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The time when Trump sabotaged immigration restrictions, and the alt-right cheered
I’ve long held that most of politics is overwhelmingly dominated by some combination of 1) direct self-interest, and 2) vibes. Any notions of ideological consistency should be regarded as mere “happy accidents” rather than the norm. In the US, this issue cuts roughly equally across both parties. One particularly stark example happened a few months ago with immigration. In short, Trump sabotaged the most conservative immigration reform bill in a generation for blatantly self-serving reasons. This directly contradicts what many of his more hardline alt-right supporters want, yet instead of punishing him for doing this, they actively cheered him on. They simply like Trump’s vibes far more than they like Biden’s vibes, so they convinced themselves that the bill was akin to “surrender” through extremely strained logic.
This episode is rapidly fading from public memory given that the bill didn’t pass, but it’s such a great encapsulation of vibes-based motivated reasoning that I feel it should be highlighted before it’s forgotten completely.
Illegal immigration so far
The chart here shows migrant encounters at the US-Mexico border. While some slip through the cracks and are not counted, this still gives a good sense of the contours of illegal immigration over the past few presidential administrations.
Migrant numbers were quite high during the Bush years, with yearly peaks corresponding to agricultural labor needs.
Obama was quite hawkish on illegal immigration. Numbers were already decreasing from the Bush years, and the economic turmoil from the GFC brought numbers down further. Importantly though, Obama’s enforcement was instrumental in keeping numbers down even as the economy recovered.
Illegal immigration fell to its lowest point at the beginning of Trump’s term, but rapidly increased after that to meeting, then exceeding the numbers under Obama. Numbers crashed again at the onset of COVID.
Illegal immigration has exploded after Biden took office.
There are a couple of points worth noting here. The first is that while enforcement has an undeniable impact on illegal immigration numbers, exogenous factors should also be considered. Periods of economic prosperity in the US act as a “pull” for migrants, while recessions do the opposite. Likewise, civil turmoil in immigrant-sending countries can act as a “push” for migrants, while relative stability again does the opposite. That peak in May 2019 under Trump was due in part to a period of turbulence in Northern Triangle countries.
The second point worth noting is that Trump wasn’t really much better than Obama in countering illegal immigration, contrary to popular belief. This point deserves some elaboration.
Trump and Biden’s border policies
During Trump’s 2016 campaign, immigration was frequently at the forefront despite the historical lows of illegal immigrant activity. Upon ascending to the presidency, Trump at least tried to keep his promise. He signed the infamous “Muslim Ban” in his first week, suspending entry for citizens from 7 predominantly Muslim countries from entering the country for 90 days. He would continue with additional policies throughout his presidency, including preventing sanctuary cities from receiving federal grants, phasing out DACA, implementing a zero-tolerance policy and family separation at the border, creating new restrictions for who could apply for asylum, and many others.
The problem with all of these was that they were executive orders. Executive orders require less political capital to implement since they don’t have to go through congress, but they’re far more brittle and subject to legal challenges or revocation when a president of a different party comes to power. Indeed, practically all of Trump’s EO’s on immigration faced stiff legal hurdles. The Muslim Ban was rejected by courts twice, and only a watered down version passed on the third attempt. The family separation policy and restrictions on asylum were similarly watered down heavily. The policies on sanctuary cities and the phaseout of DACA were basically killed entirely.
Another issue with Trump’s implementation is that it was done with little tact. Any sort of reform will encounter pushback, with bigger changes tending to lead to more of a backlash. This can be mollified somewhat by a good PR campaign. Indeed, the ability to push through substantial reforms without angering huge swathes of the country can be seen as one of the key skills of a successful politicians. Trump and his team did not do a very good job of this. Few efforts were made to get buy-in from moderates. Instead, Trump’s modus operandi was typically controversial unilateral action, followed by doubling down with rhetoric like “shithole countries” that may have flattered his base, but was very poorly received among Democrats and independents. Trump had this problem in many more areas than just immigration, as Scott Alexander noted in 2018.
The end result was that while Trump certainly talked up his immigration policies as successes, most of them were little more than PR stunts. Illegal immigration surged substantially every year for the first three years of his presidency and peaked in 2019 at a level far higher than what Obama ever had. Likewise, legal immigration measured by the number of lawful permanent residents added per year was basically the same as during Obama’s presidency, only dipping substantially in 2020 with the onset of COVID. Furthermore, all of the hostile rhetoric Trump used created a backlash that (at least partially) helped propel Biden to the White House in 2020, and ensured he had a clear mandate to roll back Trump’s policies.
