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It’s hard for me to have any sympathy for this position.
Tens of millions of illegal immigrants came into this country over decades, then President Biden enabled millions more. They made an app so anyone could apply for asylum and wait in the US while their claims processed (designed to take years if they ever even happened). Welfare, work authorization, no verification. Crime, gangs, murderers, pedophiles, sex traffickers, the works. People came pouring into this country. The worst of them are now sitting in jail cells across the country, known to local authorities. And we can’t deport them because bleeding heart liberals think it’s mean. We want to deport all the criminals, we want the murderers and pedophiles gone, and your actions are preventing us. You don’t want to cooperate with ICE, ok, then we are going to have to focus on deporting the illegals who aren’t sitting in jail cells. And some of them, I assume, are good people.
And we’re not going to give them all trials, they’re here illegally, deportation is their due process. Maybe in a gentler time we could have been nicer. That time is over because our immigration process was abused by the same bleeding heart liberals saying we can’t deport criminals. Cry me a river, give me a break. I don’t care if a few hundred Venezuelans with gang tattoos get deported to an El Salvadoran jail. It’s fake news of the media to suggest that we’re just kidnapping random legal immigrants and putting them in death camps.
Can Trump be trusted to deport immigrants humanely? No, because you made that impossible. This is what you wanted, this is what sanctuary cities are. We don’t have law anymore. We let in millions of immigrants and millions of criminals then said we aren’t even allowed to deport the ones who were so bad they still ended up in jail. Ok, what’s your next move? You can protest and riot in the streets and incite more bleeding hearts to pick fights with cops until more people get shot. Humane! As long as the bleeding hearts feel good.
But @Eleocharis wasn't even talking about the gentleness or lack thereof of the deportation process! The point is that the US specifically arranged for them to be shipped to the torture prison, as opposed to neutrally dumping them back in their home country and letting events take their course. "We shouldn't under any circumstances actively pay Bukele to put people in his torture prison" is pretty fucking different from "we shouldn't deport illegal immigrants back to El Salvador because Bukele might put some of them in the torture prison".
We couldn't deport them to Venezuela because Venezuela was run by Maduro, who refused to accept them.
Moreover this framing of El Salvador's prisons as a "torture prison" is inherently a little dishonest. Define "torture". In Sweden they would call American prisons torturous because we don't give criminals Xbox and weed. Singapore still uses the cane. El Salvador had a massive gang problem, the highest murder rate in the world, they put all the criminals in jail. That's bad, apparently. Now we're not allowed to deport gang members there because liberal journalists say it's inhumane, we're more enlightened than that. Why do I have to accept this characterization of Bukele's jails as "torture prisons"? It's a prison, it's not supposed to be fun.
"Deliberately inflicting serious physical pain on an individual" seems like a good, no-frills definition that avoids relativistic semantic creep where any less-than-maximally-homely prison can be called a "torture prison". I am not trying to play language games here, I am talking about the thing where CECOT detainees are allegedly beaten to the point of injury on a regular basis - not even as a punitive measure for specific documented misbehavior within the prison, but at the whim of the prison staff, including an hour-long beating meted out to all newcomers. You don't have to be a Scandinavian hyper-altruist to think that this is barbarous conduct that the US should on no account be condoning, let alone subsidizing.
(I'm not a fan of corporal punishment as it exists in Singapore, but that's still a different story. Caning over there is an actual judicial sentence, carried out in an orderly, controlled way with proper healthcare provided to the convict afterwards. This may not be our civilization, but it's recognizably a civilized process with limited scope. And even then, I still think the US paying Singapore to cane people would be a step too far.)
If you want to argue that the reports of the beatings etc. at CECOT are fabricated, well, color me skeptical, but that's a factual disagreement I can live with. If the reports are accurate, however, I don't think there's anything hyperbolic about calling it a "torture prison".
Well, tough. Where was the famous Trump bravado then? The principled thing to do in the face of such an unreasonable demand, IMO, was clearly to call Maduro's bluff and just fly them to Venezuela anyway. If Venezuelan authorities don't want to take them into custody, just set'em loose outside the airport. If my neighbor's aggressive dog hops over the fence and starts causing property damage in my yard, it's not actually up to him whether I toss the dog back over to his side of the fence. That's just… ridiculous. Particularly if I'm a zillion times stronger and wealthier and influential than said neighbor. (It'd certainly take something more than an Official Refusal from him for me to even consider paying out of my own pocket to place the dog into the custody of some third party, never mind whether that third party would abuse the dog or not.)
