Puerto Rico's governor says no one should question the pain of Hurricane Maria victims
Puerto Rico Gov. Ricardo Rosselló pushed back against detractors of a report that found nearly 3,000 people died on the island because of Hurricane Maria.
On Twitter Thursday morning, Trump claimed without any evidence that "3,000 people did not die" from Hurricanes Maria and Irma last year, and that the number was inflated "by the Democrats in order to make me look as bad as possible when I was successfully raising Billions of Dollars to help rebuild Puerto Rico."
The official death toll of nearly 3,000 is from a study that Rosselló commissioned, conducted by George Washington University's Milken Institute School of Public Health. "We went through a rigorous scientific process, we externalized the investigation so that it was an independent investigation," Rosselló told CBS News, adding, "Neither the people of Puerto Rico nor the victims deserve their pain to be questioned."
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Relief efforts are still underway on the island, and Rosselló said it's "evident that the treatment that was given to, say, Florida or Texas was very different than the treatment given in Puerto Rico. We are second-class U.S. citizens, we live in a colonial territory, it is time to eliminate that and I implore all the elected officials, particularly now in midterm elections, to have a firm stance." People are either "for colonial territories or against them," he added. "You're either for giving equal rights to the U.S. citizens that live in Puerto Rico or you're against it."
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Catherine Garcia has worked as a senior writer at The Week since 2014. Her writing and reporting have appeared in Entertainment Weekly, The New York Times, Wirecutter, NBC News and "The Book of Jezebel," among others. She's a graduate of the University of Redlands and the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism.
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