And that’s exactly what Biden did. In his first day in office, he axed the majority of Trump’s executive orders with the stroke of a pen. The first 100 days of Biden’s presidency were defined by “undoing Trump” in practically every area, and in terms of immigration that meant less hostility, fewer rules, and a more welcoming attitude. Cracks began to show almost immediately as illegal immigration soared, and then kept soaring month after month. It surpassed Trump’s worst month, and then kept climbing even higher before settling at a rate unseen in at least the past 3 administrations. December 2023 marked the worst month at nearly 250K encounters, with several preceding months having >200K encounters. For reference, Obama’s second term only saw a brief period above 50K encounters before declining to a steady-state of around 30K-40K encounters.
This rapidly became a political liability for Biden. Despite deploying Kamala Harris with her infamous “do not come” speech, illegal immigration kept increasing and Biden seemed helpless to address it, effectively getting himself caught between a rock (giving fodder to Republicans) and a hard place (alienating his base, reneging on promises, etc.). Ominously, things only seemed to be getting worse. Biden tried to use Trump-era COVID restrictions to limit some immigration through Title 42, but COVID couldn’t be used as a justification forever. What’s more, Biden’s actions significantly worsened a loophole in the system through abuse of a particular asylum designation. This article discusses it in detail. To summarize:
When the DHS encounters an illegal immigrant, it has two options: standard removal, or expedited removal.
Standard removal requires a court case with lawyers present to give evidence, while expedited removal is a streamlined, unreviewable process meant to reduce the burden on the DHS and the court system.
Illegal immigrants can indicate they intend to apply for asylum by establishing “credible fear”. While the threshold to asylum is fairly high, the “credible fear” threshold is very low, which at least starts the process towards asylum and thereby prevents use of expedited removal.
While standard removal is ongoing, the US has 3 options for where to keep them: (1) Parole them out into the US, (2) keep them in ICE detention centers, or (3) kick them back to the country from which they entered from, i.e. Mexico.
Obama did (1), but apparently the loophole wasn’t well-known enough to be a huge issue yet. Trump tried to go after asylum directly, but those efforts mostly fizzled in court. He then tried to do (2), but this caused a huge overcrowding problem as detention centers weren’t built big enough to accommodate the huge influx. After some bad press, he tried to do (3), which sort of worked when courts weren’t throwing spanners into the works, which they did frequently. Biden reverted back to (1), but now it was well-known that you could come to America illegally, utter the magic words “credible fear”, and you’d be let out into the community. Some derisively referred to this as “catch and release”. From this point, some immigrants simply didn’t show up to their court hearing, while others received court dates so far in the future (up to a decade or longer in some cases) that it didn’t matter. This became a vicious cycle, as more immigrants abused this loophole it clogged the courts further and further making the loophole more effective, which further incentivized anyone who wanted to come to the US to give it a try due to this One Crazy Trick ICE Doesn’t Want You To Know About.
The Senate compromise deal
After a few years of spiraling migration problems, it became clear that the center could not hold. Biden capitulated and signaled that he was willing to give concessions to Republicans to get immigration back under control. This willingness coalesced around the same time that an important foreign aid package was being discussed, with some Republicans stretching credulity a bit when they claimed that illegal immigration was functionally indistinguishable from Putin’s invasion of Ukraine. Thus, the idea of a “compromise” bill was born, where Biden would give in to Republican demands on immigration in order to get his foreign aid passed. This came to the fore in late January and early February of 2024.
You can read the full text of the bill here, but non-lawyers trying to read actual bills written in thick legalese is like trying decipher jabberwocky growls. A much more scrutable summary is available here.
Division A is all about the foreign aid. This chunk would eventually be passed in April in a standalone vote.
Division B is the immigration part. This was primarily negotiated by Republican Senator James Lankford of Oklahoma. Notably, this would have been the first major immigration reform bill (NOT executive order!) passed since Reagan. Everything else since then has been done through unilateral presidential action or the courts. Since this would have had the backing of Congress, its provisions were quite sweeping compared to the piecemeal efforts that came before. It:
Includes billions of dollars for immigration enforcement, including money for detention centers, 2700 new border agents, asylum case officers to break the vicious cycle, deportation flights, etc. It’s hard to understate how much money this bill would have ladled on to border protections, with the biggest increases going to the usual agencies like ICE and CBP, with smaller chunks going to ones that I wasn’t even aware were part of border enforcement, like FEMA and the US Marshals Service. It also gives case officers a permanent 15% raise over the standard GS schedule of government pay.
