A new caravan of at least 1,500 asylum seekers has departed southern Mexico in the hopes of reaching the US border before President-elect Donald Trump takes office.
The caravan of migrants — who hail mostly from Venezuela, Cuba, Haiti, Colombia, Guatemala and Honduras — started walking north late Sunday from Tapachula, a city near Mexico’s southern border with Guatemala.
The latest caravan of migrants — who hail mostly from Venezuela, Cuba, Haiti, Colombia, Guatemala and Honduras — started walking north late Sunday.REUTERS
Migrants walk along a road in a caravan bound to the northern border with the U.S., in Tapachula, Mexico December 2, 2024.REUTERS
Some of the migrants, who kicked off the trek under the cover of darkness to avoid the scorching daytime heat, are racing to try to cross the border ahead of Trump’s Jan. 20 inauguration amid fears he will follow through on campaign promises to crackdown on immigration.
There are concerns Trump could eliminate the Biden administration’s CPB One app program — which allows asylum seekers to book appointments with immigration officials — as soon as he takes office, some migrants say.
“There are a lot of reports that [Trump] has said he is going to do away with CBP One, that there are going to be deportations, the biggest deportation, but you have to have faith in God,” Venezuelan migrant Francisco Unda, 38, said.
The app entry program was introduced in January last year, with President Biden claiming it would help control the number of migrants crossing the border illegally.
There are roughly 1,450 appointments made available daily via the program.
Meanwhile, the fresh wave of migrants took off heading north after Trump threatened to slap 25% tariffs on Mexican products if the country didn’t do more to block the flow toward the US border.
Last week, Trump said Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum had agreed to stop unauthorized migration.
At least 1,500 asylum seekers set off in southern Mexico en route to the US border.REUTERS
Sheinbaum, on her part, insisted that “migrants and caravans are taken care of before they reach the border” — adding she was confident a tariff war with the US could be averted.
The back-and-forth comes after two small caravans that started rushing toward the southern border in the wake of Trump’s election victory last month were broken up just weeks later by Mexican authorities.
Some migrants were bused to cities in southern Mexico, while others were offered transit papers.
Migrants gather before departing in a caravan bound to the northern border with the U.S., in Tapachula, Mexico December 1, 2024.REUTERS
A handful in the caravan that departed Tapachula Sunday said they’d be willing to stay and find work in the industrial cities of northern Mexico if they are stopped.
Most migrants cannot work or find work in Tapachula — a city flooded with migrants — some 1,100 miles from the border.
“I think a lot of people here, if there were opportunities in Monterrey and surrounding areas, they would stay there,” Santos Modesto, a migrant from Honduras, said, “because there are a lot of Cubans and Venezuelans who would rather stay here than return to their country.”
He added, though, that most in the caravan want to get to the US so they could “achieve a better life for their families.”
Ex-Gov. Andrew Cuomo committed “medical malpractice” and publicly undercounted the total number of COVID-related nursing home deaths in New York during the worst period of the killer pandemic, a damning final investigative report released by a key House panel found.
The report from the Republican-led House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic, released Monday, also concluded that Cuomo “likely gave false statements” about his role in pandemic decision-making.
That includes him actually being “directly involved” in the infamous March 2020 edict directing nursing homes to admit recovering COVID-19 patients — and downplaying pandemic-related deaths of residents in a July 2020 report, the House panel found.
A House report found that former Gov. Andrew Cuomo committed “medical malpractice” during the COVID-19 pandemic.Aaron Schwartz – CNP
In another finding, the report concluded that Cuomo “acted in a manner consistent with an attempt to inappropriately influence the testimony of a witness and obstruct the Select Subcommittee’s investigation,” referring to his contacts with former adviser James Malatras.
Skip Ad
The House had previously released documents laying out the allegations about Cuomo and his administration’s actions — but the more-than 500-page final report paints a devastating picture of the three-term Democratic governor’s decisions that the subcommittee claims undermined public health.
Cuomo — who is weighing a political comeback run for mayor after resigning as governor in 2021 amid sexual misconduct accusations he denied — ripped the report as a partisan GOP witch hunt.
“This is the same weak gruel the MAGA Republicans on this committee have been peddling for months if not years,” said Cuomo spokesman Richard Azzopardi.
