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30 April 22
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As Republican politicians give up all principle to gain Trump's blessing, where will it end?
That was then. Recently, Brnovich — now running for Senate in Arizona — came onto Stephen Bannon’s far-right podcast with the opposite message: Brnovich said he was “investigating” the 2020 vote and had “serious concerns.” He went on: “It’s frustrating for all of us, because I think we all know what happened in 2020,” without explaining what he meant by “what happened.” (Bannon titled the podcast segment “AZ AG On Interim Report On Stealing The 2020 Election.”)
It would be bad enough were Brnovich the exception. But he exemplifies what’s happened to the GOP over the last 19 months. Republican politicians who initially told the truth have since then embraced Trump’s big lie in order to gain Trump’s favor (or avoid his wrath) in their 2022 races. (Brnovich launched his “review” of the 2020 vote in Arizona in response to a widely-ridiculed “audit” commissioned by Arizona GOP lawmakers.)
It’s the same story with J.D. Vance, Republican candidate for the Senate from Ohio, who initially told the truth about the 2020 election but then pushed Trump’s lie to curry favor with Trump — and was rewarded last week with Trump’s endorsement and $10 million in campaign funds from right-wing billionaire Peter Thiel.
It’s the same with House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, who held on to his scruples for a few minutes after the January 6 insurrection — when he publicly criticized Trump and told House colleagues he’d urge Trump to resign — but then promptly did a one-hundred-eighty and traveled to Mar-a-Lago to display his total loyalty to Trump, even bestowing on his madness a jar of his favorite pink- and red-flavored Starbursts. (McCarthy has denied ever telling his colleagues he’d urge Trump to resign but was caught doing just this).
And the same for Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell, who initially condemned Trump and now won’t utter a negative word.
Up and down the ranks of the Republican Party, the new litmus test for gaining dollars, votes, and the coveted Trump Endorsement is to embrace the big lie that the 2020 election was stolen from Trump. For the rest of us — and for posterity — it should be a negative litmus test for politicians who place ambition over principle, narcissism over duty, and cowardice over conscience.
How are Republican voters ever to know the truth when these toadies, sycophants, and unprincipled pawns repeat and amplify Trump’s big lie? Fully 85 percent of Republicans now believe it (35 percent of Americans overall believe it).
The Republican Party now stands for little more than the big lie — not for fiscal prudence or smaller government or stronger defense, not for state’s rights or religious freedom or even anti-abortion, but for a pernicious deception. How can what was once a noble party — the party of Abraham Lincoln and Teddy Roosevelt — descend to such putrid depths, sowing distrust in our electoral system and in the peaceful transition of power that’s at the heart of democracy?
The real question — more in the realm of social psychology than political science — is how one profoundly sick, pathologically narcissistic man, who is obsessed with never losing, has been able to impose his narcissistic obsession on one of America’s two political parties? Which raises an even more troubling question: How can our democracy ever function when almost all Republican politicians are willing to sell out their oaths to the United States Constitution in order to kiss the derrière of this demented man? Why are no more than a handful of Republican politicians, such as Rep. Liz Cheney, willing stand up to this monstrosity?
This is how fascism begins.
Russian soldiers move toward mainland Ukraine on a road near Armiansk, Crimea. (photo: Shutterstock)
Ukraine: "We have serious losses but the Russians' losses are much much bigger...They have colossal losses."
The body of a journalist from U.S.-backed broadcaster Radio Liberty was found in rubble in the Ukrainian capital, killed in a Russian missile attack during a visit by the U.N. secretary-general.
President Volodymyr Zelenskiy praised Biden's offer of help, which amounts to nearly 10 times the aid Washington has sent so far since the war began on Feb. 24.
Having failed in an assault on Kyiv in the north of Ukraine last month, Russia is now trying to fully capture two eastern provinces known as Donbas.
Ukraine has acknowledged losing control of some towns and villages there since the assault began last week, but says Moscow's gains have come at a massive cost to a Russian force already worn down from its earlier defeat near the capital.
"We have serious losses but the Russians' losses are much much bigger...They have colossal losses," presidential adviser Oleksiy Arestovych said, without elaborating. Western officials said Russia had been suffering fewer casualties after narrowing the scale of its invasion but numbers were still "quite high".
Zelenskiy's office said Russia was pounding the entire front line in the eastern Donetsk region with rockets, artillery, mortar bombs and aircraft. The Ukrainian general staff said Russia was shelling positions along the line of contact to prevent the Ukrainians from regrouping.