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I thought their home country refused them, as would be sensible for known criminals
From what I remember from reading on Kilmar - when you apply for asylum, you generally also apply for 2 other forms of protection. One is based on torture, one is based on nonrefoulment (dont return peoole to dangerous counties). But basically when you apply for asylum, you can also say "dont return me to my home country becauase theyll torture me". And sometimes you are able to get orders to not be deported to a certain country, even while being denied asylum. Which basically means (until recently, maybe?) they get to stay. So it might be that as much as home country not taking them.
I think what was happening with both Kilmar and CERCOT was that Trump admin was basically playing hardball. People were getting a bunch of nonrefoulment type protections from being returned to their home country, the bar to get that was lower, and then they could more or less just stay. And trumps response was to say "ok, maybe we cant send you back to Venezuela, but instead we can send you to a third counry, like South Sudan or El Salvador." The chance of being sent to south sudan or rwanda or whereever would nuke incentives to apply for certain protections.
In the case of Kilmar Abrego Garcia, he was sent back (deported) with a bunch of other El Salvadorans who were sent back to El Salvador. He had a nonrefoulment order that was not respected, which was a fuckup on the part of DHS. If they'd done it by the book he's likely have been detained in the US until the US came up with the Guatemala idea. The Venezuelans, as far as I can tell, were not deported -- they were sent to CECOT to be detained there (still titularly in US custody), seemingly as part of some sort of hardball the US was playing with Maduro, and after Maduro agreed to take them back they were sent from CECOT to Venezuela.
As for CECOT being a torture prison, who knows? There's stories from prisoners, but you could interview prisoners in any maximum security US prison and get similar ones. Some of them would likely even be true, because prison sucks, prisoners suck, and prison guards generally suck too.
At the very least, I don't think it's disputed that prisoners in CECOT are in horribly crowded cells and do not have any right to visitation or communication with the outside world.
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The problem is that if you want to actually get through the ~8M folks that need to be deported at 500-700K a year, you need a durable political coalition that can actually keep it up for 10-12 years.
That won't happen if you piss off enough of the marginal bleeding hearts that there is no way to do it. A paroxysm of 4 years of Trump's ICE (which he's already pulled back on, less than 9 months out) won't actually accomplish your goal.
People seem to forget that outsmarting your opponents is an allowed move in politics. Try harder not to be outsmarted.
Actually I think the Right could lean in to due process as a meme here -- especially with regards to folks who have had asylum denied, had their chance to appeal to the BIA and already ignored a final order of removal.
And yes, for those folks, deportation is the right next step. For those at other stages, they deserve some notice and a solid (5 days? 10 days?) chance to self-deport.
Sorry, your enemies were never going to just let you do it. "Bleeding hearts have a veto so we have to do what they want!" You'll do things the "moderate" and "humane" way and then they'll say it still isn't good enough and you need to do better. This is how you lose before you even try.
Everything Trump is doing right now is the moderate option. This is all right and just. We are going to deport illegal aliens and criminals no matter how many blue voters say we aren't allowed because it's mean.
Midterm elections are in 9 months. One way to lose is by declining to try, but another way to lose is deciding to try really hard, fucking everything up badly in a highly legible way, and being booted out of your position.
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Politically moderate and factually moderate are different things.
And yes, of course the median voter has a veto, that’s representative government. The point was doing it without losing the median voter and without getting outsmarted by your opponents.
Of course a party or a politician can decide to just go balls out for a few years and get whalloped. But it won’t lead to a long term accomplishments.
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What do you consider would be the non-moderate option?
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It seems to me as an external outlier that quite a few of the 'heartbreaking story of peaceful productive illegal immigrant removed stories' are these people, though. Cases where they entered the USA in 2005 or whatever, have explicitly run through all of their options for appeals over the course of a decade and have then wandered off the reservation till occasionally picked up on the current day. Even the OP mentioned with the Grandma who had explicitly received a final order of removal.
Also hasn't a soft-amnesty and opportunity to self deport also been provided with an additional payment to those who take it up?
I feel like those are the least sympathetic such cases. People that were ordered removed by the Obama administration and just refused, well, even Obama was in favor of deporting them (and his clip of 3M over his 8 years is comparable enough to Trump's run rate of 500K a year).
The most sympathetic cases are something like "immigrant goes to ICE appointment, has existing status yanked and is arrested right on the spot".
Granted some large proportion of those existing legal statuses were Biden-era bullshit, I'm not defending that they were justified, but a lot of those folks did have a valid-on-paper withholding of removal. And while the left doesn't acknowledge it as legitimate, the same law that makes it possible for the Biden AG to grant WoR also justified the Trump AG revoking WoR on the spot. Still, it's bad look as compared to giving them notice that WoR is being revoked, a chance to try the process and appeal through the BIA and ultimate removal if they ignore their legal duty to leave.
