As most of you have probably heard, the razor wire deathtraps I mentioned are still up along the Rio Grande, and have killed people, as deathtraps tend to do. The federal government is suing Abbot to make him take them down, and in the meantime, people crossing the border to claim asylum (which is their legal right under US law) are extending their journey to go around. Unfortunately, razor wire isn’t the only way that the sadists “guarding” the US border are trying to “accidentally” kill asylum seekers. In Arizona, Border patrol has been keeping migrants in cages, in the middle of a heatwave. From the transcript of the interview:

Last week I got a tip that the Border Patrol was holding migrants outdoors in some sort of enclosure at the Ajo Border Patrol Station. And this was surprising for two reasons. Anybody who knows anything about the desert in southern Arizona knows that this portion of the desert is as deadly as it gets. And as you mentioned at the top of the show, we are right now experiencing a record-setting and deadly heat wave.

So, I drove out to the Ajo station with photojournalist Ash Ponders. As you said, it was 114 degrees that day. We hiked up to a ridge where we were able to see into the Border Patrol station. We had a telephoto lens and binoculars, and we were able to observe roughly 50 migrants being held in a chain-link enclosure under a sort of carport-style structure that cast a small strip of shade on the ground. The ground was loose rock. The shade was minimal. People were crowding themselves into the shade that was available, shoulder to shoulder. I observed roughly 30 migrants being marched off to a separate section of the facility, and roughly as many staying behind. The ground was littered with water bottles.

The cruelty is the point, and this is under a Democratic Arizona governor, and a Democratic president. The GOP may be worse, but they’ve got no monopoly on bad.