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The Biden Administration finally allowed two journalists and a film crew to enter the Border Patrol migrant child detention center in Donna, Texas. The resulting photos and video show the conditions where more than 4,100 children are held in a facility with a capacity of 250 — 1,700 percent above capacity.

After leaked photos and videos of the overcrowded housing of unaccompanied migrant children in Border Patrol facilities along the Texas border, CBP officials allowed two Associated Press reporters and a CBS News camera crew to enter the Donna facility on March 30. Officials allowed the journalists to photograph and observe the processing of the children and the facilities where they were being held well beyond the 27-hour legal limit.

Due to the surge of children crossing the border without a parent, Border Patrol officials packed more than 4,100 unaccompanied minors into the Donna facility designed to temporarily hold no more than 250, CBSDFW reported on Tuesday afternoon.

Oscar Escamilla, the acting senior officer in the region, told the reporters that 250 to 300 children are entering the facility on a daily basis. Far fewer leave, he said. “That number is so lopsided,” Escamilla expressed.

During processing, journalists observed the children being inspected for lice, scabies, fever, and other health conditions. The processes fingerprint and photograph the children who are 14 and older, the CBS report states.

A migrant and her daughter have their biometric data entered at the intake area of the Donna Department of Homeland Security holding facility, the main detention center for unaccompanied children in the Rio Grande Valley in Donna, Texas on March 30, 2021. (Photo by DARIO LOPEZ-MILLS/POOL/AFP via Getty Images)

The children are provided bracelets with barcodes to track their showering and medical conditions.

Young children lie inside a pod at the Department of Homeland Security holding facility run by the Customs and Border Patrol (CBP) on March 30, 2021 in Donna, Texas.  It is an overcrowded tent structure where more than 4,000 kids and families are kept in pods. (Photo by Dario Lopez-Mills – Pool/Getty Images)

Young unaccompanied migrants, wait for their turn at the secondary processing station in the Department of Homeland Security holding facility on March 30, 2021 in Donna, Texas.  (Photo by Dario Lopez-Mills – Pool/Getty Images)

Newly migrants wait to enter the intake area at the Donna Processing Center, run by the U.S. Customs and Border Patrol (CBP), the main detention center for unaccompanied children in the Rio Grande Valley, in Donna, Texas, Tuesday, March 30, 2021. (AP Photo/Dario Lopez-Mills, Pool)

Monitored by a caretaker, young unaccompanied migrants, aged from 3 to 9, watch television inside a playpen at the U.S. Customs and Border Protection facility, the main detention center for unaccompanied children in the Rio Grande Valley, in Donna, Texas, Tuesday, March 30, 2021. The youngest of the unaccompanied minors are kept separate from the rest of the detainees. (AP Photo/Dario Lopez-Mills, Pool)

Young migrants wait to be tested for Covid-19 at the Department of Homeland Security holding facility on March 30, 2021 in Donna, Texas.  (Photo by Dario Lopez-Mills – Pool/Getty Images)

Minor children are housed inside a pod at the Donna Department of Homeland Security holding facility, the main detention center for unaccompanied children in the Rio Grande Valley run by U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP), in Donna, Texas, Tuesday, March 30, 2021. The minors are housed by the hundreds in eight pods that are about 3,200 square feet in size. Many of the pods had more than 500 children in them.(AP Photo/Dario Lopez-Mills, Pool)

Bob Price serves as associate editor and senior news contributor for the Breitbart Texas-Border team. He is an original member of the Breitbart Texas team. Price is a regular panelist on Fox 26 Houston’s What’s Your Point? Sunday-morning talk show. Follow him on Twitter @BobPriceBBTX and Facebook.

Alabama Gov. Kay Ivey’s press secretary has reaffirmed that the statewide mask mandate put in place to combat the spread of COVID-19 will end next month on April 9.

“As Governor Ivey has previously stated, Alabama’s mask mandate ends April 9,” said Gina Maiola in a statement to Breitbart News. “We have made progress, and we are moving towards personal responsibility and common sense, not endless government mandates.”

Earlier this month, Ivey implemented a “new modified order” and said she would not allow the mask mandate to extend past April 9.

Ivey had previously extended the state’s “safer at home” order, which included a mask mandate, in January. That extension could have ended earlier this month, but Ivey felt it should carry on through Easter.