Gives a bit of money to USAID for stanching immigration at its source, in the Northern Triangle countries and elsewhere.
Restarts and funds building of Trump’s wall, which Biden canceled early in his presidency.
Modernizes border infrastructure generally, such as adding more sophisticated monitoring equipment and accepting fingerprint cards or biometric submissions for use in immigrant processing. You know, things that would be nice to have given the last major immigration bill is almost 40 years old at this point.
Raises the threshold on “credible fear” substantially to actually close the loophole. Currently, credible fear is evaluated using the lower “significant possibility” standard.
Raises the threshold on asylum generally even after they pass the first hurdle, and it funnels as many cases as possible into the expedited removal process.
Ends “Catch and Release” and formalize the “Remain in Mexico” policy. Those who arrive at ports of entry are placed under government surveillance, while those who arrive between ports of entry are detained outright, with funding provided for new detainment beds.
Establishes an additional asylum bar if there are reasonable grounds to believe an individual could have internally relocated in their country of origin or country of last habitual residence, in lieu of seeking protection in the United States.
Creates a Border Emergency Authority, a “break in case of emergency” power if the border became overwhelmed. This requires the DHS to ignore all asylum requests except those that fall under the Convention Against Torture, which has a high bar. It also further streamlined the expulsion process, allowing for immediate deportation in a range of scenarios. There was to be no public notification for this authority to be enacted, so an immigrant arriving would never be sure if it was active or not. This is the closest the US would come to “closing the border” for an extended period of time that wasn’t due to a national emergency like what happened after the JFK assassination or 9/11. To prevent this emergency tool from simply becoming the new normal, the Authority could only be activated if border encounters exceeded 4000 over a 7 day period. Conversely, it also prevents abuse in the other direction, i.e. a president deciding never to activate it, as it would be required if there were 5000 border encounters over a 7 day period. Note that border encounters were far higher than 5000 when the bill was being debated, so Biden would have had no choice on the matter.
Does NOT include any significant amnesty, even for DREAMers. Almost every serious attempt at reforming immigration had previously settled on the compromise of amnesty for current illegal immigrants in return for enforcement at the border. The most recent major attempt at immigration reform under the Gang of Eight did exactly this. Trump himself acknowledged this political reality in his first State of the Union address in 2018 when he came out in favor of giving amnesty for DREAMers. The fact that this is nowhere to be found in this bill is a significant implicit concession.
There are also a handful of concessions to the Democrats:
Allows processing and conditional permanent residence for Afghan collaborators.
Authorizes an additional 50,000 immigrant visas each year for the next five fiscal years.
Establishes a carveout in some of the rules above for unaccompanied minors, which in 2024 have made up <5% of all encounters.
The Border Emergency Authority requires a lower limit of 4000 encounters per day as discussed above, so a future Republican president wouldn’t be able to use it as the new normal unless there was an actual emergency. It also sunsets after 3 years unless renewed.
Republicans likely wanted restrictions on all asylum claims, but Dems kept a carveout for the Convention Against Torture.
Those concessions are really tiny. The last 3 bullet points are just minor restrictions on the new powers that would be in place. Only the first 2 bullet points are concessions in any meaningful sense. Helping Afghans who collaborated with the US is a one-off now that the war is over, and is a good idea since the US doesn’t want to get a reputation of abandoning those who help it. The 50K new legal immigrants a year is time-limited to 5 years, and is much, much less than the status quo of 200k+ illegal immigrants per month that is happening now. Heck, it would have only been 2-3 months worth of illegal immigrants encountered under average Trump or Obama years, so it’s a very small price to pay.
The bill received endorsement from the National Border Patrol Council, the union that represents Border Patrol agents, endorsed the proposal and said it would drop illegal border crossings nationwide. The group in 2020 endorsed in Trump and has been highly critical of Biden’s border policies.
It’s also interesting to compare this bill to the Border Coalition Letter that was submitted to Congress in 2022. This letter was sent on behalf of a bunch of conservative think tanks like the Heritage Foundation, Conservative Partnership Institute, and several that I’ve never heard of, like the Federation for American Immigration Reform, which the SPLC classifies as a hate group. The letter demanded exclusion of amnesty of any type, creating an Authority to immediately expel illegal immigrants, increase restrictions on asylum, mandate resources for the border wall, increase funding for the CBP and ICE, end the abuse of parole authority. The bill shares a striking resemblance to this letter. Granted, it doesn’t do everything, as there are a few carveouts for stuff like asylum under the Convention Against Torture, and the letter also asks for states to overrule the federal government when it comes to border enforcement (something that Texas has been motioning towards recently). But overall, the bill does the vast majority of what was asked for by some of the most conservative immigration groups in the country.
