Family of 11-year-old boy who died in Texas deep freeze files $100 million suit against power companies
Texas power providers Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT) and Entergy Corporation have been hit with a $100 million lawsuit accusing them of gross negligence in the death of a child whose family suspects he suffered hypothermia when they lost electricity and heat in their mobile home during a historic cold snap.
The mother of 11-year-old Cristian Pineda filed the wrongful death lawsuit in Jefferson County District Court, alleging the utility giants "put profits over the welfare of people" by ignoring previous recommendations to winterize its power grid, which sustained an epic failure last week and left more than 4 million customers without heat and electricity as temperatures in some parts of the state plunged to single digits.
"Despite having knowledge of the dire weather forecast for at least a week in advance, and the knowledge that the system was not prepared for more than a decade, ERCOT and Entergy failed to take any preemptory action that could have averted the crisis and were wholly unprepared to deal with the crisis at hand," the lawsuit states.
Cristian died on Tuesday in his family's mobile home in the Houston suburb of Conroe while sharing a bed with his 3-year-old brother under a pile of blankets in an attempt to stay warm, according to the lawsuit.
The sixth grader, who migrated to the United States two years ago with his family, was a healthy boy who on the day before his death was playing in the snow for the first time in his life, his mother, Maria Pineda, told the Houston Chronicle.
MORE: Power outages, carbon monoxide deaths rock Texas: Here's what you should know to stay safe
Maria Pineda found her son unresponsive the next day and called 911 while attempting CPR, according to the lawsuit.
While the Pineda family contends the child froze to death, the official cause of death is pending the results of an autopsy, according to the Conroe Police Department.
Entergy released a statement to ABC station KTRK in Houston saying, "We are deeply saddened by the loss of life in our community. We are unable to comment due to pending litigation."
ERCOT which manages the electric grid for more than 25 million customers, said in a statement that it had not yet reviewed the lawsuit but "will respond accordingly once we do."
"Our thoughts are with all Texans who have and are suffering due to this past week," the ERCOT statement continued.
Entergy -- which delivers electricity to customers in Texas, Arkansas, Louisiana and Mississippi -- released a statement, saying, "We are unable to comment due to pending litigation."
"We are deeply saddened by the loss of life in our community," the utility company wrote.
ERCOT officials said it initiated emergency rolling blackouts on Feb. 15 after a snowstorm blanketed much of Texas and sent temperatures falling to sub-freezing levels. The agency said it took drastic action to avoid a catastrophic statewide blackout.
"Because approximately 46% of privately owned generation tripped offline this past Monday morning, we are confident that our grid operators made the right choice to avoid a statewide blackout," ERCOT said in its statement.
But the lawsuit -- filed on behalf of Maria Pineda and the estate of Cristian Pineda by attorney Anthony Buzbee -- contends that power was turned off for "those who were most vulnerable to the cold."
MORE: Millions of Texans still scramble for drinking water after devastating winter storm
"Hence, there were images of empty downtown Houston office buildings with power, but the Pineda's mobile home park was left without power," the lawsuit reads.
The lawsuit blamed ERCOT for misleading customers by assuring them the rolling blackouts would be temporary.
"The blackouts instead lasted days. The failure to adequately inform Plaintiffs of the length of the blackouts prevented them from properly preparing for the lack of power, or leaving the area. Accurate information might have saved Cristian Pineda's young life," the lawsuit alleged.
The Pinedas were without power and heat for two days and during that time temperatures plummeted to as low as 10 degrees in their area, the lawsuit states.
Instead of informing customers, like the Pinedas, that the rolling blackouts would be prolonged, ERCOT sent out messages on social media for customers not to do laundry on Valentine's Day and to "unplug the fancy new appliances you bought during the pandemic and only used once," according to the lawsuit, which included an image of ERCOT's Valentine's Day social media post
The lawsuit also noted that following a severe winter storm in 2011, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission and the North American Electric Reliability Corporation issued a report informing ERCOT that "additional winterizing of the power infrastructure in Texas was necessary."
A large number of units that tripped offline or could not start during the 2011 storm demonstrated that "the generators did not adequately anticipate the full impact of the extended cold weather and high winds," according to the report cited in the lawsuit.
MORE: Bitter Texas freeze hits most vulnerable hardest
"Despite having knowledge of the dire weather forecast for at least a week in advance, and the knowledge that the system was not prepared for more than a decade, ERCOT and Entergy failed to take any preemptory action that could have averted the crisis and were wholly unprepared to deal with the crisis at hand," according to the lawsuit.
Because the ERCOT system does not cross state lines, the agency is not subject to federal regulation or oversight, according to the lawsuit.