But Rep. Brad Wenstrup, an Ohio Republican who chaired the panel, said in the opening letter of the report that there was bipartisan consensus on numerous topics including “that former New York Governor Andrew Cuomo participated in medical malpractice and publicly covered up the total number of nursing home fatalities in New York.”
The report found that the Cuomo administration publicly undercounted the total number of COVID-related nursing home deaths in New York during the peak of the pandemic.REUTERS/Lucas Jackson
A more than 40-page section of the report focuses solely on Cuomo and the state government’s response to the pandemic. Cuomo’s name appears in the report 203 times.
Among the findings alleged in the report are that:
The Cuomo administration’s March 25, 2020 directive to admit or readmit recovering COVID-19 patients into nursing homes was “medical malpractice,” “antithetical to known science” and inconsistent with federal guidance — and the Executive Chamber “attempted to cover it up.”
Contrary to his denials during House testimony, Cuomo and his top aides and advisers were “directly Involved” in and approved the infamous directive, which was later rescinded following public outcry.
Cuomo administration officials testified that the governor ordered the controversial July 6, 2020 state Department of Health report — which was criticized for lowballing nursing home resident deaths from COVID — to combat criticism of the March 25 edict.
Cuomo was directly involved in editing the July report and directing people outside the government — such as Northwell Health CEO Michael Dowling and Greater NY Hospital CEO Kenneth Raske to review it. In a memo shortly before the report’s release and obtained by the House panel, Dowling offered to help “rewrite” it.
Cuomo’s executive chamber decided to remove “out-of-facility” fatalities — such as nursing home residents who died from COVID after falling ill and being transferred to hospitals — from the July report, thus dramatically reducing the total death toll.
The panel also concluded that “Mr. Andrew Cuomo Likely Gave False Statements to the Select Subcommittee in Violation of 18 U.S.C” — a federal crime that if proven could result in a sentence of five years in prison.
The report claimed that Cuomo “likely gave false statements” about his role in pandemic decisions.REUTERS/Mike Segar
The committee in October said it had referred Cuomo’s “criminally false statements” to the US Department of Justice for potential prosecution.
Cuomo’s rep, Azzopardi, claimed the House was out to get “perceived political enemies.”
“From the very beginning this has been an abuse of power and a waste of taxpayer money aimed at punishing perceived political enemies – like Dr. [Anthony] Fauci [then Director of the National Institute of Infectious Diseases], Governor Cuomo and ‘the deep state’ – that does nothing to make us more prepared for the next pandemic,” he said.
The House report called Cuomo’s nursing home order “antithetical to known science.”Annie Wermiel/NY Post
He claimed federal data showed that New York ranked 39th in terms of per capita nursing home deaths in 2020.
“The DOJ -three times – the Manhattan DA and others looked at the nursing home issue and found no wrongdoing, while the meritless civil lawsuit launched by the very same people who have been working arm and arm with this committee was tossed out of court,” Azzopardi added.
Families of loved ones who were nursing home residents and died from COVID said Cuomo was finally being held to account.
“Cuomo has been lying about following the Trump CDC guidelines for years,” said Peter Arbeeny, whose father, Norman, died from the virus after being released from a Brooklyn nursing home.
“If the Cuomo administration would have followed the Trump [administration] CDC guidelines and also used the the USS Comfort ship and Javits Center [for more patients], thousands of lives would have been saved.”
Actual women such as Riley Gaines, Paige Spiranac, J. K. Rowling, and the female Israeli soldiers Steve helpfully displays each week, just got the news from the New York Times that they should be known as “non-transgender women.” This drew flak from tennis great Martina Navratilova, British Olympian Sharron Davies, and Rep. Nancy Mace, among others. The dynamics going on here will be of interest to all people.
NYT reporter has surrendered to to the Dictatorship of the Subjunctive Mood, institutionalized and enforced unreality. Under DSM a person can proclaim themselves to be anything, and everybody must follow along or stand accused of “transphobia,” “misgendering” and such. As Mace tweeted, “what bs,” but there’s more to it.
In narrow empty minds, contended French historian Hippolyte Taine, a general idea has the whole place to itself, so the narrow-minded can literally become possessed. In this case, the general idea is the notion that women can become men and vice versa. The narrow, empty minds are all over the establishment media, and George Orwell has thoughts on the matter in “Politics and the English Language.”
