Pic via Immigration and Customs Enforcement

The number of unauthorized immigrants in the United States has fallen slightly since 2010, according to a report released by the Department of Homeland Security. The department study indicates that “in summary, an estimated 11.5 million unauthorized immigrants were living in the United States in January 2011 compared to a revised 2010 estimate of 11.6 million.”

“These results suggest little to no change in the unauthorized immigrant population from 2010 to 2011,” the report states, adding that “it is unlikely that the unauthorized immigrant population increased after 2007 given relatively high U.S. unemployment, improved economic conditions in Mexico, record low numbers of apprehensions of unauthorized immigrants at U.S. borders, and greater levels of border enforcement.”

The report adds that with 6.8 million, or 59 percent of America’s unauthorized immigrants, “Mexico continued to be the leading source country of unauthorized immigration to the United States.”

El Salvador (660,000), Guatemala (520,000), Honduras (380,000) and China (280,000) were the “next leading source countries.”

According to Reuters, “immigration has been a hot topic on the presidential campaign trail with Mitt Romney, the leading candidate for the Republican nomination to face President Barack Obama in November’s election, backing tougher measures to crack down on illegal immigrants,” while President Obama “has sought to block some tough new state laws aimed at pushing out illegal immigrants” and urged “Congress to pass a comprehensive package of immigration reforms, but that effort has gone nowhere.”

According to the Department of Homeland Security report in 2011, Florida, with 740,000, had the third largest number of unauthorized residents while “California remained the leading state of residence of the unauthorized immigrant population in 2011, with 2.8 million,” followed by “Texas with 1.8 million unauthorized residents.”

Florida’s unauthorized immigrant population declined from 800,000 in 2000 to 740,000 according to the report.

Department of Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano (Photo: Flickr/The National Guard)

Former members of a task force on Secure Communities sent a letter this week to Department of Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano calling on her to suspend the immigration enforcement program.

The letter also expressed their concern that an Arizona law enforcement agency that has committed a “wide range of civil rights violations” still has access to Secure Communities.

Brittney Nystrom of the National Immigration Forum and Andrea Zuniga DiBitetto of the AFL-CIO write in the letter:

As former members of the Homeland Security Advisory Council, Task Force on Secure Communities, we note with concern the multiple findings of racial profiling of Latinos and other civil rights violations by the Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office released by the Department of Justice (DOJ) on December 15.

The findings of a pattern and practice of racial profiling of Latinos in Maricopa County, Arizona, demonstrate that abuse can occur while the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) is actively collaborating with enforcement agencies through both the 287(g) program and the Secure Communities program and through informal collaboration between DHS and law enforcement agencies.

“My understanding is that [Immigration and Customs Enforcement] is continuing to operate Secure Communities in Maricopa County despite the findings of discriminatory policing by that sheriffs department,” Nystrom tells The Florida Independent.

Secure Communities allows local law enforcement agencies to check the fingerprints of people they detain and match them up with federal immigration and criminal databases, with the stated goal of deporting undocumented immigrant criminals. All 67 Florida jurisdictions participate in Secure Communities.

Napolitano said in October that the termination of Secure Communities “would only weaken public safety, and move the immigration enforcement system back towards the ad hoc approach where non-criminal aliens are more likely to be removed than criminals.”

Opponents of Secure Communities have repeatedly called on the Obama administration to end the fingerprint-sharing program because immigrants who have committed no crime are being detained and deported, leaving behind U.S.-born children and families that, in many cases, will struggle to make ends meet.

Nystrom says that Homeland Security officials said they were “limiting” the Maricopa sheriff’s office’s “access to Secure Communities, but that in [her] thinking and Andrea’s thinking doesn’t go far enough to prevent someone who was picked up in a biased manner from being put into the deportation machine.”

The letter adds that the Secure Communities termination should also include Alabama, “where immigration enforcement laws that have been challenged as unconstitutional by the Department of Justice are in effect.”

A new study says border fences are disrupting the migration of black bears.

A recently published study (pdf) to be disseminated to the U.S. Department of Homeland Security reports that barriers built to keep out illegal immigrants are blocking black bears in Arizona from their relatives in Mexico. Border fences are choking off bear migration corridors that are already under stress from urban encroachment, according to the study authored by the Department of Agriculture’s Todd C. Atwood and Julie K. Young and other biologists.