“Let me be abundantly clear: after April 9, I will not keep the mask order in effect,” Ivey said at the time.

The governor also stated then that she and state health officer Dr. Scott Harris were “both convinced that we need to get past Easter and hopefully allow more Alabamians to get their first shot before we take a first step that some states have taken to remove the mask order altogether and other restrictions.”

Ivey announced the statewide mask mandate last summer, an order she said was “hard to enforce” as she called for “everyone in our state to practice personal responsibility & wear a mask.”

Follow Kyle on Twitter @RealKyleMorris and Facebook.

Ohio GOP lawmakers plan to introduce legislation that would prohibit mandated “vaccine passports.” The term “vaccine passport” refers to the concept of requiring citizens to show proof they have received a vaccination for the Chinese coronavirus in order to be allowed to enter an area or establishment.

“Ohio is not New York,” said State Rep. Al Cutrona (R-Canfield) in a statement. “I anticipate introducing this bill to ensure that the liberties of all Ohioans are instilled throughout this vaccination phase of the pandemic.”

New York is the first state to formally launch a “vaccine passport” program — called the “Excelsior Pass” — which allows residents to pull up a code on their phones to prove they have been vaccinated for the Chinese coronavirus, or have tested negative.

Rep. Cutrona went on to say that while he encourages Ohioans to get vaccinated by their own free will, “a vaccine should not be mandated or required by our government for our people to integrate back to a sense of normalcy.”

“We’ve had restrictions on our freedoms for over a year and more restrictions or mandates are not the answer to every issue related to COVID-19,” Cutrona added.

Fellow Ohio State Rep. Mike Loychik (R-Bazetta) echoed these sentiments on Monday, tweeting, “Vaccine passports have no place in a free society.”

Rep. Loychik, who is also a co-sponsor of the upcoming bill, told Breitbart News that “upending society to implement an invasive vaccine credential system will only serve to further slow our economic recovery and deepen divisions in our society.”

“I absolutely encourage everyone who is eligible to get vaccinated to do so as soon as they can, but vaccine passports are not the way to go,” Loychik added.

Rep. Cutrona, who currently holds a position as the Chief Operating Officer for a tri-county infectious disease medical practice in Ohio, told Breitbart News that he foresees a violation of privacy if a vaccine passport were to be implemented.

“It is quite clear that the purpose for these passports go far beyond COVID,” Cutrona told Breitbart News. “A certificate from a physician could establish whether you have had COVID or a vaccine, so there is no need for the passport if that was truly the only intention. Amazon is already discussing using this as a platform to handle financial transactions and tracking people.”

“This is a clear example of what it looks like to slowly steal our freedoms,” Cutrona added. “As a Chief Operating Officer of an ID medical practice, I can confidently say that breaching medical privacy and freedom in the face of what the government decides is best for us will never be acceptable.”

The State Rep. went on to say that “this level of government intrusion would begin a slippery slope for our country.”

“This is the exact opposite of what our founding fathers envisioned for our country and its liberty,” Cutrona affirmed.

“Good intentions rarely justify imposing on people’s freedoms,” Cutrona added. “More frequently, these good intentions result in unintended consequences. If we have learned anything over the past year, it is that more regulations isn’t the answer.”

Cutrona says that he anticipates introducing the bill within the next three weeks.

The Ohio lawmakers are not alone in their stance regarding a “vaccine passport,” as Florida Governor Ron DeSantis (R) recently expressed the concept is a “terrible idea,” adding that a state mandate is “totally off the table.”

“The vaccine passport is a terrible idea. We are definitely not going to require anything from the state’s perspective. That is totally off the table,” DeSantis said.

You can follow Alana Mastrangelo on Facebook and Twitter at @ARmastrangelo, on Parler @alana, and on Instagram.

Personal Protective Equipment (PPE), once scarce and now abundant, is morphing into a new wave of masks and glove litter that is threatening wildlife, according to a recent study published on the Brill website.

The study said that the discarded masks and gloves are showing up everywhere around the globe.

The abstract to the study said, in part:

During the COVID-19 pandemic, Personal Protective Equipment (PPE) is massively used, resulting in a new wave of litter: protective face masks and gloves. Here we present the first case of a fish entrapped in a medical glove, encountered during a canal clean-up in Leiden, The Netherlands. We also report the first cases of birds using medical face masks as nesting material, which were also found in the Dutch canals. To place these new findings in context, we collected online reported interactions of animals with PPE litter, since the start of the pandemic. 