The recommendations were voluntary at the time, but will become mandatory at the end of next year. In an interview last week with KTRK, an ERCOT official seemed to suggest that at least some of the recommendations were followed. "In 2018 it was similarly cold, similarly windy, and we had very few generating plants offline," ERCOT's senior director of operations Dan Woodfin told KTRK. "It appeared that those best practices and what the generators were doing in that regard was working."
"Rather than invest in infrastructure to prepare for the known winter storms that would most certainly come and potentially leave people vulnerable without power, the providers instead chose to put profits over the welfare of people, and ERCOT allowed them to do so," the lawsuit states.
Family of 11-year-old boy who died in Texas deep freeze files $100 million suit against power companies originally appeared on abcnews.go.com
The Rio Grande Valley in southeast Texas, traditionally the nation’s busiest smuggling corridor, has been hardest hit by the migrant surge. U.S. Border Patrol agents there have been apprehending more than 17,000 illegals a month since October; more than double the pace of late 2019 and early 2020. Last week, Border Patrol agents apprehended 253 illegals, mainly families with children, in the Rio Grande Valley within a single hour.
Biden, whether from spite or dementia, has ignored Texas
Over a week after a massive storm hit, Texas is slowly warming up, the snow is melting, and power is returning. What Texas hasn’t seen is President Biden. Instead, he’s been enjoying an easy schedule, playing computer games with his granddaughter while Kamala Harris handles the phone calls to foreign leaders. If he were a Republican, rather than a Democrat, the media would be castigating him as the worst leader ever. Instead, though, the media is praising him for not showing up, lest he look too much like Trump.
The Valentine’s Day storm that hit Texas wasn’t the worst snowstorm ever, but it was certainly one of the worst storms to hit a state that always does things in a big way. Immediately after the storm hit, 4 million people were without power, and almost half the state’s population without reliably safe drinking water. Roughly 35 people died in Texas because of the storm.
A reader sent us pictures from a major grocery store in central Texas, showing that the shelves were stripped as bare as they were during the height of lockdown panic last year:
Thankfully, things are improving:
A warming trend brought welcome relief. In Tennessee, where Memphis was walloped with 10 inches of snow, temperatures soared into the high 50s on Sunday. In battered Texas, Houston's temperature climbed into the 70s, and Austin was almost there.
[snip]
About 20,000 Texas homes and businesses remained without power Sunday afternoon, according to poweroutage.us, a utility tracking website.
A political battle is now raging over the reason for Texas’s travails. Many have pointed out that about 25% of its power comes from wind turbines, which don’t work in winter storms. Chuck Schumer, though, contends that Texas was punished for not believing in climate change. In Schumer’s world, apparently believing or not believing in climate change determines whether massive storms will strike. The man is positively pagan.
The real problem appears to be that Texas, uniquely for American states, has a completely stand-alone power grid. That means that, when its power went down, it was unable to rely on outside sources for help.
What’s not controverted is that Biden continues to be absent from a major American disaster area. You may recall that, when Hurricane Katrina hit, the media, instead of blaming corrupt Louisiana officials for letting the levies decay, blamed President Bush for every death because he opted not to land in New Airlines the day after the levees failed, lest it interfere with recovery efforts – although he instantly got the federal government involved in responding to the disaster.
Things are different when you’re Biden. The media was incredibly excited by the fact that he played Mario Kart at Camp David with his granddaughter, held a town hall where he lied through his teeth without even acknowledging the storm, and took the weekend off. In addition, before heading off to play computer games, Biden only “partially” approved of Texas’s request for the all-important disaster declaration.
The media has been equally mellow about the fact that Biden still hasn’t gone to Texas. On Sunday, the Washington Post enthusiastically relayed that the White House’s pronouncement that Biden is “eager” to visit Texas and might even go there this week. According to the WaPo, Biden’s hands-off approach is a virtue:
Biden is taking a notably low-key approach to the storm relief process. It’s a marked contrast to predecessor Donald Trump’s habit of making himself the often-hostile center of attention during natural disasters.
It’s clear that Biden, Schumer, and the media all believe that Texans should suffer for not worshipping at the Church of Climate Change. While some of us think Biden is probably too decrepit and demented to make a visit to Texas, the WaPo coverage establishes that, no matter how pathetically Biden performs his duties, the media will cover for him – and, if possible, attack Trump.
It all makes sense if you understand that the American media are Pravda West – except the media are actually worse than the original Pravda. Soviet “journalists” lied and propagandized because they’d be imprisoned or killed if they didn’t. Our American “journalists” lie and propagandize because they want to.