A U.S. official said the Russian offensive in Donbas appeared to be beind schedule.
By pledging tens of billions of dollars in aid for Ukraine, Biden has dramatically increased U.S. involvement in the conflict. The United States and its allies are now sending heavy weapons including artillery, with what Washington says is an aim not just to repel Russia's attack but to weaken its armed forces so it cannot menace its neighbours again.
"We need this bill to support Ukraine in its fight for freedom," Biden said. "The cost of this fight - it's not cheap - but caving to aggression is going to be more costly." Zelenskiy tweeted: "Thank you @POTUS and the American people for their leadership in supporting Ukraine in our fight against Russian aggression. We defend common values - democracy and freedom. We appreciate the help. Today it is needed more than ever!"
While the proposed U.S. aid amounts to more than 20 percent of Ukraine's 2020 GDP, the World Bank estimates the war will cut more than 45 percent off Ukrainian GDP this year and hit growth elsewhere around the world. Some of Russia's neighbours say they fear Moscow could target them next.
Russia has said the arrival of Western arms into Ukraine means it is now fighting a "proxy war" against NATO. President Vladimir Putin threatened unspecified retaliation this week, while his foreign minister warned of a threat of nuclear war.
JOURNALIST FOUND IN RUBBLE
Prague-based Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty (RFE/RL) said the body of producer Vira Hyrych had been found on Friday morning after Thursday's missile attack destroyed the bottom two floors of a residential building. It said Hyrych had worked for Radio Liberty since 2018.
"She was going to bed when a Russian ballistic missile hit her apartment in central Kyiv. Russia's barbarism is incomprehensible," Ukrainian Foreign Ministry spokesperson Oleg Nikolenko said. "We call on media organizations to condemn the murder of Vira and all other innocent Ukrainians."
Russia's defence ministry said its forces had destroyed the production facilities of a rocket plant in Kyiv with high precision long-range missiles.
U.S.-funded RFE/RL, which has covered the former Soviet Union since the Cold War, is one of the main remaining Russian-language sources for news outside Kremlin control, since Moscow effectively shut all independent media following its invasion.
"Kyiv is still a dangerous place and Kyiv is still the target of Russians, of course. The capital of Ukraine is the goal and they want to occupy it," Mayor Vitali Klitschko said, supervising the cleanup in the rubble-strewn street before the body was found.
The missiles hit the capital during a visit on Thursday by U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres. Ukrainian Defence Minister Oleksiy Reznikov called it "an attack on the security of the Secretary-General and on world security".
In Donbas, Britain said fighting had been particularly heavy around the cities of Lysychansk and Severodonetsk, the main part of the region that Russia is still trying to capture, with an attempted advance south from Russian-held Izium towards Sloviansk.
"Due to strong Ukrainian resistance, Russian territorial gains have been limited and achieved at significant cost to Russian forces," the British defence ministry said in an update.
The bloodiest fighting and worst humanitarian catastrophe of the war have been in Mariupol, an eastern port reduced to a wasteland by two months of Russian bombardment and siege.
Ukraine says 100,000 civilians remain in the city, which is mostly occupied by Russia. Hundreds of civilians are holed up with last remaining defenders in bunkers beneath a huge steel works.
Zelenskiy's office said an operation was planned on Friday to get civilians out of the plant, giving no details.
In parts of Mariupol now held by Russian troops, emergency workers were gathering up bodies from the streets. Residents among the blasted ruins recounted the horror they had survived.
"We were hungry, the child was crying when the Grad (multiple rocket launcher) shells were striking near the house.
We were thinking, this is it, the end. It can't be described," Viktoria Nikolayeva, 54, who survived the battle with her family in a basement, told Reuters, weeping.
"It was a massacre," said Vitaliy Kudasov, 71. "It was the scariest thing when the shells were flying overhead. Shells, rounds and all such, you couldn't survive it. And yet we did."
Refugees from Mariupol. (photo: Wojciech Grzedzinski/WP)
The 1.02 million includes 120,000 foreigners and people evacuated from Russian-backed breakaway regions of Ukraine, the so-called Donetsk and Luhansk People's republics, which Russia recognised as independent just before launching its invasion.
According to data from the United Nations, more than 5.4 million people have fled Ukraine since the start of the invasion. Moscow calls it a "special operation" to demilitarise and "denazify" its neighbour. Ukraine and the West say Russia launched an unprovoked war of aggression.