“While black bears are not a species of concern in [the] U.S., they are in Mexico, which represents the southern extent of their historic and current range,” the study reads, noting that border bears “may be particularly vulnerable to further loss of habitat due to urbanization and border security activities.”

The study focused on Arizona’s desert Sky Island mountain ranges, which are also home to mountain lions and jaguars and encompass one of the nation’s most biologically diverse regions.

Its findings come as the State of Arizona is soliciting private donations to build a wall in an attempt to secure the remaining 82 miles of the state’s 388-mile border with Mexico that isn’t fenced.

A mishmash of barriers currently cover about one-third of the 2,000-mile U.S.-Mexico border with nearly half of them in Arizona and the rest equally split between California, New Mexico and Texas.

The U.S. Border Patrol first began erecting barriers in 1990 to deter illegal entries and drug smuggling in San Diego and, in 1996, Congress passed the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act, which bestowed what is now the Department of Homeland Security broad authority to construct fencing. Then in 2005, Congress passed the REAL ID Act, authorizing Homeland Security to waive all legal requirements to expedite the construction of border barriers. The Secure Fence Act of 2006 directed Homeland Security to build 850 more miles of border fencing, though that requirement was later modified to authorize fencing along not fewer than 700 miles.

Republican congressmen and women from Colorado have historically voted for federal fence-building while Democrats such as Mark Udall and Diana DeGette have opposed it and questioned the effectiveness of barriers, their cost, environmental impacts and diplomatic ramifications.

Border security doesn’t come cheap. The Government Accountability Office estimates (pdf) the federal government doled out between $400,000 to $4.8 million for every mile of border fencing it constructed and that another $6.5 billion is needed for its maintenance over the next 20 years.

Atwood, Young and the other biologists urge government officials and policymakers to identify opportunities to maintain and restore suitable wildlife habitat to protect borderland migrations.

“Currently, in the western U.S., there is opportunity to integrate connectivity conservation with land-planning. For example, land-use planners in the Tucson metropolitan area have developed a regional conservation plan with a specific focus on maintaining wildlife linkages and increasing the permeability of transportation corridors. The information we present here, if incorporated into land-use planning, may aid in ameliorating the adverse effects of inevitable urbanization and border security activities. If connectivity can be maintained, there is greater likelihood of the longterm persistence of species such as black bears, mountain lions, and jaguars along the U.S.-Mexico border.”

Sheriff Joe Arpaio (Photo: Flickr/Gage Skidmore)

Homeland Security writes:

The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) is troubled by the Department of Justice’s (DOJ) findings of discriminatory policing practices within the Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office (MCSO). Discrimination undermines law enforcement and erodes the public trust. DHS will not be a party to such practices. Accordingly, and effective immediately, DHS is terminating MCSO’s 287(g) jail model agreement and is restricting the Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office access to the Secure Communities program. DHS will utilize federal resources for the purpose of identifying and detaining those individuals who meet U.S. Immigration Customs Enforcement’s (ICE) immigration enforcement priorities. The Department will continue to enforce federal immigration laws in Maricopa County in smart, effective ways that focus our resources on criminal aliens, recent border crossers, repeat and egregious immigration law violators and employers who knowingly hire illegal labor.

A Department of Justice report released Thursday found that Arpaio, an advocate for controversial immigration enforcement and detention measures, has committed a “wide range of civil rights violations.”

The Department of Justice states that the ongoing civil rights investigation of the Arpaio’s office found “reasonable cause to believe that MCSO, under the leadership of Sheriff Joseph M. Arpaio, has engaged in a pattern or practice of misconduct that violates the Constitution and federal law.”

“We are pleased the Department of Justice report compelled the Department of Homeland Security to take steps today that should have been taken years ago,” said Chris Newman, Legal Director of the National Day Laborer Organizing Network in a written statement.

The Network adds:

As the DOJ report implies, DHS was an accomplice in the rights violations caused by Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio. DHS enabled Sheriff Arpaio to conduct his reign of terror, and expansion of the Maricopa Sheriff’s approach led to SB 1070 and to the potential Arizonification of the country. Today, the Department of Justice again acted to clean up the mess caused by failed DHS policies that enlist local police into the business of enforcing unjust immigration laws. It is time for DHS to stop contributing to the civil rights crisis described in the DOJ report and end the programs that made Arpaio’s crimes possible.”