As the 1984 and Animal Farm author contended, so much bad writing proceeds from bad thinking, the need to deceive, the gap between real and concealed aims. Then there are simple bad habits such as defining things by what they are not, as in “not unjustifiable assumption.” Readers might wonder what Orwell would do with “not transgender woman” and the general idea behind it.
To prevent the “not-un” formulation, Orwell suggest memorizing this phrase: “a not unblack dog was chasing a not unsmall rabbit across a not ungreen field.” For their part, the “not transgender woman” crowd might buy a can of spray paint and find a retaining wall for their writing. That’s the level they’re on.
I’d like to put a name to why we so badly need to reform our legal approach to treating the severely mentally ill. That name is Rebecca Smith, an elderly homeless woman wholivedin lower Manhattan in the 1970s and 1980s. Friendly and talkative, she developed relationships with people passing by on their way to work and was well-known in the area. Those in the neighborhood sometimes gave her food or money. She received formal public benefits from New York City for a while but, like many homeless people, struggled to clear the bureaucratic hurdles necessary to maintain that status. Smith’s daughter, having lived with her mother’s schizophrenia since childhood, worked for more than a decade to get her off the streets, to no avail. Smith spent much of her time in a cardboard box.
The winter of 1981–82 was forecast to be particularly brutal. Officials with New York’s Human Resources Administration became concerned for Smith, who was older and, like almost everyone living on the streets, suffered from various chronic health problems. They tried to get her off the streets before the weather got really bad, offering her various places to sleep. She turned them all down. Like many people with severe mental illness, Smith had a deeply disordered sense of personal risk. Some concerned city workers began the process of involuntarily committing her. But the O’Connor v. Donaldson Supreme Court case, decided in 1975, had established a precedent that the mentally ill could be treated without their consent only if they were proved to be a clear danger to themselves and others; that decision was part of a broad anti-psychiatric trend in American politics, and many additional barriers were erected in the judiciary and the states against involuntary treatment. Those concerned for Smith’s well-being pressed on, under the logic that her refusal to take shelter constituted a clear danger to herself. But the legal process to execute a psychiatric commitment had grown complicated and difficult; before a judge finally signed off, Smith froze to death, in January 1982. Her body was found, literally frozen stiff, in her cardboard box.
In Rebecca Smith, we see the absurdity of activists’ appeals to freedom and autonomy in opposition to involuntary treatment. The lack of short-term freedom inherent to involuntary medicine is unfortunate but, in context, represents a much smaller price to pay than the alternative. There is no such thing as autonomy or freedom in death. Nor is there freedom that stems from psychosis. Mental illness hijacks the brain and destroys the very possibility of liberty. We all recognize that if I sign an exploitative contract while under the influence of, say, an illness like Alzheimer’s or dementia, that contract should not be considered valid—the most basic prerequisite of making such a choice is operating with a clear mind.
I often ask people to consider this hypothetical. If you found a friend sleeping in filth under a bridge, and you knew him to be under the influence of a powerful drug, would you just walk away and leave him there, under the logic that he was simply expressing his freedom? You wouldn’t. You would intuitively recognize that the influence of the drug makes genuine freedom impossible. And yet every day, we walk by people who have been crushed by schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, or other mental illnesses and live in squalid, dangerous conditions on the streets. Those claiming to be their advocates forbid doing what’s necessary to ensure effective treatment of those conditions.
But the psychotic self is not the self. Take it from me: I have struggled with bipolar disorder for more than half my life, and much of that struggle involves trying to put back the pieces after my bipolar self once again destroys everything I care about—my finances, my career, my friendships, my romantic relationships. Why would I act so self-destructively, if I were freely deciding what to do? And would you really be willing to tell me to my face that my bipolar self—paranoid, aggressive, ruinously impulsive, afraid of everything and everyone—is the “real me”?
Fixing the system won’t be easy. The O’Connor precedent, which invokes a constitutional right, is not easily maneuvered around. America’s mental-health system is a tattered patchwork that varies dramatically from state to state. But beyond those practical considerations remains a stubborn reality: romanticizing the notion of a life of freedom on the streets is a cruel insult. There are many kinds of freedom. None looks like a frozen corpse in a cardboard box.
