U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement has drafted plans to release thousands of immigrants and slash its capacity to hold detainees after the failure of a Senate border bill that would have erased a $700 million budget shortfall, according to four officials at ICE and the Department of Homeland Security.
....Some of the proposed cost savings in ICE detention would occur through attrition — deportations — but much of it would have to happen through the mass release of detainees, said the officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss internal deliberations.
This is precisely what Republicans hoped for when they killed the border bill. A mass release of detainees would produce the panic and outrage they want, largely directed against Joe Biden. It might be bad for the country, but it would be good for Donald Trump.
The cynicism on display here is jaw dropping. Everybody plays politics in an election year, but a deliberate—and entirely public—attempt to sow chaos is a new thing entirely. They need to be made to pay the price.
Kevin: the media seems to be concluding that the Democratic Houe victory on Long Island suggests they may be having some success blaming GOP instransigence and sabotage for our border issues. So maybe—who knows?—if Democrats play their cards rate and hammer away on this theme, the GOP can be shown to the electorate for what they are: vandals. It has the added advantage of being 100% true.
Do you have any confidence that Democrats will actually do that? So far, from what I’ve seen, polls indicate that a majority of the people blame Democrats for the failure to pass that border bill and blame Biden more than Trump! Republicans have been harping on the border so long that they get a pass with low information voters no matter what they do.
Democrats have forgotten how to sell products on TV. They should take a lesson from Miller Lite Beer, or Tony the Tiger, or any of the other most successful advertising campaigns that have shown the value of repetitive broadcasting of the same message, over and over until the message was indelibly engraved in the memory of everyone who watches TV.
Democrats are routinely ignored by media, so why do you say they've forgotten?
They aren’t just ignored they are often held to a much higher standard by the mainstream “liberal” media. Also the media constantly using Republican’s framing when reporting on stories. For example immigration is constantly reported on as a crisis, not as a major reason for our strong economic growth coupled with decreasing inflation. The evidence is that immigration has been a huge benefit to our economy but most of the media ignores that fact, doesn’t show pictures of crops rotting in the fields, interviews with employers desperate to find workers, etc.
The WaPo’s Catherine Rampell is one of the few who have actually reported these facts. The Times’s Krugman is another. I guarantee if Democrats tried to tell people this the mainstream media would hammer them by saying they were don’t understand the problem, are insensitive, etc.
“ The surge in immigration is a $7 trillion gift to the economy”
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2024/02/13/immigration-economy-jobs-cbo-report/
I suspect the attitude of this NY Times economics reporter is also typical of most mainstream political journalists:
Talmon Joseph Smith posted about a dinner party he had with his well-educated friends. Those friends had no clue what the CHIPS, IRA or ARP acts were. When someone replied by pointing out that Smith is literally an economics reporter Smith replied that he wasn’t the Democrats’ PR man. Clearly Smith believes that reporting actual, provable facts about the benefits that are the result of Biden’s programs means he is biased in their favor. He is willing to ignore reality in order to appease the right. I bet he is not an aberration.
https://www.readtpa.com/p/whats-up-with-the-new-york-times
Do you have any confidence that Democrats will actually do that?
Apparently in the Long Island race, Dems ran hard-hitting ads blaming GOP obstructionism for the border crisis, so, yes, I do have some confidence they'll try.
+++
Biden should make an emergency request for money to prevent this, and then he can blame them directly for refusing it.
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Or make a big gesture that he's going to move money from somewhere else like Trump did for the wall.
Somebody needs to buy a big neon sign in Times Square, sort of like that old national debt clock, Ut can show the number of illegal immigrants who are in America thanks to Trump: all those who would have been kept out by the bill Trump scuppered, all those released because of Republican budget cuts.
Republicans, hell! I was hoping for this. You should have been too.
These people came to America to try and build a better life for themselves and we threw them in prison. They are literally poor huddled masses yearning to be free, and we are freeing them.
That's an unalloyed good. If the fash want to make hay over it, let them. Describing this as "a disaster" is awful. We threw these people into prisons and now we're letting them out.
+1
And if this helps TFG win the Presidential election? He has threatened to deport millions.
doing bad things instead of good things to hopefully lessen the odds theoretical worse things is not how i want to live.
If TFG gets elected what happens to migrants will be a relatively minor issue compared to what happens to American citizen that don't obey him.
It is my read of the polls, every time the media is talking about immigration the GOP is benefitting. Sad, but true
This, and other, Republican strategy would not work, if we were not a nation of credulous rubes. Alas…
The number they're holding is a pittance of the total number of immigrants crossing the border. The question is, what is the makeup of their detentions -- are they people who were previously released in the US but did not show up for their hearing? If so, what's the damage done if they haven't committed crimes, per the WaPo article?
Back before Trump decided to stick his tiny hands in the immigration process and decided that separating minors from their parents and then caging them was the way to go, the vast majority of asylum seeking immigrants weren't detained at all.
Those who were deemed to have a case were housed within the community and monitored in a way similar to what paroles do until they had their day in court. Compliance with court dates was over 90% and the cost of housing an entire family this way was cheaper than keeping in detention a single person on their own. Not to mention sparing the families and children in particular the trauma of being sent to God knows where sperately with no easy way to reunite them down the road.
Like with all things he touches, Trump broke a system that worked well enough and was no major concern to anyone, and then made the system more inhumane, inefficient, and vastly more expensive. So of course the MAGA morons want to double down on it.
The Republicans have a recent history of pre-election actions that should be considered to be treasonous (in that these actions are against the interests of the country in order to influence elections in favor of the party's candidate for president). Examples are Nixon's extension of the Vietnam War and Reagan's work with Iran to delay release of the hostages. I see this latest scuttling of a bipartisan immigration agreement and now the possible release of detainees as a continuation of this disgusting tradition.