President Trump Needs a Plan for COVID-19 at the Border

   Ten Border Patrol officers have reportedly lost their lives to COVID-19 from catching the virus while dealing with immigrants crossing the border. How you deal with entry of the virus into the country should go beyond banning entrance, a measure (which I do not approve of) President Trump has taken. The same principles used elsewhere of social distancing, face-masking, contact tracking, isolating when you become sick, etc., should be happening on our border.

   If you don't secure the border as best you can from the spread of COVID, you are failing to fight the virus. 

   If you don't have a plan of attack in place, you are failing. Each state has plans in place. Has Texas made the border part of its plan? And, rather, shouldn't that plan be coming from the White House, as it is over U.S. Customs and Border Patrol Protection, and the border extends through several states and you need policy for all of it?

   The detention camps are part of this. You should be providing the prisoners there the same protections, when possible. Because when they contact the virus, they spread it to Customs and ICE officials, and to camp attendants, and thus to others living here in the United States.

   Not to mention that you should be as concerned for the lives of the immigrants as you are for the lives of the Border agents. It is wonderful if the agents are getting immigrants to hospitals when it is suspected they have COVID-19. Texas and other states should be more transparent in accounting for how many patients in their hospitals are immigrants. And, if news reports start coming out that there are many, we should be concerned for the immigrants instead of being maligned against them. 

    Are the immigrants in the camps being issued masks? Are they being tested regularly? Are the Border agents being tested each time they come in contact with someone they suspect of having the virus? Are they being sent home on sick leave until cleared? Are they keeping distance from the immigrants when they pick them up, by keeping them in the backs of the vans walled off from the cab? Do they issue masks to the immigrants as soon as they apprehend them?

   It is possible that they are transporting a high volume of immigrants to the hospitals on suspicion of COVID and the testing is being done there. With the immigrants then having no other place to go to and isolate until those results do come back, they are being held right in the hospitals. Is this not possibly what is happening? Wouldn't it be better to test them right upon capture, and keep them in large tent facilities big enough to isolate each person?
   Whatever is being done, it falls for short of being planned out, if there is any plan even at all. I call for the Trump administration to come up with a comprehensive plan for dealing with COVID-19 at the border.