The National Immigration Forum writes that the “Justice Department findings confirm what the American public had already suspected: Sheriff Arpaio has been more concerned with headlines than the Constitution and the law,” adding that they “also hail Department of Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano’s prompt termination of the MCSO’s 287g agreement, which delegates authority for immigration enforcement to local officials, and restriction of the MCSO’s access to the Secure Communities program.”

Immigrant advocates across the U.S. have denounced Secure Communities, a highly controversial federal immigration enforcement program critics say contributes to racial profiling, demanding that the Obama administration terminate the program immediately.

Photo: Sheriff Joe Arpaio (Flickr/Gage Skidmore)

An Immigration and Customs Enforcement officer (Pic via ice.gov)

The Department of Homeland Security announced Thursday it will begin reviewing about 300,000 deportation proceedings to implement prosecutorial discretion measures laid out in a June 2011 memo issued by John Morton, director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (aka ICE).

The Office of Principal Legal Advisor at ICE in charge of the review has been directed to review “incoming cases and cases pending in immigration court.” The purpose of the review, according to guidance directives also issued Thursday, “is to identify those cases that reflect a high enforcement priority for the Department of Homeland Security.”

According to The New York Times, “the accelerated triage of the court docket — about 300,000 cases — is intended to allow severely overburdened immigration judges to focus on deporting foreigners who committed serious crimes or pose national security risks, Homeland Security officials said.”

The guidance distributed to all immigration attorneys in Customs and Border Protection, U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services and ICE lists terrorism, felony convictions, murder, sexual abuse, drug trafficking, illegal entry, reentry and immigration fraud among the crimes that are removal priorities.

Cases not considered enforcement priorities include members of the armed forces, children who have been in the U.S. for more than five years or came to the U.S. before the age of 16, people over 65, domestic violence victims, and people seeking asylum.

The Times adds that “immigration agency lawyers will examine all new cases just arriving in immigration courts nationwide, with an eye to closing cases that are low-priority according to the Morton memorandum, before they advance into the court system,” while “immigrants identified as high priority will see their cases put onto an expedited calendar for judges to order their deportations, Homeland Security officials said.”

Immigrant advocates have had different reactions to the review of deportation proceedings.

The National Day Laborers Organizing Network argues that Thursday’s announcement

highlights how completely out of whack the Administration’s immigration priorities are. President Obama has chosen to deport 400,000 people a year. Moreover, its decision to turn local police into “force multipliers” through [Secure Communities] has caused immeasurable suffering: families have been destroyed, community safety has been undermined, and Latinos’ civil rights have been imperiled as we witness an entire generation of Americans in Waiting criminalized by these policies.

B. Loewe of the National Day Laborer Organizing Network told the Independent in August that the case review

may bring with it an expansion of the definition of “criminal,” because the damaging label is never actually defined. As we’ve seen in Secure Communities, those who they define as criminals are people whose only offense may be driving without a license or may actually only be immigration-related. There’s the potential for many to be condemned under the agency’s new scarlet letter, the title of “criminal.”

The National Immigration Forum, meanwhile, welcomed ”the launch of the Administration’s long-promised review designed to reduce the backlog of deportation cases and prioritize resources. In this time of great concern about our nation’s fiscal health, it makes sense to focus valuable law enforcement resources on the deportation of individuals who are genuine threats to public and national safety.”

The Federation for American Immigration Reform (aka FAIR) writes that the Department of Homeland Security is beginning “Amnesty Screenings” with the move. FAIR supports immigration enforcement measures like Arizona’s infamous S.B. 1070 and “lower immigration levels.” It has said the prosecutorial discretion measures issued by Morton “constitute nothing less than the granting of administrative amnesty to hundreds of thousands of illegal aliens.”

Immigrant rights organizations will join today in a national day of action in six U.S. cities to deliver a report that documents what they see as Secure Communities abuses, demanding that the Obama administration terminate the immigration enforcement program immediately.

Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s Secure Communities program allows local law enforcement agencies to check the fingerprints of people they detain and match them up with federal immigration and criminal databases, with the stated goal of deporting criminals.

