Hurricane Dorian Spares Puerto Rico, but Trump Does Not
Trump used Hurricane Dorian to launch another series of reflexively puerile insults against Puerto Rico, San Juan Mayor Carmen Yulín Cruz, and the island’s mainland-enabled corruption. Days earlier, science writers lunged at their keyboards to respond to news of the president’s query about breaking up the storms with nuclear weapons—a discredited idea that occasionally resurfaces during hurricane season. This all before an inch of rain from the storm hit Puerto Rico.
One man died preparing for the hurricane; the island escaped severe damage and its infrastructure was not tested. Still, some on Twitter disputed official reports about power outages—the Puerto Rico Electric Power Authority claimed that that service was “better than a normal day.” The storm is moving toward Florida and is currently expected to make landfall as a major hurricane.
Dorian did lay bare more evidence of Trump’s continuing abuses of power and the inability of Congress to confront and end these repeated eruptions of presidential malpractice. Only Trump could manage to link his administration’s abuses of migrants in southern border concentration camps to a Puerto Rico threatened by its third hurricane in two years.
The administration ordered the Department of Homeland Security to move $271 million, including $155 million from FEMA’s Disaster Relief Fund, to ICE to increase migrant detention and hearing facilities. Earlier this summer the department redirected $200 million from DHS agencies to ICE. In 2018, the department had steered roughly $10 million to ICE.
Read more: https://prospect.org/article/hurricane-dorian-spares-puerto-rico-trump-does-not
(American Prospect)