Four bodies—those of two infants, a toddler, and a woman estimated to be 20 years old—were found near the Rio Grande on Sunday, and one of Texas’s Republican senators responded by blaming the dead woman and trying to score cheap political points. And it wasn’t even Ted Cruz. No, this piece of sneering contempt came from Texas Republican John Cornyn, too often an underrated player in the who’s-the-biggest-asshole-in-the-Senate competition, and one who is underrated exactly because his viciousness is just a slightly spicier version of the typical Senate Republican.
Cornyn’s response to the tragic deaths of a young woman and three small children presumably fleeing violence or poverty? “Sadly, this is what happens when infants are used as a ticket to enter the US due to arcane laws,” he tweeted.
We don’t know the facts behind these deaths—and neither does Cornyn. But we know general patterns of who’s coming to the U.S., and to say that someone who was obviously risking her life and the lives of her children was using those children as “a ticket” is grotesque.
Asylum-seekers coming here with children are trying to save their children’s lives and their own lives, calculating that the risk of the journey is less than the risk of staying in place. That calculation is in fact one of the reasons the Trump administration is keeping migrants in such dangerous, abusive conditions—to make parents think that maybe it’s safer to stay in their home countries despite gang violence or domestic violence, because the danger of the journey will be compounded by the abuse to be inflicted on them by Team Trump. And John Cornyn is only too eager to join in and paint a dead woman as some kind of cynical trickster.
This kind of cruelty is why we need a Democratic Senate. Can you contribute $1 to help Democrats win these Senate races in 2020?