchin think they are guarding against the power of Trump’s fake populism among their white base by hedging on bold action to raise wages. But this simplistic framing plays into the divide-and-conquer tactics that pit poor white people against their Black and brown neighbors by telling them that the “far left” wants to take away their jobs and their freedoms. When we repeat the lie that raising the minimum wage is a “far-left” idea, we implicitly suggest that it is something the sensible people of West Virginia would never support.

It’s an interesting argument to link Fight for $15 as a need for COVID response, I’ll give him that. But, it’s a bunch of mule fritters. Just using the deaths for political gain.

Read: Yes, They Do Want You To Wear A Mask Even After Vaccination »

NY Times Notices That All These Companies Proclaiming They’re Doing Something On ‘Climate Change’ Mostly Aren’t

Seriously, most companies who climavirtue signal don’t actually do much in practice, because it’s expensive and idiotic. It doesn’t cost that much to patronize climate cultists, right? Well, the NY Times digs behind the scenes, forgetting to mention what the NY Times corporation is actually doing themselves with their big old building. Will they move ahead with only getting their power from solar and wind? How about doing away with the use of fossil fuels to gather and deliver the news?

What’s Really Behind Corporate Promises on Climate Change?

surprise surprise surpriseFor the past several years, BlackRock, the giant investment firm, has cast itself as a champion of the transition to clean energy.

Last month, Laurence D. Fink, BlackRock’s chief executive, wrote that the coronavirus pandemic had “driven us to confront the global threat of climate change more forcefully,” and the company said it wants businesses it invests in to remove as much carbon dioxide from the environment as they emit by 2050 at the latest.

But crucial details were missing from that widely read pledge, including what proportion of the companies BlackRock invests in will be zero-emission businesses in 2050. Setting such a goal and earlier targets would demonstrate the seriousness of the company’s commitment and could force all sorts of industries to step up their efforts. On Saturday, in response to questions from The New York Times, a BlackRock spokesman said for the first time that the company’s “ambition” was to have “net zero emissions across our entire assets under management by 2050.”

As the biggest companies strive to trumpet their environmental activism, the need to match words with deeds is becoming increasingly important.

Household names like Costco and Netflix have not provided emissions reduction targets despite saying they want to reduce their impact on climate change. Others, like the agricultural giant Cargill and the clothing company Levi Strauss, have made commitments but have struggled to cut emissions. Technology companies like Google and Microsoft, which run power-hungry data centers, have slashed emissions, but even they are finding that the technology often doesn’t yet exist to carry out their “moonshot” objectives.

“You can look at a company’s website and see their sustainability report and it will look great,” said Alberto Carrillo Pineda, a founder of Science Based Targets, a global initiative to assess corporate plans to reduce emissions. “But then when you look at what is behind it, you’ll see there is not a lot of substance behind those commitments or the commitments are not comprehensive enough.”

I’m shocked, shocked, I tell you! This is like most cities and countries: lots of talk, little action. The majority of Paris Climate idiocy signers aren’t doing much of anything. Most companies, the same. Like the NY Times company.

President Biden is also placing a big emphasis on climate change and has rejoined the Paris agreement. But determining how hard companies are really trying can be very difficult when there are no regulatory standards that require uniform disclosures of important information like emissions.

“Regulatory standards.” I wonder if the Times realizes this would affect themselves? And who’s shocked that the notion of even more Big Government is being mentioned? It’s a long piece, let’s skip to the end

“If we are going to achieve a net-zero carbon economy for real, we will need everyone to act,” said Lucas Joppa, Microsoft’s chief environmental officer. “And that means action can’t be voluntary. We need requirements and standards that everyone is expected to meet.”

Why can’t it be? If you believe, do all the things required, like doing away with the use of fossil fuels and operate only on renewables. Simple. Nope, because this is about forcing everyone to be in the Cult of Climastrology, whether they want to or not.

Read: NY Times Notices That All These Companies Proclaiming They’re Doing Something On ‘Climate Change’ Mostly Aren’t »

China Joe Opens His First Illegal Alien Child Concentration Camp

Because Democrats want unfettered illegal immigration, the set the conditions where foreigners send their kids willy nilly across the border. Sometimes with the parents themselves, sometimes with other relatives, sometimes with coyotes, sometimes alone. That way there’s sympathy for bringing/keeping the parents in the US. Both Obama, who didn’t take any real heat on it, and Trump, who took lots of heat, including what Obama deserved, had to put the kids somewhere. Now that Biden is finding the same, well, the media coverage is just a bit different

First migrant facility for children opens under Biden

Dozens of migrant teens boarded vans Monday for the trip down a dusty road to a former man camp for oil field workers here, the first migrant child facility opened under the Biden administration.

The emergency facility — a vestige of the Trump administration that was open for only a month in summer 2019 — is being reactivated to hold up to 700 children ages 13 to 17.

Government officials say the camp is needed because facilities for migrant children have had to cut capacity by nearly half because of the coronavirus pandemic. At the same time, the number of unaccompanied children crossing the border has been inching up, with January reporting the highest total — more than 5,700 apprehensions — for that month in recent years.

But immigration lawyers and advocates question why the Biden administration would choose to reopen a Trump-era facility that was the source of protests and controversy. From the “tent city” in Tornillo, Tex., to a sprawling for-profit facility in Homestead, Fla., emergency shelters have been criticized by advocates for immigrants, lawyers and human rights activists over their conditions, cost and lack of transparency in their operations.

Criticized is putting it mildly. He was blasted. Which the Washington Post is not doing. Also, not migrants. Migrants come legally on work visas. These kids are crossing the border in violation of U.S. federal law.

Mark Weber — a spokesman for the Department of Health and Human Services, the agency that oversees services for migrant children — said the Biden administration is moving away from the “law-enforcement focused” approach of the Trump administration to one in which child welfare is more centric.

At the 66-acre site, groups of beige trailers encircle a giant white dining tent, a soccer field and a basketball court. There is a bright blue hospital tent with white bunk beds inside. A legal services trailer has the Spanish word “Bienvenidos,” or welcome, on a banner on its roof. There are trailers for classrooms, a barber shop, a hair salon. The facility has its own ambulances and firetrucks, as well as its own water supply.

The operation is based on a federal emergency management system, Weber said. The trailers are labeled with names such as Alpha, Charlie and Echo. Staff members wear matching black-and-white T-shirts displaying their roles: disaster case manager, incident support, emergency management.

Are they holding them in detainment facilities? Yes? Then they are cages. Concentration camps. Just like under Trump, as started by Obama. And taxpayers are funding the extra extravagance, rather than seeing the children deported with their parents/right back to their parents.

“Every kid that comes into this program is a symptom of a broken immigration system,” said Weber, who has worked at HHS since 2012. “So today, we’ve got over 7,000 symptoms of a broken immigration system.”

The only thing broken is the government refusing to fully implement federal immigration law, which requires them to stop people coming across the border and deporting them when they make it across. Let’s not forget that many of the illegals, including the children, are simply showing up at the border and demanding to be let in for various reasons, and U.S. authorities letting them in and sticking them in facilities. Democrats are enabling people sending their kids on long trips, not knowing what will happen to the kids.

“When I read they were opening again, I cried,” said Rosey Abuabara, a San Antonio community activist who was arrested for protesting outside the Carrizo camp in 2019. “I consoled myself with the fact that it was considered the Cadillac of [migrant child] centers, but I don’t have any hope that Biden is going to make it better.”

The Washington Post is having problems blasting China Joe for reopening facilities other than mild chiding. But, hey, Joe has nice signs!

Read: China Joe Opens His First Illegal Alien Child Concentration Camp »

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