“Restoring Community,” a report on “ICE’S Failed ‘Secure Communities’ Program,” issued by 14 organizations, states:

S-Comm multiplies the force of unjust immigration laws and enforcement policies that tear families apart, that penalize parents for working to make a better life for their children, and that further entrench inequality. It multiplies laws and enforcement policies that, in effect, make pursuit of the American Dream a criminal proposition for current generations of immigrants. That such a program should be the showcase policy of an Administration that presents itself as a champion of immigration reform is a betrayal. Multiplying the force of misguided policy and unjust laws is not reform—it is a step backwards.

In the report, police officials explain that Secure Communities diminishes trust between local communities and law enforcement agencies and compromises public safety.

Former Los Angeles Police Chief William J. Bratton says, “Criminals are the biggest benefactors when immigrants fear the police. We can’t solve crimes that aren’t reported because the victims are afraid to come forward to the police.”

Ron Hampton, president of Black Law Enforcement in America, says in the report his opposition to Secure Communities “is rooted in common sense: counties and states across the country rely on the relationships of the communities they serve to combat and solve crime. It is foolish to sever this tie in order to enforce civil immigration laws.”

Roberto Lovato, writer and co-founder of Presente.org, tells The Independent that Latinos have organized many events and actions to tell Obama to terminate Secure Communities, but “he is paying attention to his campaign managers like David Axelrod. And he has done it to the tune of 1 million deportations. We are sending a message to the Obama campaign: We know what you are doing. Stop, or risk losing the election.”

According to Lovato, Presente.org has gathered more than 23,000 signatures to ask Obama to end Secure Communities.

“We are not telling people to not vote for Obama,” Lovato says. “He is doing that all by himself. He is doing what the Republicans want him to do on immigration. If he does the right thing and stops Secure Communities now he will get glowing support from one of the most important and growing constituencies.”

The report adds that “S-Comm, like SB 1070 and its copycats, encourages a criminalization of immigrants that is inherently incompatible with the goal of integration and reform.”

The federal government’s decision 10 days ago to terminate agreements with local authorities to implement Secure Communities only heightened the opposition of immigrant advocate organizations.

Jonathan Fried — executive director of We Count!, a Miami-Dade immigrant and worker advocacy organization — tells The Independent the decision to terminate local agreements is antidemocratic. “We are calling on our allies in the Democratic Party to hold President Obama accountable for his immigration policies,” Fried says.

Fried says that the administration’s willingness to hold a hard line on immigration is a calculated electoral strategy because it thinks the campaign can risk losing Latino voters.

Today’s report recommends:

1. The Secure Communities program should be ended.
2. The current Department of Homeland Security Office of Inspector General audit of Secure Communities should be

completed and the Department of Justice Office of Inspector General should begin an investigation into the FBI’s role in Secure Communities.
3. Criticism of Secure Communities should be applied to inform changes to other ICE ACCESS programs, and the entanglement of local criminal law enforcement and federal civil immigration functions should be stopped and reversed.
4. States and localities should not be compelled to participate in immigration enforcement programs, including the forwarding of fingerprints and other biometric information to the Department of Homeland Security.

According to ICE, Secure Communities was developed to remove “criminal aliens who pose a threat to public safety, and repeat immigration violators.”

The report counters that “ICE’s own numbers reveal that most of the individuals arrested and deported under S-Comm in fact have minor or no criminal convictions. Through May 2011, one-third of all immigrants whom ICE has arrested under the program have never been convicted of anything. More than half (59%) have either no convictions or are guilty of only misdemeanors, including traffic offenses.”

It adds that “Miami-Dade County in Florida shows noncriminal deportation rates of over 50%–a significant departure from the national average of 29%.”

Presente.org’s Felipe Matos — who walked from Miami to Washington, D.C., in early 2010 to support the DREAM Act — tells the Independent that “most people deported under Secure Communities are non-criminals” and that “a lot of our families are getting separated.” “This is not only happening in Miami but across the nation,” Matos says.

Matos adds that in 2012 Obama needs the Latino vote, but asks, “Will he continue taking actions that alienate the Latino community? Or is he going to do something positive for us? That is why we are asking him to terminate Secure Communities.”

The Department of Homeland Security announced Friday that it was canceling agreements with 40 states, including Colorado, to operate the Secure Communities program in those states. The program, though, lives on as the federal government simply decided it did not need states’ permission to run the program in those states.

