border patrol vehicles near the rio grande, where officers patrol for people crossing into the u.s. from mexico early this week. the pictures of migrant children being separated from their parents at the border are heartbreaking. but what i find even more heartbreaking is the entire humanitarian crisis at the southern border. the root of the crisis is lax enforcement of our immigration laws, a problem that didn’t start under president trump. in fact, the biggest reason for the crisis is that previous administrations pursued a “catch and release” policy for those seeking asylum after illegally crossing our borders. when migrants are prosecuted for illegal entry and plead guilty, the proceedings are short - often within the same day. after, they are quickly reunited with their children. where things get complicated is when a migrant in criminal proceedings files an asylum claim. in that scenario, they are detained for a longer period of time than the government is legally allowed to hold them with their children.




the reason for that is a ruling by the liberal ninth circuit court of appeals known as the flores settlement. this ruling prohibits the government from detaining alien children for more than 20 days. even if the government wants to detain a family together, it’s legally forbidden from doing so. because of the flores settlement, and subsequent court decisions, the obama administration doubled down on the policy to release parents in asylum proceedings who were accompanied by children. the results were predictable: from 2012 to 2017, asylum claims from central america soared almost 900 percent. not surprisingly, the “catch and release” policy incentivized migrants to bring children into the u.s. to avoid detention. it also incentivized parents to send their children with other adults so they could claim asylum as a family unit at the border, even while their parents stayed home. the unintended consequences of “catch and release” are tragic: an exponential increase in illegal immigration; numerous children abused; countless women raped; and untold numbers of men and women killed, drowned, starved or dead of dehydration in the perilous journey to the u.s. what makes these tragedies so unnecessary is there’s already a process in place for those who are legitimately seeking asylum. they can show up at any embassy or consulate abroad or any u.s. port of entry to make their asylum claims. tellingly, these migrants refuse to make their claims at designated points and continue to pour into our country illegally. this strongly suggests that most migrants are coming to the u.s. for economic reasons, not because they have valid claims of persecution. the trump administration, to its credit, wants to solve the immigration crisis. in an effort to discourage migrant families and children from embarking on this treacherous journey, the administration started prosecuting all adults illegally crossing the border, instead of giving a free pass to adults who arrived with children. this led to over 2,000 alien children being temporarily detained away from adults. this, in turn, caused the media firestorm that brought washington to a standstill. what’s interesting is that many in the media conveniently forgot that the obama administration also separated families at the border. at least the idaho statesman got it right when it ran a story last week titled, “yes, obama separated families at the border, too.” in 2014, when the crisis started under president obama, the idaho media was largely silent about this issue. the government continued to separate families in 2015, 2016, and 2017. but when president trump took steps to end “catch and release,” there was an explosion of media interest. i support president trump’s policy to prosecute those who are violating our immigration laws. i also support his executive order from june 20 that keeps migrant families together while directing the government’s lawyers to ask for a modification of the flores settlement. i have worked with my house colleagues on legislation that would keep migrant families together without reverting to the failed “catch and release” policy. the bill we propose would also close loopholes in asylum law to curb fraud and abuse. this will reduce illegal crossings, while also protecting those who have legitimate asylum claims. my proposed solution is supported by the majority of the american people. in a recent cbs news poll, 63 percent of americans support keeping families together through better enforcement of our immigration laws. only 21 percent support the “catch and release” policy advocated by democrats and the liberal media.




fixing our broken immigration system was president trump’s no. 1 promise to the american people in the 2016 election. it’s also the no. 1 issue i’ve worked on as a member of congress, and i will continue to work on it until my last day in office. i am committed to working with president trump to keep families together and to make our entire country stronger and safer. raul labrador is idaho's 1st district congressman.
