News

Reports: Migrants Are Being Released In States After Testing Positive For Covid

“Even though they test positive, they’re going to leave the next day."

   DailyWire.com
TOPSHOT - A group of about 30 Brazilian migrants, who had just crossed the border, sit on the ground near US Border Patrol agents, on the property of Jeff Allen, who used to run a brick factory near Mt. Christo Rey on the US-Mexico border in Sunland Park, New Mexico on March 20, 2019. - The militia members say they will patrol the US-Mexico border near Mt. Christo Rey, "Until the wall is built." In recent months, thousands of Central Americans have arrived in Mexico in several caravans in the hope of finding a better life in the United States. US President Donald Trump has branded such migrants a threat to national security, demanding billions of dollars from Congress to build a wall on the southern US border. (Photo by
PAUL RATJE/AFP via Getty Images

Multiple reports have cited relatively high positive COVID-19 test rates among illegal aliens released into the states.

According to Bill Reagan, director of Loaves and Fishes — a food bank and homeless shelter in Harlingen, Texas, where Border Patrol agents are dropping migrants after temporarily retaining them — as much as a quarter of the migrants released at the town tested positive for the virus, The Washington Times reported Sunday.

The paper said Reagan told a Harlingen City Commission meeting last week “that the migrants are processed at the border and then bused to his facility, so they may have contracted COVID-19 but show no signs of infection. Besides, he said, there is not much the city can do.”

“We can’t quarantine them,” he told commissioners, “Even though they test positive, they’re going to leave the next day. They’re going to get on the bus or the airplane, and they’re gone.”

NBC News reported last week that numerous asylum-seekers released into the U.S. by immigration officials have tested positive for COVID-19 after release.

One migrant from Honduras, Miriam Izaguirre, 35, “crossed the Rio Grande at dawn Monday with her young son and turned herself in to the authorities,” the network reported. “A few hours later she was released, and the first thing she did was take a rapid test for Covid-19 at the Brownsville bus station.” Izaguirre said that “about eight of us” were “separated” from others “because we were positive.”

Izaguirre explained that she was waiting to catch a bus to Houston, according to Noticias Telemundo Investiga. “Other migrant families who also said they had tested positive were waiting to go to other destinations: North Carolina, Maryland and New Jersey,” NBC noted.

“The city of Brownsville administers these rapid tests at the bus station, after migrant families are released by the Border Patrol. A spokesperson for Brownsville confirmed that, since they began doing these tests Jan. 25, 108 migrants have tested positive for Covid-19, which is 6.3 percent of those who took the test,” NBC News reported. “In response to Noticias Telemundo Investiga, a spokesperson for the city said in an email that Brownsville does not have the authority to retain these migrants who plan to travel to dozens of cities throughout the country.”

Sen. Tom Cotton, (R-AR) on Monday ripped the “Biden border crisis,” saying that “amoral” policies are putting illegal aliens at risk.

“This is the Biden border crisis. But you know if you’re Joe Biden and the Democrats and they don’t believe in borders, they don’t, therefore, think it is a crisis,” Cotton said in “Fox & Friends.”

“They think this is a feature not a bug of their policy. They’ve literally turned detention centers — that are designed to turn people away at our borders — into reception centers. That’s what they’re gonna call them. What signal is that going to send?  We’ve seen migrants wearing their shirts that say, Biden, let us in,” he said.

This article has been revised for clarity.

Got a tip worth investigating?

Your information could be the missing piece to an important story. Submit your tip today and make a difference.

Submit Tip
The Daily Wire   >  Read   >  Reports: Migrants Are Being Released In States After Testing Positive For Covid