The Border Crisis Chronicles, Family Reunification Edition
No person shall "be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law." Of course, if you don’t view immigrants as people....
Last month’s ‘border crisis’ has faded from the forefront of public consciousness. The thing many in the media said would cost Democrats control of the House in 2022 isn’t a thing anymore.
Don’t worry, the “crisis” will be back as soon as it’s politically expedient for Republicans. They started it, in the sense that events and trends at the border already occurring under the Former Guy, became news the day after the inauguration.
From Slate:
No one has been more committed to the “border crisis” framing than Fox News, though; according to the Nexis database, Fox has used the term at least 78 times since inauguration.
In fact, the first mention by any major national publication or network of an urgent, Biden-specific crisis appears to have taken place Jan. 21, one whole day after the new president had taken the oath of office, on Fox personality Laura Ingraham’s prime-time show.
One of the experts Ingraham put forth to confirm the crisis’s existence was Stephen Miller, the senior Trump adviser with well-documented intellectual roots in the community of nationalists who advocate strict immigration laws because they believe that the U.S. should be a white-controlled country; Miller was responsible for creating and/or pushing through Trump’s most notorious border policies, including the “zero tolerance” initiative to separate parents from their young children. Ingraham’s other guest was Mark Morgan, who served as the acting director of both Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Customs and Border Protection under Trump.
The message of their segment was that Biden, by moving to halt deportations during a review of immigration policy, was encouraging and attracting violent criminal
***
The first round of family reunifications got a lot of play yesterday, putting a distinctly human face on what was a deliberately cruel approach by the Trump administration toward a global crisis.
Here’s a snip from the Washington Post about the reunification of Sandra Ortíz with her son Bryan Chavez in San Ysidro:
Ortíz and Chávez had fled their village in Mexico’s Michoacán state, where it seemed as though everything that could go wrong did. Her husband disappeared in 2010; his body was found two days later with bullet wounds. Then the local cartel delivered the body of their teenage neighbor, Chávez’s friend, dismembered in a bag. And then they began trying to recruit Chávez.
That’s when we decided to go,” Ortíz said.
It was October 2017. The Trump administration’s “zero tolerance” policy wouldn’t be officially implemented until April 2018, but authorities had already begun separating migrant families at the border.
Ortíz and Chávez turned themselves in at the San Ysidro port of entry and requested asylum. Two days later, she says, they were taken to a nondescript office.
“They told me to say goodbye to my son, that I wouldn’t see him again,” she said. “And then they took him away.”
Eventually about a thousand families will be reunited, a process that’s moved at an agonizingly slow pace because the Trump administration’s zero tolerance guidelines didn’t bother to include record keeping.
As Digby noted, “It might have been helpful if the Trump administration had been doing something other than screech about the election during the final two months of their term — and let the Biden team have a transition.”
While the current administration says they’re working day and night on unifications, much of the hard work of locating people who were dumped over the border has been undertaken by volunteer attorneys and non-profit groups.
***
San Diego County will soon be providing legal assistance to immigrants facing deportation hearings.
Starting out as a $5 million one-year pilot project, the vision is for it to become a permanent program as part of the County Office of the Public Defender, working with regional immigrant support groups and nonprofit organizations.
Following a virtual two hour public hearing, Supervisor Terra Lawson-Remer’s proposal was approved by a 3-2 margin.
From the Times of San Diego:
Lawson-Remer said this issue was personal to her, because three of her grandparents fled Europe because they feared for their lives. Establishing a legal defense program “will strengthen our values as Americans,” she said.
Supervisors Joel Anderson and Jim Desmond cast the dissenting votes.
Needless to say, the local righties were incensed at the idea of something other than the Second Amendment being supported.
https://twitter.com/KUSINews/status/1389725141651779586?s=20
Here’s the 5th Amendment: No person shall "be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law."
Of course, if you don’t view immigrants as people....
***
The one thing about border/immigration that nearly everybody agrees on is that a comprehensive approach is needed.
In 2013, the Senate passed a bipartisan immigration reform bill, 68-32. It contained a path to citizenship over 13 years for undocumented workers and $40 billion for border security. House Republican couldn’t be bothered to even give it a hearing.
We’ve seen this same pattern played out repeatedly in recent years. A bipartisan bill supported by the Bush administration died a similar death in 2007.
In fact, the rhetoric about “comprehensive immigration reform” is simply bs.
The Washington Post’s Greg Sargent calls this the Lucy and the football approach.
In recent years, Republicans have run a certain playbook so often that it has become an online meme. GOP senators hint at support for Democratic initiatives only if more concessions are offered, yet that support almost never materializes — a game memorialized in a thousand GIFs of Lucy yanking away the football, snookering poor Charlie Brown again and again...
...Here’s how this scam works: There is no point at which Republicans will ever acknowledge that this “crisis” is being managed. They have already telegraphed that they hope to win back control of Congress in 2022 largely with a message hyping this “crisis.” As Media Matters documents, right-wing media is all in with this strategy.
Does anybody imagine there will come a point when Republicans will say, “Okay, Biden’s totally got the border under control now, so let’s get serious about working with Democrats on legalizing a lot of immigrants”?
Of course not. As it happens, the number of kids held at Border Patrol stations has dropped dramatically, partly because the administration has opened up new spaces to hold them before transfer to guardians. Apprehensions at the border are still high but leveling off.
What’s more, the administration is currently expelling large numbers of asylum-seeking adults and families, unconscionably so, without due process. Republicans pretend this isn’t happening, because it wrecks their spin that Biden’s “permissiveness” is drawing the influx
As is true with just about every part of the Democrat’s agenda, there is discussion about passing a comprehensive immigration bill through the reconciliation process, meaning that only 50 votes are necessary in the Senate.
As the New York Times noted,
A team of immigration activists and researchers as well as congressional aides is exploring the question, digging into the best way to present their case to [Senate Parliamentarian Elizabeth MacDonough].... They have found past precedents, including one from 2005, in which changes to immigration policy were allowed as part of a budget-reconciliation package, and they are tallying up the budgetary effects of the immigration proposals — which total in the tens of billions.
Researchers have dredged up supportive quotes from Republicans from 2005, when they won signoff for including a measure to recapture unused visas for high-skilled workers in a reconciliation package.
All this talk about doing an end run around the Senate’s filibuster rules is premised on all the Democrats/Independents voting as a bloc.
And to be honest, I’m not convinced that will happen.
Finally, there is an additional problem at the border unlikely to be fixed by legislative actions, namely the self-interests of the law enforcement agencies we pay to deal with immigration.
In this sense “fixing” the border problem is like “fixing” policing. There exists a culture, particularly with the leadership of the union representing Border Patrol agents, that overlaps with the views of “socially acceptable” white nationalist and rogue militia elements.
You can count on them to work to sabotage any immigration agreement not involving using a militaristic approach as its primary characteristic. It’s as if we’ve given thousands of people hammers and told them their only job is to hit nails.
Just as the underlying conditions driving immigration can’t be resolved overnight, neither will be the approach to border enforcement based on a “warrior” mentality.
https://twitter.com/TheImmCoalition/status/1389579791465132034?s=20
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