A Disgusting New Policy Allows the Government to Deport Children Who Are Victims of Abuse

(Permanent Musical Accompaniment to this Post)

Being our semi-regular weekly survey of what’s goin’ down in the several states where, as we know, the real work of governmentin’ gets done, and where the sky is overcast and black. We begin in Florida, where the immigration “debate” is all too real. From the Miami Herald:

The stakeout, detailed during a meeting this month between Florida’s privately-operated foster care providers and the state, is just one example of how the Trump administration’s mass-deportation campaign is encircling vulnerable children who were previously off-limits—and squeezing the social welfare agencies tasked with caring for them.

Please tell me again how this kind of thing is making me safer. I am keen to know this.

And earlier this month, the Department of Homeland Security announced a new policy that will clear the way for the agency to deport children who are in the United States as documented victims of abuse, neglect, or abandonment under a classification known as Special Immigrant Juveniles. The new guidance leaves unprotected those children who lack the ability to apply for lawful permanent residency because visas aren’t available—at the very moment when there is a years-long backlog for green cards.

And, I guarantee you, nobody in this administration gives a damn about any of this, or about what a stench in the nostrils of the world they are making of this country. And a few degrees north in Atlanta, there was another episode that made none of us safer. From the Atlanta Community Press Collective:

On April 9, Avellaneda-Delgado was arrested by the Echols County Sheriff’s Office for an alleged probation violation. He had been healthy and active at the time of his arrest, according to his family. But on the morning of Sunday, May 4, Avellaneda-Delgado could not stand, speak, or even pick up the telephone to hear his son on the other side of the glass. “I’d never seen my dad like that,” Junior recalled. His father was unable to make eye contact or communicate at all during their brief visit.

Nayely recalls answering the phone to her brother crying about their father’s condition. The next morning, Nayely drove to the jail in Valdosta and demanded to see her dad and to know her father’s medical status. Jail staff refused, claiming federal privacy laws prevented them from releasing medical information to anyone. Around the time Nayely was in the jail’s lobby pushing for information about her dad’s condition, Lowndes County jail staff was handing him over to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) contractors for transportation to the Stewart Detention Center in Lumpkin, Georgia. She left without seeing her father or even knowing his whereabouts.

When this is over, they are going to have to clean house at ICE and they're going to have to be as ruthless about it as ICE has been in doing the administration's bidding.

We move along to West Virginia, where one of my pet peeves is playing itself out again. I am adamant that polluting industries assume 100 percent of the cost of repairing the damage done by their operations. This includes cleaning up things like sealing open methane wells. West Virginia is pockmarked by these and, recently, the state legislature passed a measure that was supposed to solve the problem, but which apparently left the state's citizens on the hook anyway. From the Mountain State Spotlight:

In his speech, Gov. Patrick Morrisey spoke of the risks to “surface and groundwater drinking water sources, land and air quality” posed by unplugged, nonproducing wells. “So, plugging these wells safely and effectively is critical to protecting these resources,” he said. Morrisey also acknowledged that increased funding to clean up these wells over recent years hasn’t been enough to fix the problem. If the operator of an abandoned well is unknown or files for bankruptcy, it becomes “orphaned,” and the cleanup falls to the state.

The bill calls for a new, more cost-conscious method of capping the orphaned wells. Right now, it costs approximately $124,000 to cap a single well. There are some 6,000 documented orphaned wells in the state, but estimates are that there might be twice that many that are undocumented.

Morrisey also acknowledged that increased funding to clean up these wells over recent years hasn’t been enough to fix the problem. If the operator of an abandoned well is unknown or files for bankruptcy, it becomes “orphaned,” and the cleanup falls to the state.

Through the Infrastructure Act, the Biden administration embarked on a serious effort to cap orphaned gas wells all over the country. From the High Country News:

The program—which set aside $4.7 billion, a historically large sum, for plugging wells—was meant to supplement state-level plugging efforts. The grants were distributed by the Department of the Interior. In January, days before Trump took office, New Mexico announced that it would be receiving $5.5 million to clean up abandoned wells in the state. California also received a $9 million grant. California, Colorado, Montana, and New Mexico had each plugged over 100 orphaned wells using the Biden funds, according to an Interior Department report in 2024. Wyoming alone plugged 1,021 wells in just one year using federal grants.

However, and of course, the Trump Administration killed the program because Eek! Green New Deal! or something. And the expense fell back onto cash-strapped states, some of which voted for the current administration. Good luck with that, fellow citizens.

And we conclude, as is our custom, in the great state of Oklahoma, whence Blog Official Francesinha Judge Friedman of the Algarve brings us the tale of Oklahoma agriculture gone badly wrong. From The New York Times:

An Oklahoma man was killed on Friday when he was attacked by two water buffaloes that he had bought at a livestock auction just a day earlier, the authorities said on Monday.

The man, Bradley McMichael, 47, was found in an animal enclosure at McMichael Farms in Jones, Okla., northeast of Oklahoma City. He had “multiple deep lacerations that proved to be fatal,” the Jones Police Department said in news release. The animals, which were euthanized, delayed emergency responders from helping Mr. McMichael, the police said. “We could not get through the gate to get to where Mr. McMichael was,” Chief Farrington said, describing how the water buffaloes had prevented help from getting to Mr. McMichael by “pushing back against the gate” and “raising the gate up in the air with their horns.”

Jaysus.

Apparently, water buffaloes are quite the thing on American farms these days, which was something I did not know.

Chief Farrington said that he was not aware of any previous fatal water buffalo attacks in the area and that “multiple people around the area have had water buffalo before.”

This reminds me of nothing more than the experiment with Bayou Hippos back in 1910, when some congresscritters and scam artists—but I repeat myself—decided to make “lake cow bacon” by introducing hippos into Louisiana.

This is your democracy, America. Cherish it.