Ted Cruz is just the latest Republican to try to distract from the deadly rise in coronavirus cases by blaming it all on undocumented immigrants. And why not? It's a convenient way to shift the blame for rising hospitalizations and deaths from people who refuse to get vaccinated or even so much as put a cloth over their mouths and noses to a favorite rightwing target, even if it doesn't make a lick of sense. If Republicans thought they could get away with blaming the surge of new infections on gay people or on abortions, they absolutely would (and we're sure we'll see that happening soon enough, too).

Cruz took to the friendly cablewaves of Sean Hannity's Old Time Xenophobia Hour on Fox News last night to join Hannity in accusing President Joe Biden of fomenting the "biggest super spreader event that has been ongoing since January 20th" because immigration authorities aren't keeping all migrants locked up forever or deporting them. A few facts to keep in mind before we get to the "diseased immigrant" panic here:

1) The only migrants being released into the US now are families with minor children who are claiming asylum in the US. That means they're authorized to be in the country until their cases are heard. 2) Migrants who test positive for COVID are for the most part being released to charities that then place them in local motels or hotels while they're under quarantine. 3) Vaccination rates in Mexican border cities are far higher than in most US red states, thanks to outreach efforts by the Mexican government and the lack of a political party trying to get people to die.

Nonetheless, Hannity was happy to imply that the real crisis in America isn't that COVID is rampaging through unvaccinated Americans, many of whom have been scared away from getting vaccinated by his own network — a situation that's finally starting to change even just the tiniest amount, thank Crom.

Naturally enough, Hannity had high praise for Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis's attempt to rave about immigration to distract from his own state's explosion of COVID cases, and said that if we really want to get serious about fighting the pandemic, we should "close the border."

Yes, really.

Then he brought on Cruz to insist that efforts to control the spread of the virus are really about "control," not science, because Ted Cruz will lie about anything.

Hannity: Now I'm going to argue, you know, the high rate of COVID positivity at that border, any American that is infected because Joe's not enforcing the laws of this country, you can blame Joe Biden for COVID, and if you die, I would put the blame on him too.

Why — why won't they stop this super-spreader event? Because it's happening in the hundreds and hundreds of thousands.

We'll just jump in here and note that earlier in the broadcast, Hannity had been fulminating about the release of 7,000 migrants who had tested positive in — and remember, most of them quarantined in hotels paid for by charities. Now it's like millions or maybe billions!

Cruz agreed it's just horrible, raising every possible scary thing in the world:

Sean, you're exactly right. People across the state of Texas, across the country are pissed and should be pissed. People are dying and Joe Biden doesn't care. Kids are getting assaulted, sexually assaulted, raped, and Joe Biden and Kamala Harris don't care.

We've had over a million illegal immigrants in the last six months under Joe Biden and Kamala Harris, and they don't care.

You take the city of McAllen, releasing 7,000 illegal immigrants into McAllen, all of whom are positive with COVID. And I put that in perspective, McAllen is a city, its population is about 141,000. That means 5 percent of the population of the city consists now of illegal immigrants who've tested positive for COVID that Joe Biden and Kamala Harris are just dumping there one after the other after the other because they won't enforce the law.
And instead what does Joe Biden do? He lectures the state of Texas. He lectures the state of Florida. He cannot stand that our states are opening. He cannot stand that our schools have been open. He cannot stand that people are going back to work.

He wants to get back to the jack-booted thugs.

Again, Cruz is talking about legally admitted asylum seekers who have quarantined away from the public. You know, before their children went and murdered everyone.

This is a familiar refrain for Cruz, who made essentially the same bogus claim back on July 15 as well. It may soon be added to the 2024 Republican platform for all we know.

Again, just to emphasize who's really a danger to Texans and the rest of America, let's also note that today, Cruz continues to promote the virus in the name of "Freedom":

As for migrants, Hidalgo County Judge Richard Cortez (despite the title, he's the county's chief executive, not a judicial official) makes clear that asylum-seekers are tested on release from federal custody, and that they have a positivity rate of about 8.3 percent, which Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, policy counsel for the American Immigration Council, notes is far lower than the 12 percent positivity rate for Texans overall, and that even those numbers may be misleading since at this point in the pandemic, ordinary Texans seeking testing are more likely to be experiencing symptoms, "so the true rate of COVID in the Texas population as a whole is unknown."

Not that facts are likely to get too much in the way of the ongoing "Scary Diseased Immigrant" panic, which as we've noted is one of the oldest anti-immigrant lies this nation of immigrants has.

[Fox News / Border Report / Border Report]

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