Lavrov, in comments to China's official Xinhua news agency published on the Russian foreign ministry's website, said 2.8 million people in Ukraine have asked to be evacuated into Russia.
Ukraine has said that Moscow has forcefully deported thousands of people to Russia.
Efforts to evacuate civilians from some front-line areas, including the besieged southern port of Mariupol, have repeatedly broken down, with each side blaming the other.
Lavrov said that if the United States and NATO are "truly" interested in resolving the Ukrainian crisis, they should stop sending weapons to Kyiv.
"By publicly expressing support for the Kyiv regime, the NATO countries are doing everything to prevent ending of the operation through political agreements," Lavrov said.
Abortion rights advocates gather outside the Oklahoma Capitol in Oklahoma City to protest several anti-abortion bills being considered by the GOP-led legislature. (photo: Sean Murphy/AP)
Obtaining an abortion in Oklahoma is about to become all but impossible.
The Oklahoma Heartbeat Act will take immediate effect as soon as Gov. Kevin Stitt signs the bill, which is expected as early as Friday. Stitt has committed to signing any anti-abortion legislation that comes across his desk and has previously described himself as America’s “most pro-life governor.”
Earlier this month, Oklahoma enacted a different bill that nearly totally bans abortion except in cases where the pregnant person’s life is endangered. Under that bill, anyone who performs an abortion would face up to 10 years in prison and up to $100,000 in fines. It will take effect in August unless barred by the courts.
The new bill, which was passed without debate or any questions allowed, is modeled after a Texas law that went into effect last year. It has exceptions for cases where the pregnant person’s life is endangered, but not for cases of rape, incest, or fetal conditions that make life unsustainable after birth. It also imposes additional reporting requirements on physicians and allows private individuals to seek civil penalties, including at least $10,000 in damages, against anyone who aids in or performs an abortion after the six-week term. That’s designed to circumvent current legal limitations on the government’s ability to go after abortion providers.
“It’s identical to the bill that was enacted by the Texas Legislature last year, and that bill has passed muster with the United States Supreme Court,” Tony Lauinger, the chairman of Oklahomans for Life, told the AP. (The Supreme Court, however, never held a full hearing on the bill and merely dismissed a case challenging the bill in a brief order without explaining its reasoning.)
“We are hopeful that this bill will save the lives of more unborn children here in Oklahoma as well,” Lauinger added.
Abortion advocates challenged the bill in the Oklahoma Supreme Court late Thursday, arguing that it prevents Oklahomans from accessing constitutionally protected abortion care.
“For those able to scrape together the necessary funds, [the bill] will force them to travel out of state to access abortion care. Others will attempt to self-manage their own abortions without medical supervision. And many Oklahomans will have no choice but to continue their pregnancies against their will,” they write in the lawsuit.
It’s the latest in a series of anti-abortion laws passed in Oklahoma and in several other GOP-controlled state legislatures that make it all but impossible to obtain an in-state physical abortion, even while the US Supreme Court’s precedent in its 1973 decision in Roe v. Wade still stands.
The court will decide a case by early July in which it is expected to partially or completely overturn Roe, which recognized a pregnant person’s fundamental right to seek an abortion, but found that states could still impose restrictions on the procedure in the service of protecting the pregnant person’s health and the potential life of a fetus once it can survive outside the womb. But even if the court doesn’t overturn Roe, the latest Oklahoma bill will likely still stand given that legal challenges to the parallel law in Texas have failed.
Many Texans have flocked to Oklahoma abortion clinics after their state’s heartbeat act went into effect in September. There are just four such facilities across the entire state of Oklahoma, which have seen soaring demand in the months since.
Trust Women — which operates a clinic in Oklahoma City that provides medication and surgical abortions up to the current legal limit of 21.6 weeks — says it has seen a 2,500 percent increase in patients. Even though the clinic has doubled the number of days of the week that it’s open from two to four, patients still may have to wait two to four weeks for an abortion, sometimes forcing them to travel to other states if that puts them over the time period within which it’s legal to have an abortion in Oklahoma.
The passage of the Oklahoma Heartbeat Act will make it even harder to meet that demand.
“Planned Parenthood Great Plains’ providers have served thousands of Texans in the past seven months because of their state’s harsh bounty-hunting scheme, and we have been proud to stand with them and provide essential, constitutionally protected abortion services,” Emily Wales, interim president and CEO of Planned Parenthood Great Plains, said in a statement. “Now, rather than serving as a haven for patients unable to get care at home, Oklahoma politicians have made outcasts of their own people.”