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Ah yes, those bleeding heart liberals worrying about things like due process and the rule of law and, uh, preventing torture.
I guess don't be surprised that people actually believe in these things and are willing to put their lives on the line for them. Sure seems like it would be a lot better to, say, propose a bill to change laws around asylum etc., but for some reason those who are currently in power don't seem interested in doing that.
Yeah that's how they get you, first they say it's just about basic due process and preventing torture, then suddenly we're not allowed to deport convicted pedophiles and murderers. The bleeding hearts who let in tens of millions of illegal immigrants are now concerned about the rule of law. We're not acting out this inverse morality play anymore. Let's deport this shadow society of tens of millions of criminals who are outside the rule of law first.
Who is saying that we can't deport convicted pedophiles and murderers. Who specifically? When?
That’s what sanctuary cities do — convicted criminals sit in jails that are not allowed to coordinate with ICE. That’s the whole policy. When their sentences end, they’re released. The federal government is not given notice or record. On top of that you now have liberal judges and jurisdictions considering immigration status as a condition for leniency in sentencing — you can’t give illegals the same sentences as Americans because that could lead to them being deported.
Citation fucking mega needed. I think you are lying, or delusional.
Delusional lie. You live in a fantasy world of your own made up strawmen and twitter outrage bait.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sanctuary_city
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Looks like you are speed-running nominative determinism.
Two weeks ban this time. If you're just here to provoke, go away.
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European courts have been known to say this.
Soering v UK
Whatever the hell this is.
Also this if the headline is to be believed.
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I mean you can decide that your goals are so important that you can just steamroll any objections. I think most people have enough of a view of history to know where that tends to end up (30 thousand dead Iranians in the streets anyone?) but I guess you think this time is different? I'll stick with liberalism and democracy, thanks.
People who think like you have plenty of power within the system right now to make changes in the direction you want. Every time the Vice President of the United States blatantly lies about the motives of someone who the government just killed, you lose some of that power. Seems like everybody would be better off if that power was used to pass a law tightening the asylum process rather than kidnapping random minorities off the streets of Minneapolis.
Liberalism and democracy is deporting tens of millions of illegals, as the law says we will, as voters repeatedly affirmed they wanted. That’s why it’s called illegal!
What a useful reply that seriously engages with my arguments.
You are not for democracy or rule of law if you are against deporting criminal illegal aliens
I am not against deporting criminal illegal aliens.
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I don't think it actually works like this, though. Correct me if I'm wrong, but federal immigration statutes require serious offenders to serve their terms here in full for local offenses before they can be subject to deportation. ICE can't just legally take some guy who's just been convicted of murder or rape and deport him. What sanctuary cities do, if what I've just researched is correct, is not cooperate with ICE detainers, which are requests to hold somebody up to 48 hours after their release once they've served their sentence.
Which, fair, if you want to criticize blue states for that, I think it's totally a valid point of argument. But if your contention is that we should instead be able to eject somebody from the country the moment they're convicted of rape or murder or drug smuggling or what have you, that's a problem with federal law, and one that Congress, not sanctuary cities, is actually capable of tackling. As far as I know, Jose Ibarra, the murderer who killed Laken Riley, is still sitting in a Georgia prison, and will be for the rest of his life. And there aren't any sanctuary jurisdictions in Georgia.
It's 8 USC 1231(a)4.
If every one was going to languish in prison eternally, though... well, someone would complain about wasted tax dollars, but it wouldn't get that much of the Red Tribe's dander up. The problem's that a far greater number end up revolving door inmates.
Sometimes. Most sanctuary cities/states will comply with ICE detainers for "serious felons" being released from prison, specifically, though the dividing line there gets messy since many sanctuary cities also have standing policies by their prosecutors to "consider the avoidance of adverse immigration consequences as a factor in reaching a resolution". They usually won't for those completing a jail or noncustodial sentence, and will almost never do so where they've arrested an illegal immigrant and choose to not bring charges. Many will also refuse to notify the feds on finding undocumented immigrants and some specifically prohibit releasing immigration-related information: this is probably illegal where enforced by law, but it still happens.
I strongly suspect the federal law making this illegal is unconstitutional under general principles of state sovereignty and anti-commandeering.
The Supreme Court acknowledged something similar in Prigg v. Pennsylvania (1842) when they stated that state officials could help enforce the federal Fugitive Slave Act "if they choose... unless prohibited by state legislation." By implication, a state may legislate to prohibit officials from helping enforce federal laws; Northern states quickly took them up on that implication. I don't believe any court directly addressed any requirements for notification, but it seems to go with the general principle.
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