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Culture War Roundup for the week of September 12, 2022

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Trumpist policies -- regardless, or because of -- their (lack of) merits, did not spend a lot of time being actually applied. Most famously the DACA stuff, which not only was blocked at length, not only was eventually turned back at SCOTUS under iffy legal reasoning, but also just took until June 2020 just to finish the court cases that eventually told Trump to try again.

DACA is irrelevant in a conversation about how many illegal immigrants cross the southern border in a given year, short of some laughably tenuous argument about making a 'favorable environment.'

I don't think it's very useful to try to extrapolate from the 2016-2020 to what would happen if "we gave repubs everything they asked for"

He built the wall which was his signature campaign promise on immigration. ICE was kicking in the doors of illegal immigrants who hadn't committed crimes (aside from being in the country illegally) at a higher rate. He slashed the number of refugees accepted. All much more relevant than DACA, and the former was his signature immigration campaign promise. I think it's quite useful to extrapolate from the Trump presidency, actually.

I don't know for certain whether ICE gave them a big list of options to pick, just really hates that one bus stop in El Paso specifically, or if they give each immigrant or asylum-seeker a spin on an oversized wheel of fortune. Presumably someone actually wants to live in the Bronx, so it's possible that the immigrants getting bused there requested it specifically.

Your link itself says the children were being released to relatives or sponsors. Desantis obviously didn't manage to find migrants with relatives or sponsors in Martha's vineyard. The fact that you're desperately trying to find some equivalence here to convince me that I'm being unfair in calling this out...bah. I'm done.

DACA is irrelevant in a conversation about how many illegal immigrants cross the southern border in a given year, short of some laughably tenuous argument about making a 'favorable environment.'

DACA -- a program that prohibits removal and supplies work permits for those covered -- has a "laughably tenuous" connection to how many undocumented immigrants cross the southern border?

He built the wall which was his signature campaign promise on immigration.

Trump threatened a government shutdown for 5 billion, got 1.6 billion with a ton of caveats, and then it and a bunch of other attempts got shot down in court (tbf, in the case of the emergency order, probably correctly).

ICE was kicking in the doors of illegal immigrants who hadn't committed crimes (aside from being in the country illegally) at a higher rate.

If you mean arresting and deporting immigrants without other convictions, with the kicking in doors figuratively, yes. (I'm not able to find statistics on ICE's actual no-knock arrests, and because ICE's warrants explicitly don't allow them to break into buildings, I don't know that they happen enough to be meaningful.)

He slashed the number of refugees accepted.

Fair, albeit this seems a real small deal from someone dismissing DACA, especially given the statutory limitations for the refugee program.

Your link itself says the children were being released to relatives or sponsors.

And then it carefully glosses over the adults. The El Paso bus stop ones don't even really bother with that fig leaf.

The fact that you're desperately trying to find some equivalence here to convince me that I'm being unfair in calling this out...bah. I'm done.

My point isn't to compare equivalence between these programs; my point is that no one cared about it.