results from coronavirus antibody tests have started to trickle in, and they bolster the consensus among disease experts that the virus is significantly more lethal than seasonal flu and has seeded the most disruptive pandemic in the last century. “i think it is the worst pandemic since 1918,” said cecile viboud, an epidemiologist at the national institutes of health’s fogarty international center, alluding to the “great influenza” pandemic that claimed an estimated 675,000 lives in the united states. the new serological data, which is provisional, suggests that coronavirus infections greatly outnumber confirmed covid-19 cases, potentially by a factor of 10 or more. many people experience mild symptoms or none at all, and never get the standard diagnostic test with a swab up the nose, so they’re missed in the official covid-19 case counts. higher infection rates mean lower lethality risk on average. but the corollary is that this is a very contagious disease capable of being spread by people who are asymptomatic — a challenge for communities hoping to end their shutdowns. the crude case fatality rates, covering people who have a covid-19 diagnosis, have been about 6 percent globally as well as in the united states. but when all the serological data is compiled and analyzed, the fatality rate among people who have been infected could be less than 1 percent. but as infectious disease experts point out, even a seemingly low rate can translate into a shockingly large death toll if the virus spreads through a major portion of the population. [sign up for our coronavirus updates newsletter to track the outbreak. all stories linked in the newsletter are free to access.] new york gov. andrew m. cuomo (d) said monday that the latest antibody numbers in new york city indicate that 25 percent of the population of 8.8 million has already been infected. the city has recorded more than 12,000 confirmed covid-19 deaths, and lists another 5,000 as probable deaths. that is an infection fatality rate between 0.5 and 0.8 percent, depending on which death toll is factored in. (a spike in all-cause deaths in recent weeks also suggests that some coronavirus-related deaths have not been captured by mortality statistics.) “the death rate is much, much lower,” cuomo said monday, referring to the serology tests. he said the new york state rate appears to be 0.5 percent — which is one death per 200 infections. that figure is still sobering to infectious disease experts. a rate of 0.5 percent “is way more than a usual flu season and i would think way more than the ’57 or 1968 [influenza] pandemic death toll, too,” viboud said. this is a novel, highly infectious virus, and so everyone who hasn’t had an infection is presumably susceptible. it is unclear whether and for how long a person who recovers from covid-19 will have immunity. research shows that, in a completely vulnerable population that takes no precautions, each infected person will infect well more than two others on average, and some estimates put that reproduction number over three.  epidemiologists have said somewhere between 40 to 70 percent of the population will likely become infected in the next couple of years if there is no vaccine and the public does not take aggressive measures to limit the spread of the virus. “do the math!” said jeffrey shaman, a columbia university epidemiologist who has been studying the coronavirus since early in the outbreak. shaman and his colleagues have developed a model of the coronavirus spread that estimates that only 1 in 12 infections in the united states have been documented in official counts. that leads to an infection fatality rate of 0.6 percent, he said — a figure that roughly matches what has been seen in new york city. at that rate, the united states could potentially experience 1 million deaths if half the population became infected and no efforts were made to limit the contagion through social distancing, a vaccine or proven therapeutics, shaman said. “that’s 20 times worse than a bad flu season,” he said monday. this is obviously a highly politicized pandemic, and some critics of the nationwide shutdown have seized on this early antibody data to argue that covid-19 isn’t all that deadly. a common refrain is that the disease is not significantly worse than the flu. in this view, the pandemic threat has been wildly exaggerated. “pandemic is over. let’s stop the economic suicide, and get back to work,” declared a headline on a column by free market advocate george gilder on the realclearmarkets website. he said policies to control the viral spread “should be reversed summarily and acknowledged to be a mistake, perpetrated by statisticians with erroneous computer models.” kevin mccullough, a columnist for the conservative website town hall, wrote a column that ran last week with the headline “antibody testing: proves we’ve been had!” “nearly everything we’ve been told about models, rates of infection, deaths, and recoveries was inaccurate,” he wrote. “the death rate in new york state isn’t 7.4%, it is actually .75%.” but the two numbers describe different things: the first is a case fatality rate, reflecting deaths among people with confirmed diagnoses of covid-19. the second is the infection fatality rate, extrapolated from the antibody surveys. in other words, both numbers can be correct, and useful. “those higher numbers of case fatality rates, they’re still true,” viboud said. “it’s your probability of dying if you’re clinically sick with it, which is something that people may care about, too.” moreover, the fatality rate of a virus, however it is defined, is not an innate feature of the pathogen. it depends on many variables, including the age and health of the population and access to health care. timing matters, too: in china the fatality rate was high during the initial phase of the outbreak, when hospitals were overwhelmed and doctors struggled to cope with the crisis. ad there are so many numbers flying around that it is understandable that people may struggle to make sense of them. that’s become even more difficult in recent days due to serological studies that haven’t been peer-reviewed but have been presented to the public, typically with dramatic public health conclusions attached. the most controversial such study came out of santa clara county, calif., the heart of silicon valley. it claimed that the true number of infections in the county in early april may have been 50 to 85 times the official coronavirus case counts. extrapolating from that, it gave an estimated infection fatality rate of between 0.12 and 0.2 percent. that provided what seemed like reliable ammunition to those who believe the danger of covid-19 has been overstated. they said the numbers show this disease is not much different from seasonal flu. ad a commonly cited statistic about seasonal flu is that it has a fatality rate of 0.1 percent, that, however, is a case fatality rate. the infection fatality rate for flu is perhaps only half that, viboud said. shaman estimated that it’s about one-quarter the case fatality rate. thus, even if the santa clara numbers are roughly accurate about the spread of the virus and its lethality, it would still be deadlier than the flu. statisticians and other epidemiologists have argued that there were also errors in data analysis in the santa clara report, which was led by researchers at stanford university. the researchers used advertisements on facebook to call for volunteers, and critics said that may have led to an unrepresentative sampling of the county. the critics noted that even a small rate of false positives can skew a survey in which the targeted disease has low prevalence. ad shaman, the epidemiologist, said he hopes the higher estimates for infections and commensurately lower fatality rates are correct. everyone needs more testing and better data, he said. for now, the preponderance of evidence describes an exceptional pathogen. for someone like shaman, who wears a mask when he walks the dog in new york city and is conscientious about washing his hands, there is no doubt that the endgame is far away — that until a vaccine or reliable therapeutics are in place, or when so many people have been sickened and then recovered that the country achieves “herd immunity,” everyone needs to try to limit the spread of the virus. “we have completely disrupted our society through our social distancing practices, shutting our businesses, closing our schools, and still this thing has already killed 53,000 people in the united states,” he said. “we have a very long way to go until we get herd immunity.”