Trump swoops in
So yeah. Trump blew it all up.
The reason he did this was as obvious as it was cynical: he didn’t want Biden to have a “win” on the issue. He wanted to keep the issue in the news as a liability for Biden so he would have a greater chance at winning in November. He didn’t exactly keep his motivations secret. Nor was this the first border bill that Trump sabotaged. The overturning of Roe v Wade is instructive here, as it was a major “dog catches the car” moment. Republicans loved to campaign on restricting abortion, but when the Supreme Court actually handed them the chance to do so, they quickly realized the costs it would entail. What had once been a rallying cry for conservatives turned into a liability, and now the Democrats have the wind at their back on the issue. Why do the same for immigration by actually enacting favorable policies?
Of course, it’s not helpful to be openly cynical to your supporters, so the official reason that Trump, Gaetz, and many others trotted out to oppose the bill related to the Border Emergency Authority. In essence, they boiled the entire bill down to that upper limit threshold of 5000 illegal immigrants per day. The extra enforcement, the money for border agents, the restarting of the wall construction, the closing of the asylum loophole, the end of Catch and Release? None of that mattered. It was all boiled down to that 5000 number that you’ll see repeated over and over again in Republican criticisms of the bill. What’s worse is that this number is presented as a capitulation to Democrats rather than a ceiling on the use of a draconian new power granted in a heavily conservative bill. It’s presented as if the bill mandates open borders for the first 5000 illegal immigrants every day, and only then begins to enforce some border policies. This is so laughably, bafflingly wrong that it defies belief.
Obviously the bill isn’t perfect. There are legitimate criticisms that could be levied. For instance, Republicans could say that Democrats shouldn’t get any new legal immigration in exchange for fixing the law, even the paltry 50K number that the bill would mandate. But actually analyzing the bill to any serious degree would quickly show how conservative it is, so Republican leaders mischaracterized the bill so heavily that I’d say most reasonable people would classify it as “outright lying”.
In the world of Republican vibes, there’s the idea that conservatives are always the suckers when it comes to immigration. The idea is that Reagan’s bill was supposed to fix the issue, but the Democrats skillfully reneged on their promise. There’s also the idea of the ratchet, that Republicans will compromise with Democrats, and Democrats will get a bunch of concessions but won’t actually fulfill their end of of the bargain, either because the Republicans are RINOs who don’t actually care about limiting immigration, or because the true-believer Republicans are simply outmaneuvered. Then in the next round of dealmaking, more concessions will be given, and on and on it goes until America is overrun with illegals. For example, in the first deal, “illegal aliens” are reclassified as “illegal immigrants”, and amnesty is provided for, say, 3M of them in return for enforcement of the border laws. Then the enforcement doesn’t happen, ten years go by, and another round of negotiations happens. This time “illegal immigrants” is changed to “undocumented persons” and now we need to give amnesty to the first 3M AND the 5M that arrived since then, but in exchange now we’ll totally have enforcement… pinky promise! And then it doesn’t happen again and… you get the picture.
There’s a kernel of truth to that idea, although it’s obviously extremely oversimplified and lacking in nuance. That said, those vibes are powerful enough that compromise is thoroughly delegitimized for the Republican rank-and-file. Trump’s uncompromising vibes in 2016 is a large part of what won him the Republican primary. He sustained those vibes through his presidency with his bombastic executive orders that drove news headlines but did little to fix the underlying issues. Trump used those vibes again to kill this bill, as all he had to do was vaguely point to the 5000 number in the bill, imply that was a concession, and the bill was effectively dead no matter what it actually would have done.
Other concerns with the bill
While the misrepresenting the 5000 number in regards to the Border Emergency Authority was the most frequent criticism by far, there were a couple other, less goofy criticisms that deserve examining.
