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Vice president and Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris rallied thousands of supporters in Atlanta, Georgia, on Tuesday, where she defended her support for harsher immigration and border enforcement policies. Harris compared her record to Donald Trump’s and blamed the Republican presidential nominee for tanking a bipartisan bill that would have further militarized the southern border.
Vice President Kamala Harris: “Our administration worked on the most significant border security bill in decades. Some of the most conservative Republicans in Washington, D.C., supported the bill. Even the Border Patrol endorsed it. It was all set to pass, but at the last minute, Trump directed his allies in the Senate to vote it down.”
Supporters: “Boo!”
Vice President Kamala Harris: “Right.”
Harris has touted recent endorsements by more than a dozen mayors in Arizona, a border state, including that of Republican John Giles of Mesa, who praised Harris’ backing of the failed bipartisan bill. Immigration advocates say the legislation would have further eroded the rights of asylum seekers.
https://abcnews.go.com/US/migrants-desperate-live-us-endure-inhumane-conditions-mexican/story?id=99108515
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/1745-9133.12580
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2023/12/27/immigration-court-backlog-grows/72030952007/
There is absolutely a crisis at the border, just not the one that conservative media has manufactured.
The bill in question gave billions to ICE, CPB, US martials, and others to hire more officers and increase detention capacity.
If the purpose of the bill was to process immigrants so they could legally stay in the country and get jobs with papers and all, they wouldn’t spend billions building cages for the immigrants in the country or shut the border down, making things worse for the ones already stuck outside the border.
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I feel like this part isn’t true. Is this true? Idk, maybe it is.
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Interesting that you don’t like this
I talked way up at the top of the thread about more details of what’s going on at the border and why the bill is the way that it is. I would ask you the same thing I asked before: What should Biden/Harris do?
I linked the bill, page 64
64 SEN. APPRO.
1UNITED STATES MARSHALS SERVICE
2FEDERAL PRISONER DETENTION For an additional amount for ‘‘United States Mar-
3shals Service—Federal Prisoner Detention’’,
4$210,000,000, to remain available until expended, for de-
5tention costs due to enforcement activities along the south-
6ern and northern borders
If you find yourself in control of the machine that crushes orphans, your primary concern shouldn’t be making sure it has all the resources it needs to function.
Appoint a head of ICE who will fire every single officer and sell off or destroy every asset. Any remaining budget can be used to process claims and arrange housing/job placement for immigrants.
End all economic warfare and other hostile actions against Caribbean/Central/South American countries. You can’t torpedo Mexico’s economy via NAFTA, and ask why you’re getting a flood of Mexicans, then torpedo Venezuela’s economy via sanctions and ask why you’re getting a flood of Venezuelans, torpedo Nicaragua’s economy via coup, etc.
Ah, got it. Fair play.
He tries, congress and the courts say no because that’s not how that works. (Just as they did for way more reasonable things than this that he tried to order to have happen. That’s the whole thing with Project 2025 is to undo the guard rails that prevent presidents from simply making massive changes to the system on a whim.)
What should he try next?
He can tell the courts to fuck off, and as far as congress goes, he only needs 50%+1 in the senate to approve an appointment, and he’s more than capable of whipping that vote given that the organization that sends migrants to camps is unpopular among dem constituents.
Ah yes! I mean, you’re right; he can tell whoever he wants, whatever he wants, as Trump demonstrated. The issue is, what would happen with his orders to ICE to start doing things that were illegal as far as existing statutes about what ICE is supposed to do. And then that in the face of an order by the courts to do definitely obey the statutes.
Biden would probably be fine. He might lose some support in the election but whatever. Whoever implemented those orders would probably join the handful of Trump administration members who did the same and wound up in federal prison for it. Eventually, people would notice the pattern of their coworkers going to prison for obeying Biden’s instructions and stop listening to him. Nixon and Trump tested the boundaries of this system with varying levels of success, and a bunch of people in their orbits went to prison and a bunch more than that stopped listening to them.
So. Biden tells the courts to fuck off, people go to prison, the remaining staff do not obey his instructions as far as what ICE should do, because they don’t want to also go to prison. The border conditions remain a bone chilling nightmare. What should he try next?
There’s nothing illegal about firing ICE officers and selling off assets, they do that all the time.
Decreasing ICE and CPB’s capacity to make things worse is better than nothing.
There is absolutely something illegal about ignoring a judge who is telling you that what you are doing doesn’t match the statutes that describe how ICE is supposed to operate.
What? No it isn’t (or, not automatically). Like I say, I already explained this in my longer message. There are 3 million people waiting for their cases to be heard, in a system that wasn’t designed for that many. Decreasing the funding will make things worse for those people (when they were already pretty pretty fuckin bad); increasing the funding so the prisons are not overcrowded will make it better.
The problems of racism and horror in the immigration apparatus of this country are very real. The magical-thinking solutions you are proposing will either accomplish nothing or make things worse. People who are similarly confused on the issue, and thinking that they need to oppose the Democrats’ attempts at legislation, because if it isn’t waving a magic wand to make things instantly better then it must represent making things worse on purpose, have created quite a lot of real human misery that is ongoing including up to the present day.
I’m gonna take it from this that you have no answer to what Biden / Harris should do to make things better. There are realistic answers that are better than what they are doing, but nothing you’ve said comes anywhere close to that.