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The Texas catastrophe and the case for socialism
A disaster of colossal dimensions continues to unfold in the US state of Texas. More than 14 million people are still without clean water—that is, more people than the populations of entire countries such as Portugal and Belgium.
The collapse of the electrical infrastructure aggravated what would already have been a significant hardship for many Texans. Given the usually arid and humid subtropical climate, many Texans lack adequate cold weather clothing, such as warm coats and boots suitable for the snow that blanketed vast areas of the state over the past week-and-a-half, with temperatures only now beginning to warm.
With pipes frozen and power flickering out, countless horrific stories surfaced from across the state. Families listened in the dark as raw sewage backed up into bathtubs and out of toilets. Burst water mains flooded homes and destroyed priceless family photo albums and heirlooms. Icicles dangled from ceiling lights.
Long lines formed outside grocery stores where the shelves had already been stripped bare. Gas stations ran out of gas. Dialysis patients missed their appointments. Calls for emergency assistance went unanswered. Hospital workers struggled to unload patients in parking lots choked with snow.
Many residents fled to hotels to escape the freezing temperatures in their homes, only to wake up to blaring alarms as their hotel’s water mains burst. The residences, roads, bridges, schools, and workplaces were simply not built for freezing weather.
This catastrophe hit a population that was already reeling from a year of runaway coronavirus infections and the economic devastation accompanying the pandemic. Efforts to distribute the coronavirus vaccine ground to a halt.
Freezing, coughing and sneezing, families huddled into hastily established warming centers—doubtless accelerating the spread of the disease. And the desperate efforts to stay warm inevitably resulted in tragedy, such as the heartbreaking deaths of a grandmother and three children in a house fire in Sugar Land, Texas.
Texas is the second most populous state in the United States, with 29 million residents. Significant sections of American heavy industry, telecommunications and energy infrastructure, food production and logistics operations have been built up in the state as corporations took advantage of cheaper labor, available land and virtually no regulations. The massive working class in Texas, drawn from all over the world, is gathered in huge metropolitan areas such as Houston, the fourth largest in the US, San Antonio, the seventh largest, and Dallas, the ninth largest.
The Texas catastrophe is a man-made disaster, the latest in a long line of similar disasters, including the California energy crisis (2000–2001), Hurricane Katrina (2005), the Houston flood disaster in 2017 and many others.
The latest disaster in Texas is the product of corporate greed and a decades-long conspiracy between state politicians and the energy conglomerates designed to squeeze the state’s population for as much profit as possible.
The conspirators cut off the Texas energy infrastructure from the national grid, the better to avoid national regulations that would have mitigated the impact of this month’s winter storm. The dangers were known, especially since a 2011 winter storm produced a similar cascade of blackouts.
The Texas energy racket is the product of decades of privatization and deregulation, including a key measure sponsored by a Democrat, Steven D. Wolens, and passed by the state legislature in 1999 known as Senate Bill 7. The measure was backed by the subsequently disgraced energy company Enron. The set-up it established was used to generate countless billions in profits that flowed through Wall Street and into the pockets of the ultra-rich.
This profit-making scheme was the direct cause of the wave of blackouts across the state this month: energy production could not be maintained on account of the failure to prepare and adequately insulate the energy-producing infrastructure, and the isolated Texas grid could not keep up with the surging demand on account of the freezing temperatures.
The same capitalist principle is behind the disaster in Texas and the catastrophic response of the government to the coronavirus pandemic: profits are prioritized over measures needed to protect human life. The brunt of the consequences, as always, fall on the shoulders of the working class. Texas has seen 42,000 deaths from the coronavirus, and while the death toll from the collapse of the energy and water infrastructure remains uncertain, the official count has climbed to 58.
The response of the ruling class to the disaster was best summed up by Tim Boyd, the Republican mayor of Colorado City, Texas, who shouted with bloodthirsty glee on social media that “only the strong will survive” and the rest will “perish.”
“No one owes you [or] your family anything,” he declared, “nor is it the local government’s responsibility to support you during trying times like this!” A swift popular outcry forced his resignation, but he remained unrepentant.
Boyd blurted out what is essentially the policy of all capitalist governments at every level all over the world to any disaster.
The experience of the Texas catastrophe will leave its inevitable mark on popular consciousness both inside and outside of Texas.
Outrage against the boasting, swaggering band of reactionaries and ignoramuses who constitute the Republican Party leadership in Texas is entirely justified, including that directed against US senator and Trump co-conspirator Ted Cruz, who took a luxury vacation to Cancun at the height of the crisis. The climate change-denying Texas Republicans, blinking in the global spotlight, are now flailing around with wild assertions that the crisis is actually the fault of renewable energy.
