Something curious seems to be happening at the border.  Migrants are staggering across...and dying.

This happened in two instances this week, according to the Washington Times:

Two illegal immigrants [sic] died at the border in less than 24 hours this week, in both cases succumbing just minutes after they breached the border, officials said Monday, detailing a rapidly expanding death toll from the migrant surge.

A 40-year-old Honduran woman died after being caught sneaking into the country early Monday morning, following a 33-year-old Salvadoran man's death just after noon on Sunday.

The woman collapsed 25 minutes after being caught, and was in an ambulance 10 minutes later, but the hospital was unable to revive her, Customs and Border Protection said.

The man's case was similar: He was caught at 12:10, was seen having a seizure at 12:22, was given immediate attention until an ambulance arrived at 12:29, and was at a Texas hospital by 12:45, where he was pronounced dead.

It coincides with another phenomenon being reported in the San Diego Union-Tribune, as well as in many of the local television news reports (I live here, so I see them):

In the 17 days since San Diego began receiving families who crossed the border in Texas, the downtown migrant shelter have identified 149 cases associated with a flu outbreak, according to the county.

Processing centers for migrants caught crossing the border in Texas have reported influenza cases, including one 16-year-old Guatemalan boy who died from it. Meanwhile, Border Patrol, its processing centers beyond capacity in the Rio Grande Valley area, decided to send some migrant families to San Diego stations for processing.

San Diego's shelter began experiencing an outbreak — meaning 2 cases within 72 hours — on May 20, the day after the first group of families from Texas were released from Border Patrol custody to its care, according to Dr. Dean Sidelinger, the county's deputy public health officer.

And of course, there is the upsurge in measles cases derived from illegal migrants, given the presence of a measles outbreak in parts of Guatemala and the fact that they are spreading the illness to Border Patrol agents.

As the Washington Times notes, the Left has used these incidents to decry the Border Patrol as somehow causing them.  Bad, brutal closet-Nazi Border Patrol, see, with all those people who die under their care.  That's the current narrative, and each media organ picks it up from the last one.

But it's pretty obvious that someone who staggers across the U.S. border illegally and dies shortly afterward is not someone who's been done in by the jackboots of the Border Patrol.  It's pretty obvious that such people arrived with illnesses, and those illnesses were serious.

This raises the obvious question here: is California's promise of "free" health care for indigent illegal aliens drawing the world's sick to the U.S.?  It's probably too soon to say for certain, but the promise of a free ride on health care at some of the world's best medical establishments — which pretty much no one in the entire world gets, not even people in places such as Canada and Denmark — is a powerful magnet to come on over.

Now we're starting to see sick people crossing illegally, and the Left finding a convenient reason to argue for even less border control, given that the Border Patrol is an easy mark to blame for these problems.  It's far more useful to look at the sick-people entries as a surge.

The Border Patrol official quoted by the Washington Times argues that the rigor of the journey up the belly of Mexico is probably what's responsible for migrants dropping dead once they cross illegally.  He may be right for some.  But the more disturbing possibility is that Democrats have made free health care such a draw for the sick abroad that some are making the perilous journey in their enfeebled state. 

For this, lefties can stand up and take a bow.  Instead of shipping some of their money to people in their home countries for treatment before they become illegal aliens in the U.S., they hold out the dinner triangle in California.  They should be ashamed of themselves as this reality spills out.  The issue is on them.