From the Los Angeles Times:

After months of protest from some Democratic governors, the Obama administration is cancelling more than 40 agreements it has signed with states under the Secure Communities program, although the move will have no apparent impact on the controversial effort to identify and deport convicted felons.

The Department of Homeland Security notified governors Friday that the program does not need their approval to operate, and the cancellations will not affect the ability to check the immigration status of anyone whose fingerprints are in an FBI criminal database…

The gist of the program is that local law enforcement agencies share the fingerprints of people suspected of being in the country illegally with the FBI which may pass them on to immigration officials.

With this decision, the feds are saying they can work directly with local law enforcement agencies without any approval or involvement at the state level.

The controversial program has been shown to snare far more small time law breakers than the hardened criminals it is often touted as targeting.

The move also serves to blunt the effect of individual states saying they won’t participate.

“We think this change to Secure Communities poses a real danger,” said Dee Dee Garcia Blase, executive director of Somos Republicans. “There are a lot of flaws with the program and for it to continue unchecked by the states is a problem. We are asking people to call the Obama administration and ask them to end the program,” she told the Colorado Independent.

Former Sen. Rick Santorum answered an immigration question first, stating that “the federal government should not require states to provide government services.”

CNN’s John King, the debate moderator, then asked Rep. Ron Paul whether care should be provided to the 5-year-old child of an undocumented immigrant who walks into an emergency room.

Paul replied: “We shouldn’t have the mandates… we shouldn’t give them easy citizenship.” He then argued that the Catholic Church used to provide health care to immigrants, implying that religious charities could replace hospital emergency rooms, which since 1986 have been federally required to provide care regardless of the patient’s ability to pay. Paul was indignant in his opposition to the ER mandate: “You don’t have to say, ‘you’re not going to have care or there won’t be any care and everybody is going to starve to death and — and die on the streets without medical care.’ That’s the implication of the question. That’s just not true, and you shouldn’t accept it,” he finished, to applause from the audience.

Herman Cain then argued that in order to “deal with the illegals that are already here, [we should] empower the states to do what the federal government hasn’t done, won’t do, and can’t do.” However, he finished his answer with a rejection of Paul’s support for denying emergency care: “We are a compassionate nation. Of course they’re going to get care. But let’s fix the problem.”

Tim Pawlenty then argued that the issue of birthright citizenship proves the need to appoint conservative judges. “That result is because a U.S. Supreme Court determined that that right exists, notwithstanding language in the Constitution,” presumably referring to the 1898 decision stating that the Fourteenth Amendment granted citizenship to anyone born in the United States. The decision, which Pawlenty apparently opposes, concerned a man born in San Francisco to Chinese parents who was denied reentry into the United States under the Chinese Exclusion Act.

Newt Gingrich took the final immigration question arguing that there was a middle ground between deporting “20 million illegal immigrants or [legalizing] all of them.” (Twenty million is the number King gave Gingrich, but the U.S. Dept. of Homeland Security estimates the actual number illegal immigrants in the U.S. is more like 10.8 million, as of January 2010.) Sounding a note of relative moderation, he concluded by stating, “There are humane, practical steps to solve this problem, if we can get the politicians and the news media to just deal with it honestly.” Unfortunately, King did not ask Gingrich if that meant he supports legalization of some percentage of the undocumented population, the answer to which would surely have provoked some reaction from the other candidates.

The U.S. Supreme Court Thursday upheld (pdf.) the 2007 Legal Arizona Workers Act, a decision that deepens the debate between between supporters and detractors of mandatory state and federal E-Verify programs.

According to the Arizona attorney general’s office, the Legal Arizona Workers Act prohibits businesses from knowingly or intentionally hiring an “alien who does not have the legal right or authorization under federal law to work in the United States.” The law also requires employers in Arizona to use E-Verify (a free web-based service offered by the Department of Homeland Security) to verify the employment eligibility of all new employees.

Attorney Bill Flynn, head of the Florida-based immigration practice Fowler White Boggs, tells The Florida Independent that the highlight in the ruling is its decision on “whether the states have any say in immigration law.”