Meanwhile, the Democrats are attempting to posture as critics, hoping to become political beneficiaries of the Texas disaster. Among them are Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Cory Booker, who recently staged a highly publicized fund-raising stunt in which $3 million was raised for Texas charities, an insignificant sum in comparison with the scale of the disaster.
In states like California, the most populous American state, the Democrats have been the ones to preside over the decades-long decay and neglect of essential infrastructure, in line with the Clinton-era policy of an “end to big government,” i.e., deregulation, and privatization across the board.
It is high time for the working class to say to the capitalist oligarchy: Enough! Every time that we left you and your political accomplices in charge, the result was a total catastrophe. Every time we entrusted a social problem to you—like fighting the pandemic, maintaining the infrastructure in Texas, addressing climate change, or trying to make progress towards social equality—in every case, you failed to do anything but enrich yourselves. Your time is up! Now it is time for a different class to take the wheel.
The Texas catastrophe, part of a pattern of similar catastrophes stretching back decades, is an indictment of the whole capitalist social order. The capitalist system has proven again and again impervious to science and reason, pathologically irrational, incapable of lifting a finger to address any social problem, feasting on bigger and bigger profits as thousands die every day.
The catastrophe in Texas, coming amidst the coronavirus pandemic, which has killed half a million people in the United States, makes the urgent case for the abolition of the capitalist system and its replacement with socialism.
The Socialist Equality Party insists that those responsible for the catastrophe must be held accountable, including through arrests and prosecutions. The negligence and greed of the directors and executives of the energy conglomerates and their accomplices in the state government led directly to death and destruction that will doubtless reach into the tens if not hundreds of billions of dollars in cascading economic ramifications.
The huge profits that were reaped from the Texas energy racket over the preceding decades must be traced and recovered, including from the Wall Street banks and hedge funds through which they flowed. The proceeds must be used to compensate the victims and repair the damage.
BLOG EDITOR: DO A SEARCH FOR THE OLD WHORE DIANNE FEINSTEIN AND HER No. PAYMASTER, THE CRIMINAL UTILITY PACIFIC GAS & ELECTRIC, WHICH BURNED DOWN THOUSANDS OF HOMES, KILLED DOZENS AND LOOTED FEINSTEIN'S STATE BILLIONS WHILE DOING IT. DO A SEARCH.
The energy conglomerates themselves must be confiscated, taken out of the hands of the capitalist oligarchs and transformed into democratically-controlled public utilities. The profit motive of the oligarchs can then be replaced with scientific planning to address climate change, shift to renewable energy, and develop more robust infrastructure in advance of future extreme weather.
Climate change, which is likely to produce more and more extreme weather events, together with infectious diseases are challenges requiring global coordination and planning.
The fight for these measures requires the mobilization of the principal social force that would benefit from their implementation, the international working class, which confronts a parallel struggle in every sphere of social and economic life around the world.
The labor of the working class is the foundation of modern human civilization, and the experience of the global pandemic has only underscored its fundamental social role, with the term “essential workers” entering popular parlance.
The fight for working class power means a fight to develop socialist consciousness in the working class and a break from the whole rotten framework of bourgeois politics, which is implicated from top to bottom in catastrophe after catastrophe.
Texans receive exorbitant electricity bills after winter storm
In the aftermath of the winter storm which left millions of people in Texas without access to power and clean water, some residents are receiving costly electricity bills.
The Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT), which oversees approximately 90 percent of the electric load in the state, was wholly unprepared for the record demand for power in the past week as temperatures fell well below freezing.
The combination of insufficient capacity and the temperature-induced crippling of power stations led to a complete collapse of the power grid. As power plants and natural gas pipelines froze, the market price of electrical power in Texas soared from a seasonal average of $50 to $9,000 per Megawatt.
Texans on variable rate electricity plans have seen electricity bills for tens of thousands of dollars. According to KHOU 11, Dallas resident Ty Williams owes more than $17,000 for his house, guest home and office.
Williams had a variable-rate plan with energy supplier Griddy, which encouraged its customers to temporarily switch energy providers to avoid high prices. He stated that no company would take him until February 26, leaving him on the hook for thousands of dollars.
Griddy customers pay a monthly fee of $9.99 and then pay for the spot cost of the energy at the time of day which it is used, allowing for the skyrocketing of bills this week.
“How in the world can anyone pay that? I mean, you go from a couple hundred dollars a month … there’s absolutely no way‚ it makes no sense,” Williams said.
KHOU 11 also cited a customer who had a bill of over $1,000 for her 700-square foot apartment. Another couple tweeted a picture of a bill for over $3,800, noting, “Using as little as possible 1,300 sq. ft. house and this is my bill. How is this fair. I only paid $1200 for the whole 2020.”
