Daniel Horowitz, Conservative Review, April 30, 2019

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On Sunday, Aaron Hull, chief patrol agent of the El Paso sector, divulged to the public what we already suspected but most government officials assiduously covered up. The head of the second busiest illegal immigration corridor told Fox News’ Maria Bartiromo that Customs and Border Protection (CBP) is increasingly “caring for more and more sick people, because a lot of these aliens coming in are carrying contagious health conditions, things like chicken pox, scabies, tuberculosis, lice.”

Tuberculosis. That is the disease we sought to eradicate through our laws as early as 1907 by requiring every prospective immigrant to wait at Ellis Island, away from the population, until they got the green light to enter. That is a far cry from what a CBP official told me two weeks ago – that “we have not seen any specific, unusual, or alarming public health or infectious disease threats in persons in CBP custody.”

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If border agents have confirmed the arrival of illegal aliens with tuberculosis who have not been treated in hospitals, what about all those exposed to it in close quarters who did not yet exhibit symptoms and were released within hours of apprehension? Unlike in the past, where illegal immigrants waited for days in ICE facilities before either being deported or released, CBP is directly releasing thousands of aliens into the interior within hours. A bunch of illegal aliens caught in Arizona and El Paso this past month were released in Tucson.

It is simply inconceivable that this is not a priority threat to the American people. It is certainly a violation of current immigration law. The law (8. U.S.C. §1182(a)(1)(A)(i)-(ii)) states clearly that any alien “who has failed to present documentation of having received vaccination against vaccine-preventable diseases, which shall include at least the following diseases: mumps, measles, rubella, polio, tetanus and diphtheria toxoids, pertussis, influenza type B and hepatitis B, and any other vaccinations against vaccine-preventable diseases” are inadmissible. Moreover, 8 U.S.C. § 1222(a) requires the government to detain them “for a sufficient time to enable the immigration officers and medical officers to subject such aliens to observation and an examination sufficient to determine whether or not they belong to inadmissible classes.”

DHS officials, including the current acting DHS secretary, have testified that these people have largely never “received immunizations.”

Why is the lack of detention space a rationale to vitiate our laws and release them anyway and not a rationale to turn them back across the river or at least hold them in tent cities right at the border until or unless they voluntarily depart?

We now know that aliens are coming with tuberculosis and that they are being released without proper quarantining and incubation. TB is highly contagious among people who live very closely to each other, precisely the conditions in which the migrants travel north. According to the CDC, “The TB bacteria are put into the air when a person with active TB disease of the lungs or throat coughs, sneezes, speaks, or sings.” It warns that “a person who is exposed to TB bacteria” should take steps not to “spread the bacteria to other people right away.”

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{snip} Remember, Guatemalans are already 83 times more likely to have tuberculosis than Americans and seven times more likely than legal immigrants, according to the CDC.

Thus, there is a reason why, over time, Texas, and particularly the border areas, have become infested with this once near-extinct disease. {snip}

Even if DHS had more time to screen some of these migrants, they are bringing in strains of diseases that medical professionals have not dealt with and might not be familiar with. A recent report from the bipartisan Homeland Security Advisory Council noted that “most FMUs [family units] are not detained by ICE ERO due to their lack of capacity,” so they are released very quickly by CBP. And although CBP has hired staff to treat medical concerns, the report observes how all the “infections” are “not necessarily evident” with the medical observations being done by CBP because “an expectation for clinical acumen by CBP agents and officers is highly unrealistic.”

Moreover, it’s unclear if these new strains are resistant to existing vaccines or not. We just don’t know what we don’t know when we are releasing tens of thousands from disease-prone countries without any regard for the American people. {snip}

According to Texas Health and Human Services, the rate of TB in children under five is double that of the rest of the country. It’s not surprising given that almost the entire flow of unaccompanied minors into the U.S. from Central America in 2014 was in Texas. Today, according to the Homeland Security report, “73% of the children in FMUs illegally crossing our border are tender aged, being 12 or younger.”

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{snip} Today’s unprecedented influx of family units, on the other hand, are being immediately released unless the alien requests medical attention or a medical official or border agent happens to notice apparent symptoms of illness. Even then, they are often not quarantined but sent to our hospitals in major border cities, which further endangers Americans. A few months ago, Yuma County Sheriff Wilmot said on my podcast (minute-marker 19:55) that one alien escorted to a hospital in Imperial County, California, with tuberculosis escaped out a window.

{snip} Beginning in August 2014, right after the influx of Central American teens, there was an outbreak of enterovirus D68, a respiratory illness, which many experts increasingly believe to be the cause of Acute Flaccid Myelitis (AFM), a mysterious polio-like disease that causes paralysis but starts out as what appears to be an innocuous cold. Health experts still say the cause is unknown, but it’s awfully suspicious that this disease did not appear until the latter part of 2014, right after the Central Americans started coming. 2014 is a benchmark year for those who follow immigration policy.

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