Many argue immigration matters are solely a responsibility of the federal government. “The decision here is that where it is a local or state licensing situation it does not fall under preemption,” Flynn says. ”The thrust of the court opinion is that Arizona can pull your business license if you knowingly employ unauthorized aliens.”

Flynn agrees that this decision indicates that Arizona’s law does not infringe on federal immigration oversight and that this ruling will open the way for other states to require E-Verify.

“The federal government will not enact comprehensive immigration reform. Congress is simply too politicized to do anything statesman like [that],” Flynn says. “It is not a good thing that 50 different states have slightly different laws, but if you’re sitting in the state and you want to regulate undocumented workers, the states need to step up.”

“A lot of what gets put forth is for politicians who are ambitious to say, ‘Look, I was tough on immigration,’” Flynn says. “The part that they miss is that if they get real tough then it hurts the state’s economy.”

Several studies have shown that Arizona businesses (.pdf) lost hundreds of millions of dollars due to reactions against S.B. 1070, the state’s controversial immigration-enforcement law.

Flynn says the Supreme Court decision will impact Florida, where an immigration bill almost passed an this year, failing in the last few days. “I would be surprised if they didn’t pass a bill that has E-Verify in it,” he says, adding that Florida, with an estimated 800,000 undocumented people, wold suffer a huge detrimental effect on the economy if they all leave.

The Federation for American Immigration Reform (aka FAIR) says it is “proud to have shaped this landmark legislation,” saying that, with this court ruling, “other states considering mandatory E-Verify laws now have a green light to proceed and can do so with the confidence that they are working within a legal framework on behalf of their citizens.”

Somos Republicans — a conservative Republican Hispanic organization — stated: “Under this ruling, the federal government, no longer, needs to create a federal E-verify mandatory programs because states have the right to pass this law if they see it fit to their economic benefits, or politician motivations. Thus, Congressman Lamar Smith does not have to seek passing a mandatory federal E-verify that has been already granted to states by this Supreme Court ruling. ”

Rep. Lamar Smith, R-Texas, announced recently that he will propose a bill to mandate the use of E-Verify at the federal level.

Participants in a Tuesday conference call hosted by the National Immigration Forum said mandatory E-Verify, whether at the state or federal level, without immigration reform, would harm the U.S. economy.

The National Immigration Law Center stated:

We’re deeply disappointed that the Court has allowed this law, which has proven to have serious economic ramifications for Arizona’s workers and employers, to remain in effect. However, the ruling does not grant states the right to enforce immigration law — the issue at the heart of current legal challenges to SB 1070, Arizona’s racial profiling law. State legislators considering this decision a free pass to enact and implement legislation targeting immigrants are gravely mistaken.

The nation’s public health systems are ill-equipped to deal with a major nuclear emergency according to a 2010 analysis by the U.S. Dept. of Homeland Security.

ProPublica reports that according to the DHS Strategy for Improving the National Response from an IND [Improvised Nuclear Device] Attack, “current capabilities can only handle a few radiation injuries at any one time,” and, “there is no strategy for notifying the public in real time of recommendations on shelter or evacuation priorities.”

And there is other evidence of gaps in preparedness.

One example: The U.S. Strategic National Stockpile stopped purchasing the best-known agent to counter radioactive iodine-induced thyroid cancer in young people, potassium iodide, about two years ago and designated the limited remaining quantities “excess,” according to information provided by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to ProPublica. Despite this, the CDC website still lists potassium iodide as one of only four drugs in the stockpile specifically for use in radiation emergencies.

Many states don’t have a basic radiation emergency plan for communicating with the public or responding to the health risks. Even something as fundamental as the importance of sheltering inside sturdy buildings to avoid exposure to radioactive fallout from a nuclear explosion — which experts say could determine whether huge numbers of people live or die — hasn’t been communicated to the public.

Another problem is that people don’t always respond when offered opportunities to prepare for nuclear emergencies.

Several years ago Michigan, like many other states, sent vouchers for potassium iodide to people living within a 10-mile radius of a nuclear power plant. The goal was to give them the medication free of charge from local pharmacies, so they wouldn’t risk their lives searching for the drug in an emergency, when they should be sheltering in place or evacuating.
But only about 6 percent of the residents picked up their allotted supply, said Fales, the Michigan regional medical director, a rate that’s similar to some other states. “So much for pre-event planning,” he concluded.