Crossing a remote border area of Greece and Bulgaria, a new pipeline nearing completion will help countries in the region dependent on Russian imports get greater access to the global natural gas market. (photo: AP)
A new pipeline — built during the COVID-19 pandemic, tested and due to start commercial operation in June — would ensure that large volumes of gas flow between the two countries in both directions to generate electricity, fuel industry and heat homes.
The energy link takes on greater importance following Moscow’s decision this week to cut off natural gas supplies to Poland and Bulgaria over a demand for payments in rubles stemming from Western sanctions over the war of Ukraine.
The 180-kilometer (110-mile) pipeline project is the first of several planned gas interconnectors that would give eastern European Union members and countries hoping to join the 27-nation bloc access to the global gas market.
In the short term, it’s Bulgaria’s backup.
The new pipeline connection, called the Gas Interconnector Greece-Bulgaria, will give the country access to ports in neighboring Greece that are importing liquefied natural gas, or LNG, and also will bring gas from Azerbaijan through a new pipeline system that ends in Italy.
It’s one of many efforts as EU members scramble to edit their energy mixes, with some reverting back to emissions-heavy coal while also planning expanded output from renewables.
Germany, the world’s biggest buyer of Russian energy, is looking to build LNG import terminals that would take years. Italy, another top Russian gas importer, has reached deals with Algeria, Azerbaijan, Angola and Congo for gas supplies.
The European Union wants to reduce its dependence on Russian oil and gas by two-thirds this year and to eliminate it completely over five years through alternative sources, the use of wind and solar power, and conservation.
Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is likely to accelerate changes in the EU’s long-term strategy as the bloc adapts to energy that is more expensive but also more integrated among member nations, said Simone Tagliapietra, an energy expert at the Brussels-based think tank Bruegel.
“It’s a new world,” he said. “And in this new world, it’s clear that Russia doesn’t want to be part of an international order as we think of it.”
Tagliapietra added: “The strategy — particularly by Germany — over the last 50 years was always one of engaging with Russia on energy. ... But given what we are seeing in Ukraine and given Russia’s view of international relations, it’s not the kind of country with which we would like to do business.”
EU policymakers argue that while Eastern European members are among the most dependent on Russian gas, the size of their markets makes the problem manageable. Bulgaria imported 90% of its gas from Russia but only consumes 3 billion cubic meters annually — 30 times less than lead consumer Germany, according to 2020 data from EU statistics agency Eurostat.
The Greece-Bulgaria pipeline will complement the existing European network, much of which dates to the Soviet era, when Moscow sought badly needed funds for its faltering economy and Western suppliers to help build its pipelines.
The link will run between the northeastern Greek city of Komotini and Stara Zagora, in central Bulgaria, and will give Bulgaria and neighbors with new grid connections access to the expanding global gas market.
That includes a connection with the newly built Trans Adriatic Pipeline, which carries gas from Azerbaijan, and suppliers of liquefied natural gas that arrives by ship, likely to include Qatar, Algeria and the United States.
As many as eight additional interconnectors could be built in Eastern Europe, reaching as far as Ukraine and Austria.
The 240 million-euro ($250 million) pipeline will carry 3 billion cubic meters of gas per year, with an option to be expanded to 5 billion. It received funding from Bulgaria, Greece and the EU, and has strong political support from Brussels and the United States.
On the ground, the project faced multiple holdups because of supply chain snags during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Receiving specialized parts and moving personnel after construction got underway in early 2020 soon became increasingly difficult, said Antonis Mitzalis, executive director of Greek contractor AVAX, which oversaw the project.
Construction of the pipeline finished in early April, he said, while work and testing at two metering stations and software installation are in the final stages.
“We had a sequence in mind. But the fact that some materials did not arrive made us rework that sequence, sometimes with a cost effect,” Mitzalis said.
Greek Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis missed a tour of the site last month after contracting COVID-19. He spoke Wednesday with his Bulgarian counterpart, Kiril Petkov, to provide assurances of Greek support.
“Bulgaria and Greece will continue to work together for energy security and diversification — of strategic importance for both countries and the region,” Petkov later tweeted. “We both are confident for the successful completion of the IGB on time.”