Roy Pierce, who lives in the Dallas suburb of Willow Park, told NBC that his electricity bill was $10,000 for his three-bedroom home.
“We are hoping there will be relief,” Royce said. “This is something maybe we can skate by and tackle as time goes on, but how many people can’t? A lot.”
Customers of other companies have also seen their bills increase during the winter storm. Veronica Garcia, a resident in Mansfield, who gets her power from Reliant Energy, said that her bill is projected to be twice as much as she usually pays for power in a month. Garcia paid $63 for electricity usage in January but expects a bill between $114 and $133 for this month.
The Texas government, infamous for its deregulation policies and privatization of public services, has not indicated if it will intervene on behalf of customers. According to legal experts, state law prohibits companies from exploiting natural disasters for profit. However, it is unclear if such legal protections can be extended to customers with hefty electricity bills.
Bensman calls the migrant surge “the Biden effect” because nearly all the migrants he has interviewed along the routes from Central America and Mexico were ecstatic about the president’s campaign promises to reform the U.S. immigration system. They assumed that his victory in November meant they would soon be welcomed to resettle in the U.S., they told him.
Obama Official: More Than One Million Migrants to Hit Border This Year
More than one million migrants will try to push through the southern border this year, warns a former senior official in former President Barack Obama’s Department of Homeland Security (DHS).
The 78,000 arrivals in January were “nearly double the figure for the same month last year and the highest for January in a decade,” Juliette Kayyem wrote in a January 18 article for the Atlantic. “If the current pattern holds, the U.S. is on track for more than 1 million encounters in 2021.”
One million migrants adds up to roughly one migrant for every four Americans who turn 18 this year.
Kayyem’s warning, however, is not about the impact on many millions of Americans whose wages and neighborhoods face damage from the government-delivered flow of workers, buyers, and renters to the U.S. consumer economy. “People who are fleeing persecution and violence deserve refuge,” she insists as senior lecturer of the homeland security program at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government.
Instead, her concern seems to be that the flood of migrants will prompt American voters to step in and reassert control of the border which has now been delegated to Biden’s team of ethnic advocacy groups, open-borders progressives, and corporate allies.
That intervention would be bad for Harvard because it would likely derail Biden’s amnesty bill — a bill includes a massive giveaway to the elite university sector.
The Biden bill, if passed, would effectively allow Harvard and other universities to recruit fee-paying foreign students by offering an unlimited number of work permits — complete with a 15-year “path to citizenship.” In effect, the bill allows the universities to train fee-paying foreigners to take the careers the universities’ American graduates need.
Kayyem cautiously tries to blame the flood on the progressive wing of the Democrats. She wrote:
Many Democratic candidates during the 2020 presidential-primary season supported decriminalization of unlawful border crossings, and activists and officials on the party’s progressive flank support the outright abolition of Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Both positions, however, are unpopular among an American public.
The Democrats’ support for the migrant flood is very unpopular across a wide range of American society.
Yet Kayyem offers no plan to reduce the approaching migrant flood that threatens the giveaway to Harvard and the rest of the Ivy League. Instead, she pleads from Boston, saying “for the moment, the United States’ humanitarian interest lies not just in showing kindness to those who reach the border, but also in stemming the flow of people who undertake the journey in the first place.”
“Biden will have more maneuvering room, both operationally and politically, if he succeeds in signaling to migrants that they should not travel to the border immediately — and that an easing of Trump’s policies is not the same as an unconditional welcome,” she concludes.
Biden's amnesty bill dramatically raises the $$ incentive for Fortune 500 CEOs to NOT hire American graduates.
It is a giveaway to the many CEOs & investors who prefer compliant, no-rights, foreign graduate contract-workers.
IOW, #H1B for every career. https://t.co/WUW5lREV7l— Neil Munro (@NeilMunroDC) February 18, 2021
Correction Note: An earlier version of this article erroneously stated Kayyem was “head” of the homeland security program at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government. Kayyem is a senior lecturer there and the article has been updated to reflect that.
Hope and Chaos on the Border
Since Biden has become president, there’s been a surge of migrants trying to enter America.
It’s Joe Biden’s border crisis now.
Tens of thousands of migrants are surging across Mexico toward the U.S. frontier, most of them desperate Mexicans and Central Americans drawn by internet rumors and traffickers’ false promises that the new president’s immigration reforms will welcome them to settle in the United States.
U.S. Customs and Border Protection officials reported Thursday that they had expelled, detained, or arrested 78,323 migrants last month, up six percent from December and more than double the number in January 2020. Nearly 6,000 of the migrants intercepted by border officers trying to slip the border last month were unaccompanied children.
