Maybe it's the call of spring, or perhaps a Fox News report on a caravan of Hondurans headed for the U.S.-Mexico border. In either case, Sunday became an occasion for President Donald Trump to revive an issue that had been dormant for weeks. From the Washington Post:
PALM BEACH, Fla. — President Trump spent his Easter morning here on an anti-immigrant tirade, declaring Sunday that there would be no deal to legalize the status of undocumented immigrants known as "dreamers" and threatening to exit the North American Free Trade Agreement unless Mexico increases border security.
Trump thrust the future of millions of undocumented immigrants who were brought to the United States as children into peril by promising "NO MORE DACA DEAL," and he directed congressional Republicans to pass tough anti-immigration legislation.
Click here for the video. Trump followed up on the topic early Monday with this Tweet:
Likewise, in the Republican race for governor of Georgia, immigration has been the go-to issue for Secretary of State Brian Kemp, as he demonstrated again Saturday in a first post-session forum for the seven candidates.
Over the weekend, the Associated Press noted that, at an earlier forum, Kemp used the phrase "criminal illegal aliens" no fewer than four times. Like Trump, Kemp ties the illegal immigration issue to the criminal activities of gangs such as MS-13. But that AP article pointed out a flaw in the approach:
John King is police chief in Doraville, a city just outside of Atlanta with a large immigrant population. King says gangs are a concern in his community, but they often consist of second- or third-generation Americans.
"The first-generation immigrants are too busy working at construction sites and restaurants — they're too tired to be committing crimes," King said. "The typical 'gang-banger' that we bump into is a U.S. citizen. I wish we could deport them, but we can't."
Kemp also wants to require, rather than merely allow, local authorities to transport suspects living in the country illegally to federal deportation centers. That notion concerns King, though, who says he has a good relationship with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
"When ICE wants somebody, they come and pick them up," King said. "If transporting these folks keeps my officers from answering 911 calls in my community, I'm not sure our citizens would want to be financing that."
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My AJC colleague Rosalind Bentley has a tour de force article that combines a trove of lost photos from the funeral procession of Martin Luther King Jr. with a recreation of the four-mile route through modern-day Atlanta. It's only part of this newspaper's very thorough look at the 50th anniversary of the assassination.
Elsewhere, Patrick Parr of Politico.com has a look at a relationship that a young MLK had with a fellow white student while at seminary:
They had met at Crozer Theological Seminary, in Chester, Pennsylvania, at the time, where King was a divinity student from the age of 19 until 22, when he graduated in May 1951. In Bearing the Cross, Garrow quoted a close friend and mentor of King's at the time, Rev. Pius J. Barbour, who said the relationship had left King as a "man with a broken heart. He never recovered."
In a way, I never recovered from that quote. As I wrote my own book about King, I wasn't satisfied with such a short description of such an apparently devastating relationship. Garrow was the first biographer to discover Betty's last name, and, fortunately for me, buried it in a heavyweight endnote at the back of the book.
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Watch this Deadspin compilation of identical on-air condemnations of "fake news" for the conservative Sinclair Broadcast Group, owner or operator of nearly 200 television stations in the U.S. It's important.
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My AJC colleagues Marlon Walker and Ariel Hart report that this tiff between Blue Cross Blue Shield of Georgia and Piedmont Healthcare over a new contract will force at least half a million Georgia Piedmont patients to pay out-of-network costs for their current doctors:
The two companies, Georgia's largest health insurer and one of the state's largest health care provider groups, have been in tense negotiations for weeks over their contract renewal. The previous contract ended Saturday night. The menu of issues at stake included how much Blue Cross would reimburse Piedmont and its doctors for services, and terms such as what services it would cover.
The companies have not detailed the key sticking points, but they have been in court over Blue Cross' reluctance to fund some in-hospital MRIs and CAT scans when they can be done for less elsewhere, and to fund emergency-room care when Blue Cross decides it was not warranted. A Piedmont spokesman also said doctor payments were a roadblock….
The negotiations immediately affect about a half-million current patients across the state, who have seen a Piedmont provider within the last 18 months. There are some 2 million Blue Cross Georgia customers who could have used Piedmont as an in-network provider.
The impact is broader because Piedmont Healthcare has been expanding recently, purchasing facilities such as Rockdale Medical Center in October and the giant Athens Regional Medical Center in 2016.
That last medical complex is important – it provides health care for employees of the University of Georgia. Annelie Klein, a UGA employee who represents the United Campus Workers of Georgia, sends a note blaming Gov. Nathan Deal and the Board of Regents for not keeping a closer eye on the situation. In part:
"We choose because we must, and we thought we were given options with companies that would care for us. Now, we see this as a masquerade. The insurance companies have been given free rein to bargain with our lives.
We have no confidence that USG or UGA kept us adequately informed of the BCBS/Piedmont infighting at the time when we could have changed our plans. This lack of taking a concerted interest in the lives of the employees of UGA, whom chose BCBS as their provider, is more than a slap in the face…
"We demand to be released from BCBS coverage, and allowed to choose a provider that will not arbitrarily choose our physicians, who will not take away our dignity, who will consider our long-term relationships with our doctors, and understand that our health depends on their care."
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