People use a ladder to climb up the border wall at the U.S.-Mexico border in Tecate, Mexico, on April 21. The men used ropes to lower themselves down on the U.S. side. (photo: Denis Poroy/AP)
The journal JAMA Surgery offers one of the first attempts to measure injuries and deaths resulting from falls along new sections of the wall
The patients have fallen from new 30-foot segments of President Donald Trump’s border wall, a structure he touted as a “Rolls-Royce” that “can’t be climbed.” His administration built more formidable barriers in the San Diego area than anywhere else along the southern border, with miles of double-layer steel fencing, but that has not stopped more and more migrants from trying to scale it.
U.S. Customs and Border Protection officials say they do not tally deaths and injuries resulting from such falls. But new statistics published Friday by University of California at San Diego physicians in the journal JAMA Surgery provide one of the first attempts to measure the toll.
Since 2019, when the barrier’s height was raised to 30 feet along much of the border in California, the number of patients arriving at the UC San Diego Medical Center’s trauma ward after falling off the structure has jumped fivefold, to 375, the physicians found. Falling deaths at the barrier went from zero to 16 during that time, according to the report, citing records maintained by the San Diego county medical examiner.
“I never expected we would have to climb the wall,” said Hector Almeida, a 33-year-old dentist from Cuba, recovering this week in the trauma ward at UC San Diego Health. He fractured his left leg in a fall Monday. Smugglers led his group to the wall with a ladder and told them to climb up and slide down the other side, said Almeida, who said he saw one woman fall and break both legs, and an older man with a severe head injury.
The falling incidents are a subset of the soaring number of injuries, deaths and rescues occurring all across the southern border, where immigration arrests have reached an all-time high under President Biden. Migrants attempting to evade capture have drowned in the Rio Grande, died of exposure in South Texas and Arizona, and disappeared into the Pacific Ocean during smuggling attempts at sea.
What’s different is that the border wall is a man-made obstacle that poses a lethal danger and public health challenge where one did not exist previously.
Jay Doucet, chief of the trauma division at UC San Diego Health, said injuries along the border wall occurred before its increase in height, but the older, shorter version of the barrier, ranging from nine to 17 feet, was not lethal.
“Once you go over 20 feet, and up to 30 feet, the chance of severe injury and death are higher,” he said. “We’re seeing injuries we didn’t see before: pelvic fractures, spinal cord injuries, brain injuries and a lot of open fractures when the bone comes through the skin.”
At Scripps Mercy Hospital, the other major trauma center for the San Diego area, border wall fall victims accounted for 16 percent of the 230 patients treated last month, a higher share than gunshot and stabbing cases, according to Vishal Bansal, the director of trauma.
“I’ve never seen anything like this,” Bansal said in an interview. “This is crazy.” His trauma ward treated 139 border wall patients injured by falls last year, up from 41 in 2020.
Those injured by falls often require complex intensive care and multiple, phased surgeries, according to San Diego physicians. Lacking health insurance, many are ineligible for physical therapy and rehabilitation programs, so they remain longer in hospitals, which absorb millions in unreimbursed costs.
When the Trump administration developed a series of wall prototypes in San Diego in 2017, the most difficult to climb featured a rounded, “barrel-shaped” top. But congressional appropriations for the barrier limited development to existing barrier designs, and Trump told aides he preferred the “spiky” look of the steel bollards, which he considered more intimidating.
Thirty feet was determined to be the optimal height for new barriers, because it balanced cost concerns with U.S. Customs and Border Protection’s desire to give agents more time to respond by making it more difficult to climb, according to officials involved in the design.
Border crossings have increased sharply despite the completion of the 30-foot barrier, records show. San Diego border agents made 16,660 arrests in March, roughly four times as many as they averaged monthly before 2019.
The evidence for former Arizona governor Janet Napolitano’s quip — “show me a 50-foot wall and I’ll show you a 51-foot ladder” — is plain to see along the dusty road that edges the barrier south of San Diego.
Improvised ladders litter the brush along the base of the wall between the San Ysidro and Otay Mesa crossings. Some are fashioned from segments of metal rebar, but the more sophisticated versions use lightweight aluminum with sections that fit together like tent poles.
Smugglers hook them to the top of the wall and hurry migrants 30 feet up into the air, often with little explanation for how to get down. Many of the injuries appear to occur as migrants attempt to descend.
Videos posted to social media have shown athletic young men breezily shimmying up and gripping the bollards like fire poles to zip down the other side. But that type of skilled maneuver is beyond the abilities of many migrants, who typically attempt to climb at night to avoid detection.