“It looks like we’re at the beginning of a bona fide migrant crisis like 2019,” said Todd Bensman, an Austin-based senior national security fellow with the conservative Center for Immigration Studies. “Family units, parents with children, are massing along the northern border of Mexico, then crossing in large groups, anywhere from 20 to 150 at a time, twenty-four hours, seven days a week.”
Bensman calls the migrant surge “the Biden effect” because nearly all the migrants he has interviewed along the routes from Central America and Mexico were ecstatic about the president’s campaign promises to reform the U.S. immigration system. They assumed that his victory in November meant they would soon be welcomed to resettle in the U.S., they told him.
“The escalation is so much faster than 2019,” a federal agent on the border says, speaking on terms of anonymity to discuss the politically sensitive issue. “It started getting busy in the summer. Since the inauguration, the numbers are spinning.”
“People think that now the doors are open, that President Biden is going to immediately regularize all migrants,” Mexican President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador said Thursday, warning Central Americans not to risk the perilous trip to the border only to be turned back to gang-plagued encampments. “It is not true,” he said, “that everyone can go now to the United States.” He blamed the surge on “human traffickers, who paint a rosy picture.”
At two consecutive White House briefings this week, Biden press secretary Jen Psaki pleaded for patience.
“We have not had the time, as an administration,” she said, “to put in place a humane, comprehensive process for processing individuals who are coming to the border, now is not the time to come, and the vast majority of people will be turned away. Asylum processes at the border will not occur immediately; it will take time to implement.”
Meanwhile, though, refugees fleeing violence and poverty in Mexico and Central America may take another, more welcoming message from Biden’s formal proclamation on Thursday that put an end to ex-President Donald Trump’s 2019 declaration of a national emergency on the southwestern border. “It shall be the policy of my Administration that no more American taxpayer dollars be diverted to construct a border wall,” Biden wrote in a formal letter to Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi.
The Rio Grande Valley in southeast Texas, traditionally the nation’s busiest smuggling corridor, has been hardest hit by the migrant surge. U.S. Border Patrol agents there have been apprehending more than 17,000 illegals a month since October; more than double the pace of late 2019 and early 2020. Last week, Border Patrol agents apprehended 253 illegals, mainly families with children, in the Rio Grande Valley within a single hour.
To process the throng of refugees in winter weather and pandemic conditions, on Tuesday, the administration opened a 185,000-square-foot tent facility on 40 acres near McAllen, the biggest city in the Rio Grande Valley.
Catch and Release
After processing, most of those people are being sent back to Mexico to wait out their asylum hearings. But some families with young children are being released into the United States, with orders to return for asylum proceedings, a process that could take months or years.
According to federal officials, Border Patrol agents have been told to process and release families with children under 12, in line with Biden’s pledge to end the Trump administration policy of separating families and detaining illegal migrants for months or longer.
“Right now, we’re just dropping them off at the bus station,” says one agent. “No testing, no nothing. We detain them and get their biometrics. If they have a kid under 12, they get an OR [own recognizance] packet, a notice to appear [at an asylum hearing] and a pro bono lawyers list, and then we release them. They are now legally in the U.S. They can go wherever.”
Exactly how many refugees have been released into the U.S. is not clear. Psaki said Wednesday that “there have been incredibly narrow and limited circumstances where individuals…have come into the country awaiting for their hearing, but the vast majority have been… turned away.”
She did not disclose exactly how many people have enjoyed “narrow and limited” exceptions to the general policy of requiring asylum-seekers to wait for their turn abroad. CBP officials have not responded to SpyTalk’s request for these numbers.
Nor is there solid data for “gotaways”—Border Patrol slang for illegals who evaded U.S. authorities. Internal enforcement records reviewed by SpyTalk suggest that thousands of “gotaways” disappear weekly into the U.S. heartland. Some officials say the gotaway numbers are understated because agents on the border are stretched too thin to execute the necessary paperwork.
A few national security officials fear that some of the gotaways may have been spies and terrorists, an idea that gained traction after the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks. So far, it hasn’t materialized as a significant national security threat, but border enforcement officials say it’s entirely possible that secret agents and terrorists trained in evasion tradecraft are successfully infiltrating the burgeoning migrant waves.
Says one federal agent: “If you’re so busy you’re not able to make cuts”—hunting slang for tracking footprints—“you have no idea what’s getting away.”
FBI and Homeland Security officials pay extra attention to people they call SIAs, or “special interest aliens,” individuals who, “based on an analysis of travel patterns, potentially [pose] a national security risk to the United States or its interests.”
