Who is to blame for the approximately 627,000 COVID-19 deaths in the USA (as of August 8, 2021)?
Immigrants. Specifically, immigrants crossing the nation’s southern border. Immigrants in search of asylum from rampant poverty, vicious gangs, and oppressive totalitarian governments. That’s the newest notion being circulated by Trumpist Republicans. And why not; the slanderous accusations conveniently combine defense for their cult leader and condemnation of the “others” they’ve long sought to wall off from their cities and their consciences.
But is there any truth to their claim? A brief history of COVID-19’s arrival and first year in America might be instructive.
A Brief History of Donald Trump’s Response to COVID in America America’s first official notice of COVID-19 came with assurances from the Bumbler-in-Chief that "We have it totally under control. It's one person coming in from China. We have it under control. It's going to be just fine." That was January 22, 2020.
A month later, February 26, that same man, pretending to be an expert, declared, “You have 15 people, and the 15 within a couple of days is going to be down to close to zero.” Clearly, according to the person in a position that made him most likely to set the tone for a national response to any trend, this new virus was nothing to be concerned about.
The day after the president made the above declaration, he told White House visitors, “It's going to disappear. One day it's like a miracle, it will disappear.”
The very next day, February 28, at a rally in South Carolina, Trump said, “One of my people came up to me and said, ‘Mr. President, they tried to beat you on Russia, Russia, Russia. That didn’t work out too well. They couldn’t do it. They tried the impeachment hoax. That was on a perfect conversation. They tried anything, they tried it over and over, they’ve been doing it since you got in. It’s all turning, they lost, it’s all turning. Think of it. Think of it. And this is their new hoax.” While Trump did not explicitly say COVID itself was a hoax, many Americans—including many of his devoted followers—took his statement to mean that. The president had just stoked the fires of the COVID-is-a-hoax conspiracy theory.
On March 9 of 2020, the president tweeted, “So last year 37,000 Americans died from the common flu. It averages between 27,000 and 70,000 per year. Nothing is shut down, life & the economy go on. At this moment there are 546 confirmed cases of CoronaVirus, with 22 deaths. Think about that!” According to the man millions of Americans see as the greatest leader in American history, the common flu is far more dangerous than COVID-19. “Nothing to see here, folks. Go on about your business.” And with that statement, Trump added more fuel to the “COVID is a hoax” fire.
On March 24, Trump boasted, “There is tremendous hope as we look forward and we begin to see the light at the end of the tunnel.” On that date, health officials estimated the number of COVID infections nationwide at 65,800. Just five days later, that infection number had risen to 161,800. The tunnel likely didn’t seem too bright for those tens of thousands of infected folks.
A Late, Half-Hearted Course Correction One week after pointing to the light at the end of the tunnel, the president changed course: “But it's not the flu. It's vicious. When you send a friend to the hospital and you call up to find out, how is he doing, it happened to me. Where he goes to the hospital, he says goodbye, sort of a tough guy, little older, little heavier than he'd like to be, frankly. And you call up the next day, 'how's he doing?' And he's in a coma? This is not the flu.”
Throughout that first year of the COVID era, the President of the United States repeatedly downplayed a disease that, by the time he left office, had killed more than 400,000 Americans. He admitted to journalist Bob Woodward that he knew COVID was more dangerous than he was portraying it to be. He said he did so to avoid a panic among the American people. But that tactic could be legitimately compared to the National Weather Service (NWS) telling south Florida residents to stay home and not worry about the category-5 hurricane aiming directly at them. Would that strategy be a success if no one panicked until the hurricane was leveling homes, flooding streets, and killing hundreds of people who could have been evacuated if the NWS had taken the storm seriously?
That tactic could be legitimately compared to the National Weather Service (NWS) telling south Florida residents to stay home and not worry about the category-5 hurricane aiming directly at them.
So, Who’s to Blame? Yet Trumpists contend that the recent surge in U.S. COVID infections can be traced to a surge in illegal immigrants crossing our southern border coinciding with the beginning of a new presidential administration. Is that claim true? According to an analysis published in USA Today, “In the 2021 fiscal year, there have been 64,046 apprehensions and 317,590 Title 42 expulsions.
“By comparison, in the 2020 fiscal year, which accounts for October 2019 through September 2020, there were 400,651 encounters at the Southwest border, with 203,608 apprehensions and 197,043 Title 42 expulsions.”
In other words, border agents apprehended 139,562 more illegal entry attempts during Trump’s final fiscal year in office than during Biden’s first half year. (Yes, I know that Biden wasn’t in office the full six months of the fiscal year, but the trend is still telling.) If the apprehension number remains approximately the same during Biden’s second half year, the full-year total would be 128,092, which would be only slightly lower than the number recorded in Trump’s last year. And the expulsion rate is even more significant. The Biden administration has expelled 120,547 more illegal immigrants in half a year than the Trump administration did in a full year.
Whether one likes or dislikes either administration’s immigration and expulsion policies, the numbers plainly show that the Biden administration has not instituted a soft policy that has allowed for a massive influx of illegal immigrants.
So, based only on the number of entries, one cannot blame illegal immigrants for the COVID increase. But what about immigrants’ infection rates? Are immigrants infecting more legal residents because they are more likely to be infected than are current U.S. residents? The answer to that question varies according to the source one chooses to believe. According to far-right news outlets such as the New York Post and Fox News, infection rates among border crossing detainees, the rates are “surging,” but they provide no actual figures for any overall rise. (However, Fox News did cite a 900 percent surge at one detainee site. But one cannot assume too much based on one detainee site.)
Meanwhile, according to a CBS report, “The acting head of the Federal Emergency Agency (FEMA) told lawmakers on Tuesday that less than 6% of COVID-19 tests for migrants at the U.S.-Mexico border have come back positive, a lower percentage than the overall positivity rate in the state of Texas.” In other words, it appears more likely that current Texas residents—U.S. citizens—would spread COVID-19 to the immigrants than the other way around.
Poor Brown Folks or Rich White Politicians?
It’s easy to scapegoat poor, brown folks who have no means to defend their reputations rather than to place the blame for COVID’s resurgence where it really belongs. The truth is that the blame belongs with our former president and the craven state and local politicians who fear him—and the millions of science-denying Americans who worship him.