“One thing I have noticed is the people who are falling are not as athletic as you think they would be to go up ladder like that,” Doucet said. “They are middle-aged, and a fair number of women, even pregnant women.”
Those who fall backward while attempting to slide down can land on their heads and necks.
Some of the deceased are recent deportees, with homes, jobs and families on the U.S. side, like Efren Medina Villegas, 56, killed in a fall last year near the Otay Mesa crossing in San Diego. “He was trying to get back to his family,” said brother-in-law, Reynaldo Medina, reached by phone.
The Trump administration built 450 miles of new fencing along the Mexico border at a cost of about $11 billion, mostly replacing older, smaller barriers with three-story steel bollards anchored in concrete. Biden halted construction after taking office, but his administration has developed plans to close open gaps, mostly in Arizona.
Republicans have hammered Biden’s decision to halt construction, campaigning ahead of November’s midterm elections with calls to complete the structure.
Ronald Vitiello, former chief of the Border Patrol, said the large number of migrant releases into the United States occurring under Biden has created an incentive and driven ever-riskier attempts to cross. “More traffic equals more misery and death, from all causes,” he said.
In locations where gaps remain in the barrier, injuries and deaths appear to be less frequent. But in border areas with new, continuous segments of 30-foot fencing, such as the deserts west of El Paso, across eastern Arizona, and along California’s Imperial Valley, falling incidents have soared.
UC San Diego Health has converted a postpartum wing into a makeshift recovery ward for border wall patients, with many requiring multiple, phased surgeries and long-term rehabilitation, but lacking insurance.
Amy Liepert, the director of acute care surgery at UC San Diego Health, said the hospital is looking for help, having incurred at least $13 million in costs from border wall patients. “We need policies that fund the care that’s being delivered, in order to make sure we’re providing access for our other populations that need trauma care,” Liepert said.
Liepert said the volume of fall victims from the border wall is straining San Diego’s entire trauma system. “It means trauma surgeons, medical teams, the ICU, therapists and others all have grossly increased workloads,” she said.
Almeida, the dentist from Cuba who broke his leg, said he was knocked off the top of the wall when others in his group rushed to climb a single ladder as Mexican police approached from the south. He was able to partly grab the bollards and slow his fall, sparing a worse injury.
Some smugglers use ropes and harnesses to lower clients safely onto the U.S. side, but that technique has proved dangerous, as well. Earlier this month a Mexican woman wearing a harness got stuck descending the wall near Douglas, Ariz., and died from asphyxiation after hanging upside down for several hours.
U.S. Customs and Border Protection officials say they are amplifying their safety warnings and intensifying efforts to target smugglers. “There are not strong enough words to describe the actions of these smugglers, who are personally responsible for the deaths and injuries they cause to very vulnerable populations,” Patricia McGurk-Daniel, deputy chief of the Border Patrol’s San Diego sector, said in an interview.
She and other Border Patrol officials say the barrier remains an essential border security tool but not an unclimbable one. “Infrastructure alone was never intended to be a stopgap for everything,” McGurk-Daniel said. “We need a multitiered approach that includes technology, boots on the ground and comprehensive immigration reform.”
In trauma medicine, a fall from a height of 40 feet is considered 50 percent lethal, meaning only half of patients survive their injuries, according to Doucet. Bansal described it as “akin to being hit by a car at a moderate rate of speed.”
The San Diego medical examiner reports describe unspeakable injuries. Amet Garcia Mendez, a 31-year-old from Mexico, fell 35 feet to the ground last March, where he was found dead by agents. He died of cranial and chest fractures, with multiple perforated organs, an autopsy showed.
Marifer Jimon Rojas, a 19-year-old from Mexico, died in 2020 from a broken neck and multiple fractures to the skull and sternum. In 2019, an expectant mother fell from the wall, broke her pelvis and lost her unborn son, weeks before her due date.
“It’s absolutely tragic, and it’s not deterring anyone — it’s only harming people,” said Jules Kramer, co-director of the Minority Humanitarian Foundation, a nonprofit in San Diego that has cared for several migrants injured in falls.
Last year, Kramer and her colleague Mark Lane aided an 18-year-old girl who fell from the wall and suffered five broken vertebrae and a leg fracture. They raised nearly $10,000 to medevac the teen to a hospital close to her relatives in Northern California.