From Tehran to Yuma
CBP does not publish numbers for migrants in the SIA category. According to data obtained by SpyTalk, in the last half of January, federal agents in Texas apprehended two North Koreans, nine Chinese, 70 Venezuelans and more than 300 Cubans. Hundreds more Cubans are reported to be waiting to file asylum claims from encampments in Ciudad Juarez, just south of El Paso. U.S. officials have not said publicly whether any of the Cubans or other espionage or terrorism.
“You just can’t do background checks on these people,” says Arturo Fontes, a retired FBI agent formerly based in Laredo, who investigated numerous migrants suspected of links to Middle Eastern terror groups. “When you interview them, it’s difficult to tell who they really are.”
At this moment, the FBI, intelligence agencies and border control authorities are watching closely for any Iranian operatives. The radical nation’s leaders have vowed revenge against the United States for the January 2020 U.S. drone attack that killed Maj. Gen. Qassim Suleimani, leader of the powerful Quds Force, the external arm of the Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps. On Feb. 1, Border Patrol officers based in Yuma made national headlines when they apprehended 11 Iranians—five women and six men—on a bridge near San Luis, Arizona, a Yuma suburb that straddles the border.
“The 11 Iranians that were caught were probably economic migrants, but they’ll have to be ruled out as anything else,” says Bensman, a former journalist and counterterrorism intelligence specialist for the Texas state police, and author of a forthcoming book, America’s Covert Border War: The Untold Story of the Nation’s Battle to Prevent Jihadist Infiltration. “They’ll be thoroughly vetted and interviewed at the border.” If any are defectors, presumably they’ll be referred to the intelligence community.
The bust is intriguing because it may be part of a pattern. The U.S. Border Patrol’s Yuma Sector leads the nation in apprehensions of Iranian illegals, with a total of 14 in the current fiscal year, which began last October, and eight in fiscal year 2020. These instances suggest that southern Arizona is a preferred way station for Iranians paying to be smuggled into the U.S.
“There’s a migrant trail from Iran to the southern border that is well established,” Bensman says. Following the route back, Bensman says he found Iranians in Panama and Costa Rica, planning to travel to the U.S. They were using false or real travel documents acquired from corrupt officials in various small nations to make their way to Mexico, he says, where they planned to pay a Mexican smuggling ring to take them the last mile to the U.S.
Fontes, who also investigated the Iranian migrant trail, says he has been told by a reliable source that some Iranians fly into Cancun, a resort with many international flights, fly from there to Mexicali, just south of California, and pay cartel smugglers $30,000 to $50,000 to drive them to the border, then guide them across it.
Mexico’s human trafficking rings are highly organized, disciplined branches of larger cartels that also traffic in drugs and arms and exert rigid control over their plazas, turf.
“The cartels are in control of the border,” says Norman Townsend, another retired FBI agent, also based in Texas and experienced in investigating efforts by Middle Eastern extremist groups to send operatives into the U.S. “The potential for infiltration by a terrorist is certainly there.”
Coached Class
Malign actors can arrange to be guided via the safest routes, according to agents who work the borders. Meanwhile, the cartel will send poor Central Americans by more exposed, dangerous routes. If they need to be rescued, all the better. Cartel guides exploit humanitarian emergencies to move valuable contraband and people who pay for first-class treatment.
“Family units are being used as diversions to get everyone else across,” says a federal agent on the border. “They’ll send 100 people, and to the left of that, they’ll send up dope.”
“The fentanyl issue will slam the country in 2021,” says Jaeson Jones, head of Omni Intelligence and a former captain in the Intelligence and Counterterrorism Division of the Texas Department of Public Safety. “As apprehensions have skyrocketed this year, drug seizures will dip at the border. There’s not enough law enforcement to stop drugs, due to large migration.”
One indirect consequence of the migrant surge may be spiraling overdose deaths. According to DEA intelligence reports, Mexican cartels are jacking up their sales of counterfeit pharmaceutical painkillers laced with fentanyl, an extraordinarily addictive and lethal synthetic opioid manufactured in China and smuggled to Mexican commercial ports in 55-gallon drums of bulk chemicals.
A minuscule dose of fentanyl can kill instantly. As of June 2020, estimated drug overdose deaths spiked to 83,335 over the previous 12 months, the highest level ever reported by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
“The U.S. will pay a significant price as overdose deaths rise and local crimes skyrocket throughout the country,” says Jones. “Watch for crime problems to be a major issue during the Biden administration.”
As far as Mexico’s cartels are concerned, it’s all good. Humans, drugs or guns, it’s all just profit for the crime barons, and business is booming.
“The cartels are making a killing,” says Bensman.