This resulted in the first overview of cases of entanglement, entrapment and ingestion of COVID-19 litter by animals and the use of it as nesting material. We signal COVID-19 litter as a new threat to animal life as the materials designed to keep us safe are actually harming animals around us.

The introduction to the study said, in part:

To protect humans against this virus, personal protective equipment (PPE) is being used more frequently. China, for example, increased face mask production by 450 percent in just one month (Bown, 2020). It is estimated that we have a monthly use of 129 billion face masks and 65 billion gloves globally (Prata et al., 2020). Similar to the usage of other single-use plastic items, this also means an increase of PPE littering our environment (Fadare & Okoffo, 2020). 

PPE litter, also referred to as COVID-19 litter, mainly consists of single-use (usually latex) gloves and single-use face masks, consisting of rubber strings and mostly polypropylene fabric. Three months after face masks became obligatory in the UK, PPE items were found on 30 percent of the monitored beaches and at 69 precent of inland clean-ups by the citizen scientists of the Great British Beach Clean (Riglen, 2020). Even on the uninhabited Soko Islands, Hong Kong, already 70 discarded face masks were found on just a 100-meter stretch of beach (Kassam, 2020). 

The Study Finds website reported on the findings:

Biologists Auke-Florian Hiemstra from Naturalis Biodiversity Center and Liselotte Rambonnet from Leiden University are still examining how often and where animals are interacting the most with COVID products humans are discarding. Their samples and observations span the globe, from Brazil to Malaysia, coming from social media, websites, and local newspaper reports.

Researchers note incidents of foxes in the United Kingdom and birds in Canada all becoming entangled in discarded face masks. Hedgehogs, seagulls, crabs, and even bats are all encountering the disposable plastics in the environment.

The scientists also credited photographers, litter collectors, birdwatchers, wildlife rescue centers, and veterinarians who contributed to their project.

“As a result of this, we can learn more about the impact of this category of disposable products on wildlife,” Rambonnet said in a press release on the project. “We therefore ask people to keep sharing their observations so that we can maintain an up-to-date overview.”

People are asked to submit their COVID-19 litter observations online at www.covidlitter.com.

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An 11-year-old girl in Bellevue, Nebraska, has been working hard to raise money to buy a police K-9 vest.

“He works patrol and narcotics. So patrol being he’ll go out and find bad guys for us and narcotics he’ll sniff for drugs,” Bellevue police officer Jim Bartley told WOWT of his K-9 named Max.

The department’s K-9 unit has four dogs but only two have the vests they need.

“It’s not something we can budget for because the dog’s life, working life is anywhere from 5-7 years. So typically it’s not something we’re able to buy,” Bartley explained.

However, when Izzy Greenfelder learned of the need, she decided to help by selling dog treats through her mom’s company, Dogalicous Dog Treats.

“When we went to their training they said they wanted lightweight, bulletproof vests, so I wanted to help them,” she commented.

In the course of the past year, Izzy raised more than $2,000 to purchase a custom vest for Max that will keep him safe while working with his partner.

“I have a vest on that I always wear to work, and it makes me more confident when I go out and do my job,” Bartley said, adding, “So now knowing that Max has one as well, this is a really nice gift.”

In a Facebook post on Saturday, Dogalicious Treats shared a photo of Izzy and Max wearing his vest, writing, “A special thank you to all of my wonderful customers, family, and friends that helped her goal come true”:

Although it is the first K-9 vest the company bought, it will not be the last.

“Starting this year wear doing dog scarves and now dog seatbelts that we’re putting labels and just different crafts on to keep raising money,” said Izzy’s mom, Brandi Kawula.

“So whether it’s for another dog for Bellevue or maybe one of the other community areas,” she concluded.

Via DailyMail:

Biden’s press secretary Jen Psaki has stood by the decision by San Diego school officials to provide in-person teaching to migrant teenagers before children return to the classroom.

Parents are angry over plans for teachers providing in-person instruction to migrant children while their kids have been stuck at home slogging through virtual Zoom sessions.

Teachers from the San Diego County Office of Education as well as other nonprofit organizations started providing educational services on Monday to some of the 500 minors who arrived from Texas and Arizona over the weekend – a week before full in-person learning begins.

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