She survived and regained the ability to walk, according to her attorney, Priscilla Higuera. “You couple this bigger, taller wall with Title 42 and ‘Remain in Mexico,’ and it’s a recipe for disaster,” said Higuera, referring to pandemic-era border restrictions and the Trump-era program, reinstated by federal courts, that returns some asylum seekers to Mexico.
Higuera said she has multiple clients who suffered injuries after falling, some of whom are discharged from trauma wards and deported or sent to immigration detention.
Smugglers saw through Trump’s border wall using ordinary power tools when they aren’t climbing it. U.S. Customs and Border Protection has tallied more than 3,000 breaches since 2019, records show, and along the barrier Thursday a welding crew was busy fixing a badly damaged span. Nearly every steel bollard had been sawed through and patched with a metal sleeve. Some had been cut through four times.
A wild Canada Lynx in Northern Ontario, Canada. (photo: mlorenzphotography/Moment/Getty Images)
The Canada lynx inhabits the snowy, northern forested regions of Alaska, across Canada, and from the Northeastern U.S. to the Rocky Mountains, where several hundred of the elusive creatures are estimated to roam. Due to the loss of much of its original habitat, this beautiful animal has been pushed farther and farther into the last remaining wilderness.
This week, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (USFWS) officials agreed to create a new habitat plan for the Canada lynx, The Associated Press reported. The plan could include protected areas in Colorado and other states in the Western U.S.
Environmental groups Wild Earth Guardians and Wilderness Workshop sued the USFWS to enforce a previous court ruling that said that when federal officials had designated almost 40,000 square miles as critical habitat for the lynx in 2014, they wrongly excluded parts of Colorado, Montana and Idaho.
“There’s a lot of really good habitat in Colorado – wilderness and really remote areas,” said John Mellgen, attorney for the environmental groups, as reported by The Associated Press.
USFWS officials had previously concluded that Colorado and areas of Wyoming and New Mexico were “not essential” for Canada lynx recovery, partially because of low populations of snowshoe hares, The Associated Press reported.
The lynx lives almost entirely on a diet of snowshoe hare, which has a brown coat in the summer and a white coat in the winter, according to The National Wildlife Federation (NWF).
“The two species evolved together, the cat becoming a specialist in killing the hare, and the hare becoming adept at eluding the lynx. The lynx kills an average of one hare every two or three days. It will turn to killing grouse, rodents, and other animals if hares become scarce. The link between lynx and hare is so tight in the North that the two species’ populations fluctuate in almost perfect synchrony,” the NWF website stated.
The presence of a population of reproducing lynx in the southern Colorado Rocky Mountains was cited by U.S. District Judge Donald Christensen, who issued the order approving the settlement.
In order to comply with the order of Judge Christensen, the USFWS will evaluate and propose critical habitat for the Canada lynx for potential protections by November 21, 2024, a statement by agency spokesperson Joe Szuszwalak said, as The Associated Press reported.
Lynx were listed as “threatened” across the contiguous U.S. under the Endangered Species Act in 2000.
Wildlife officials must be consulted by federal agencies before any activities are taken that could destroy or alter land that has been designated as part of the critical habitat of a protected species like the Canada lynx. If necessary, the consultations can result in limiting recreational dirt roads or putting restrictions on logging in federal forests.
Lynx were recently reintroduced in Maine, Minnesota, Colorado and Washington, where they are exceptionally vulnerable, the Defenders of Wildlife website stated. Numbers of Canada lynx have declined due to habitat loss and fragmentation, as well as overtrapping.
Canada lynx were reintroduced in Colorado starting in the late 1990s and are occasionally also found in Michigan, reported The Associated Press.
Mellgren said that more pressure is being put on the remote areas lynx inhabit in Colorado as climate change increases the killing of trees by wildfires, beetles and other issues. Some scientists also caution that a warming planet could melt the lynx’s snowy habitat and result in the decrease of populations of snowshoe hares.
In 2016, federal government biologists said some lynx populations would be gone by 2100. According to the Endangered Species Coalition website:
Canada lynx are especially vulnerable to global warming. In order to maintain a competitive advantage over other predators, this species depends on high elevation habitat with cold, snowy winters… As their habitat shifts upward in elevation, current lynx populations will likely become more isolated. Thus, protecting habitat at higher elevations as well as important corridors linking those areas is just as critical as protecting current Canada lynx habitat in order to ensure the long-term survival of the species.
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