Allegedly Fake COVID-19 Vaccines Seized in Mexican Border State Clinic Came from Texas, Says Owner
The owner of a medical clinic in Mexico that was raided this week for allegations of selling fake COVID-19 vaccines claims they were genuine and purchased in McAllen, Texas.
The raid took place this week in a suburban clinic of the Monterrey Metropolitan area, where authorities arrested six individuals who are currently facing federal charges. Authorities received information about the sale of fake vaccines at the clinic for approximately $600. According to the Nuevo Leon Health Secretary Manuel de la O, the raid was tied to an investigation into a clandestine distribution network where authorities seized vials with the lot number 783201 with an expiration date of August 2024, however, the vials were not being kept at proper storage temperatures.
The owner of Spine Clinic by Imperium, Carlos Villarreal Aranda, said the day after in public interviews the vaccines were in fact real from McAllen. Villarreal claimed he took advantage of the recent winter storm to put the vaccines in an ice chest and move them from Texas to Nuevo Leon.
“Why? To vaccinate my family, the doctors and some friends that we had to help because they have chronic illnesses, but we are not a distribution network and we are not salesmen,” Villarreal said, claiming the allegations against his clinic are false.
Villarreal incorrectly claimed the vaccine is being freely sold in Texas during his defense. “We did not know it was a crime to use them here,” he said. The clinic owner has not publicly revealed where he purchased the doses.
Gerald “Tony” Aranda is a contributing writer for Breitbart Texas.
Exclusive: Biden Policies Force Release of 200 Migrants into West Texas Border Community
Law Enforcement sources report the release of more than 200 mostly Central American family units into a West Texas border community. The Biden administration’s cancellation of swift removal policies for Central American migrants forced Border Patrol officials to begin the releases of certain migrants immediately.
The recent dismantling of international agreements by the Biden administration created a backlog of migrants being detained in Border Patrol facilities. Due to these changes, the Border Patrol will begin to release Central American family groups that cannot be removed by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to their home countries, according to information obtained from sources with knowledge of the plans. The order to release the migrants comes with little notice to local humanitarian organizations.
Lack of bed space in ICE detention facilities designed to accommodate family units put Border Patrol officials in a quandary. The only option available to the Border Patrol is the immediate release of these migrants into humanitarian shelters. The non-governmental shelters will coordinate their travel to other destinations around the country.
In West Texas, migrants will be transported from the region surrounding Eagle Pass, Texas. Other cities within the area lack adequately staffed humanitarian shelters to handle the number of releases. In Eagle Pass, humanitarian shelters will work to accommodate the new arrivals.
As previously reported by Breitbart Texas, the shelters are currently providing humanitarian care for recently released Haitian Migrants. They are still receiving the population of released Haitians on Sunday, further complicating the situation.
The releases began on Saturday and will continue over the coming days. Border Patrol agents must complete the work to reprocess hundreds of Central American migrants and their release will be continuous until the task is complete.
Asylum case file amendments take several hours per migrant. This removes many Border Patrol agents from patrol duties. The timing of the move could not have been worse.
Texas Governor Greg Abbot declared a state of emergency for all Texas counties due to impending freezing weather. Many of the migrants travel lightly and lack cold weather apparel. With little advance notice, local humanitarian shelters will likely attempt to provide shelter, food, and clothing through donations.
In a recent tweet, a State Department spokesperson celebrated the end to Asylum Cooperation Agreements (ACA) with Central American countries that sped the removal process, thus preventing the overcrowding of Border Patrol Stations. These agreements also eased the strain on ICE managed detention facilities.
The border is in a state far from closed as thousands of migrants are being arrested by the Border Patrol weekly. Migrant releases, a rarity during the previous year, are now a frequent occurrence.
The new administration coined the term “irregular migration” apparently to soften earlier used terms such as “illegal immigration.” This perhaps is an attempt to deflect from the reality of what is happening along the southern border.
Witnesses reported seeing multiple Border Patrol contracted transportation vans dropping off released migrants at a local shelter on Sunday.
Other law enforcement sources outside the West Texas region are reporting migrant releases as a daily occurrence as well. One source reports the increase in illegal entries of previously removed asylum applicants under the Migrant Protection Protocols, known as the “Remain in Mexico” program. Most, however, are swiftly returned to Mexico under the CDC emergency COVID-19 order. They are being advised to wait until the DHS program unfolds next week allowing their return and release into the United States.
Breitbart Texas reached out to ICE officials for additional information. A response was not available as of press time.
Randy Clark is a 32-year veteran of the United States Border Patrol. Prior to his retirement, he served as the Division Chief for Law Enforcement Operations, directing operations for nine Border Patrol Stations within the Del Rio, Texas Sector.
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