Crooked Media - What A Day: Helter shelter

An influx of migrant children at the U.S.-Mexico border means all hands on deck: While the Biden administration races to set up humane shelters and fix a shredded immigration system, Republicans have graciously taken on the task of lying a bunch to score political points.
 

• DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas announced on Tuesday that the U.S. now sees a record surge in border crossings: “We are on pace to encounter more individuals on the southwest border than we have in the last 20 years.” Most of those individuals are single adults, whom the Biden administration has continued to expel under the CDC’s pandemic authority, but many of them are unaccompanied minors who need to be cared for until the government can locate sponsors. 
   
• As of Sunday, Customs and Border Protection was encountering an average of 565 children crossing the border each day, up from an average of 313 children per day last month. That’s created a serious backlog in Border Patrol stations, with over 4,200 children in custody and 2,943 of those kids being held in unfit facilities over the 72-hour legal limit. To help get children out of CBP custody as quickly as possible, the Biden administration has deployed FEMA to set up two Texas shelter facilities and help HHS provide basic care, and will open an emergency intake site at a Dallas convention center this week.
   
• Mayorkas also outlined the Biden administration’s proposed long-term policies to address the immigration surge, including a new regulation that would speed up asylum adjudications so that the process takes months rather than years. The administration also plans to collaborate with Mexico on expanding its capacity to take in more migrant families, and work with Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador to create processing centers that would ascertain whether migrants are eligible for humanitarian protections, including asylum.

Of course, it’s unclear how any of those measures will stop the scourge of imaginary terrorists from countries that don’t exist.
 

• On Monday, a group of House Republicans lead by House Xenophobia Leader Kevin McCarthy took a field trip to the southern border, where McCarthy claimed in a press conference that border agents had caught suspected terrorists from “Yemen, Iran, Sir Lanka [sic]” trying to cross into the U.S. Rep. John Katko (R-NY) repeated that claim on Fox News. There’s no evidence whatsoever to support it, but re-heating an old Trump-era lie to terrify voters sure is a useful distraction from the GOP’s lockstep opposition to coronavirus relief. 
   
• Republicans’ weaponization of the border surge comes as House Democrats prepare to pass two pieces of Biden’s immigration-reform agenda this week: One bill would create a path to citizenship for millions of DREAMers and other immigrants with temporary humanitarian protection, while the other would allow a path to legal status for some agricultural workers. Those incredibly popular proposals are the immigration reforms most likely to attract Republican support, but the situation at the border—and the GOP’s decision to exploit it in bad faith—could cause them to stall out in the Senate.

The plight of unaccompanied children at the border is a very real problem, and there’s a perfectly reasonable conversation to be had about whether the Biden administration’s response has been sufficient. Republicans have zoomed past that conversation entirely, in favor of toxic lies. When they start demanding concessions on immigration reform, Democrats should probably keep that in mind. 

The premiere episode of Crooked’s new sports podcast Takeline is OUT NOW. It’s smart, it’s funny, it’s thoughtful, and it’s so, so good. Takeline is hosted by Emmy winner Jason Concepcion and WNBA champion turned team owner Renee Montgomery, who talk through all the ways that sports, culture, and politics intersect on and off the court.

The very first guest is Jeremy Lin, which rules. Subscribe to Takeline, your new favorite show, on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Texas Republicans have introduced a slew of voter-suppression bills, with the support and encouragement of Gov. Greg Abbott (R-TX). Texas already has some of the most restrictive voting laws in the country, but Republicans are now targeting measures put in place by local officials to expand access, with bills to limit early voting, ban drive-through voting, and prohibit county officials from mailing out unsolicited absentee-ballot applications. That effort comes after Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton's office spent 22,000 hours searching for voter fraud (cool use of time) and found a whopping 16 cases of false addresses on registration forms, out of the state’s nearly 17 million registered voters. 

Here’s the good news: Major corporations like Coca-Cola and Home Depot have taken the first steps in opposing these kinds of bills in Georgia (though civil rights groups are pushing for stronger statements), the Brennan Center has outlined exactly how H.R.1 provisions would thwart most of the voter suppression proposals under consideration, and Senate Scorched-Earth Leader Mitch McConnell is so spooked about the prospect of Democrats reforming the filibuster to pass pro-democracy legislation that he’s re-upped his favorite threats.

• Vladimir Putin authorized an extensive operation to interfere in the 2020 election by laundering misinformation about Joe Biden through people close to Donald Trump, according to a newly released ODNI subtweet of Rudy Giuliani report. U.S. intelligence officials have found no evidence that any foreign actor had disrupted the actual voting process.
   
• Capitol Police has suspended an officer after a congressional aide spotted a copy of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion on his desk. 
   
• Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) has called on Attorney General Merrick Garland to answer long-standing questions about the FBI’s investigation of Justice Brett Kavanaugh (or lack thereof) during his confirmation hearing. 
   
• A review of the CDC’s coronavirus guidance under the Trump administration found that some documents were not grounded in science, and three documents passed off as CDC guidance weren’t written by the CDC at all.
   
• Gov. Tate Reeves (R-MS) has decided turn down roughly $600 million in federal funding for Mississippi rather than expand Medicaid, in an inspiring commitment to denying his low-income constituents health care during a pandemic. 
   
• An internal Facebook study on vaccine hesitancy found that a tiny group of users is responsible for a huge fraction of harmful vaccine-skepticism content, and that they overlapped significantly with QAnon communities. Since those posts don’t necessarily contain outright misinformation, Facebook hasn’t taken them down.
   
• An Arizona judge has ordered the Arizona GOP to shell out $18,000 for its baseless voter fraud lawsuit. One for the Consequences Scrapbook.
   
• Trump Tower in Chicago somehow vaccinated its staff without eligibility or the knowledge of city health department leaders. If they can preach the vaccination gospel to the losers who stay at Trump hotels, we’ll call it a wash.
   
• New Dead Sea Scroll just dropped. Well, incredibly old Dead Sea Scroll, but nobody's seen it in a while. 

The Biden administration has been laying the groundwork to make the fight against corruption a key element of its foreign policy. Earlier this month, Secretary of State Antony Blinken banned a corrupt Ukranian oligarch and his immediate family members from setting foot in the U.S. That move signaled that the Biden administration plans to hold America’s allies to account, not just its adversaries. Last week, Blinken described corruption as a useful Achilles’ heel that the U.S. can spotlight to undermine support for unfit leaders, and the administration’s infrastructure to do so is snapping into place: The NSC has established a Democracy and Human Rights directorate that has fighting corruption as a central mission. For that global strategy to be taken seriously, though, the Biden administration will need to reckon with America’s own burbling swamp of corruption issues—especially in the wake of the Trump era—and prioritize internal enforcement with just as much zeal.

Gov. Ralph Northam (D-VA) has signed an executive order restoring voting rights to over 69,000 people in Virginia with previous felony convictions. 

Queens District Attorney Melinda Katz has requested the dismissal of nearly 700 cases related to sex work. 

Some coronavirus long-haulers have reported seeing their symptoms disappear after getting vaccinated. (This is purely anecdotal, and researchers have barely begun to look into it, but it’s an exciting pattern!)

A coalition of environmental groups has launched a $10 million ad campaign urging the Biden administration and Congress to go big on the climate-friendly infrastructure package.