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{{Workflow
|Plaintiff verdict=No
|Stage=Needs judge
|Filed by=User:Isophist
|Case ID=Afe6ea6ic3afEfeAfi3c
|Lie=Gov Abbott lies about migrant truck deaths
|Topic=Factual Lie
|Accusation=
50 migrants were found dead from heat exposure after they were left trapped in an abandoned truck in San Antonio, Texas, this week.  On 6/27/2022 Texas Gov Greg Abbott tweeted, “These deaths are on Biden. They are a result of his deadly open border policies. They show the deadly consequences of his refusal to enforce the law.”

As University of Texas Rio Grande Valley political science professor Terence Garrett told PolitiFact while responding to Abbott’s previous lies about Biden’s immigration policies, “There's no such thing as an open border.” According to Garrett, current border security measures include nearly 20,000 Border Patrol agents, aerial surveillance systems, and hundreds of miles of fencing. “We don’t have an open border,” Garrett said. “That’s absurd.”

The Washington Post, for example, pointed out that Customs and Border Patrol had made 239,416 arrests in May, further commenting: “The agency is on pace to surpass the record 1.73 million border arrests tallied in 2021 — presenting an ongoing logistical and political challenge for the Biden administration.” 

While politicians argue about how to address the flood of immigrant/refugees on the southern border few ever discuss the reasons that these people are fleeing their countries of origin.  The economic, political and security threats (including criminal and state-sponsored violence) that are driving this immigration, which has deep roots in Latin America, can often be traced of the exploitative 20th century banana republic practices of US companies and the resulting social and political conflicts aggravated by US foreign policies in the region.

According to Wikipedia, in 1904, the American author O. Henry coined the term banana republic to describe Honduras and neighboring countries under economic exploitation by U.S. corporations, such as the United Fruit Company (now Chiquita Brands International) and Dole. Typically, a banana republic has a society of extremely stratified social classes, usually a large impoverished working class and a ruling class plutocracy, composed of the business, political, and military elites of that society. The ruling class controls the primary sector of the economy by way of the exploitation of labor; thus, the term banana republic is a pejorative descriptor for a servile oligarchy that abets and supports, for kickbacks, the exploitation of large-scale plantation agriculture, especially banana cultivation.

Workers rebelling against these practices often adopted socialist models for redistributing the wealth of state controlled assets and political power, which turned most countries in the regions into proxy state wars between the US and the USSR.  The US favored strong-man, anti-communist leaders and trained their ruling elites in suppressive military and police practices, many of which have evolved into the failed social and political structures present today.

So, in my humble opinion, one hundred years afterward the US is reaping what it sowed when it exploited these Central and South American countries. It is a very difficult and complex task to address the economic, social and political problems now festering in these countries today, if the US was seriously inclined to do so.  But, in the end, that is really the only way to stem the flow of immigration from those regions to the US southern border.
|Locations=https://twitter.com/GregAbbott_TX/status/1541596214705135617
|uuid=0a453b4c-94fc-49db-8837-830abd001c28
|Markup=<b>“These [migrant] deaths are on Biden. They are a result of his deadly open border policies. They show the deadly consequences of his refusal to enforce the law.”</b>
|Meeting=
|Random judge=User:Rht5
|Random juror=User:Frank,User:Justin
|Juror amount=2
}}