The first is that Biden already had the tools to solve the border crisis, and therefore this bill wasn’t necessary. This is typically paired with vibey “Republicans cooperate, Democrats defect” arguments that I detailed in the previous section, i.e. that the bill must have been a “trap” of some sort. Vibes aside, there is some degree of truth to this. As we saw earlier in this article, Biden’s policies were indeed principally responsible for the recent explosion in illegal immigration. Probably the clearest remedy would be reimplementing the Remain in Mexico policy that has been shambling along, half dead. Biden attempted to kill this policy early in his presidency, and courts initially agreed he could do so, until they didn’t, so the policy is technically still alive. Reimplementing this would take at least some of the wind out of the vicious cycle in regards to the asylum loophole, although there would still be the omnipresent specter of legal threats, and now Mexico has said it will refuse to cooperate.
The issue with this idea is that even if Biden were to reimplement all of Trump’s executive orders, they still amounted to little more than a bandaid on a bullet hole. Critics of the bill are technically correct in pointing out that there was less blood before Biden ripped off the bandaid, but it’s ludicrous to then assume that the bandaid was all that was ever needed. US immigration law and border enforcement is fundamentally broken in a number of ways, and this bill would have gone a long way in addressing the worst problems. Recall that Trump himself tried to go after asylum laws directly, but his efforts mostly fizzled in the courts.
Another criticism that was sometimes levied is that Republicans should simply hold out for Trump to become president to truly fix immigration. Again, this typically came packaged with vibey concerns that any deal with Democrats must necessarily imply some ratcheting of concessions, and thus the only way to address the issue is unilateral Republican action, headed by a true-believer like Trump. To steelman this idea, the idea that the political capital to solve illegal immigration would evaporate if the issue was successfully mitigated is a sound one. Democrats were only willing to come to the table in the first place due to the extremely tenuous position they found themselves in with the surge of illegal immigration. This bill almost certainly would have solved that surge, which would give Trump less of a mandate to take drastic action if he wins in November.
The most obvious retort to this idea is that Trump is by no means guaranteed to win in November. As of the time of writing, prediction markets give Trump a 47% chance of winning, which we can round up to 50%. This essentially means the Republicans are gambling on a “double or nothing” approach, but even this prospect is unsteady. For starters, how much more could Trump deliver in excess of this bill, even under the best plausible conditions? HR2 is instructive here, which passed the House in 2023 but is not likely to advance any further in the current Congress. As such, it’s essentially a conservative wishlist on immigration. It is indeed stronger than the Senate bill, but it’s not massively stronger. I’d say instead of “double or nothing” it’s more like “10-20% more or nothing”, which has decidedly less of a ring to it. Furthermore, Democratic willingness to capitulate has an expiration date. If the moment isn’t gone already, then it’d definitely be gone when Trump takes office for a second time, which would mean he’d require control of both the House and the Senate to push through a stronger bill. Prediction markets currently give a 74% chance for Republicans to clinch the Senate, which we can round up to 75%, and a 44% chance to win control of the House, which we can again round up to 50%. If results from the races were perfectly independent, simple statistics shows us that Republicans only have <20% chance of achieving a trifecta. Granted, the races almost certainly won’t be uncorrelated with each other, but this still establishes a lower bound of likelihood. In essence, Republicans are gambling at 20-50% odds that they’ll be able to get a bill that’s 10-20% better. Even this is still underselling it, since it would have to go through one major final hurdle: Trump himself. Republicans already had a trifecta from 2017-2019, yet Trump chose not to prioritize immigration other than through flimsy executive orders. Who’s to say he wouldn’t choose to do so again?
The upshot
I’m sure some people will dismiss everything I’ve written here as concern trolling. They’ll assume I’m secretly a Democratic operative who wants to sow discord amongst Republicans. In reality, I’m just someone who actually wants to get immigration under control. Immigration can be a source of strength, but it must be harnessed very carefully to not cause major problems.
This bill represented the most conservative major immigration reform in a generation that actually had a chance at passing, and Donald Trump killed it for purely cynical reasons. This single bill would have done more than every one of Trump’s executive orders put together. Anyone who’s been seriously watching him knows that he’s utterly self-serving, but what was truly revolting was how the anti-immigration wing of the Republican party not only let him get away with it, but actively cheered him on. It’ll likely be totally forgotten too, wrongly dismissed as nothing more than another Democratic trap.
The worst part of the bill was that many of its provisions weren’t permanent. Some parts like closing the asylum loophole were, but the funding for extra agents would eventually run out. Similarly, other provisions like the incoherently reviled Border Emergency Authority were due to sunset in 3, 5, or 10 years. But the correct response would have been for Republicans to reach out at this golden opportunity with both hands and grasp as hard as they could. Then, they should have fought future battles to ensure the provisions were made permanent. Instead, they squandered a period of maximal Democratic vulnerability on the issue, when the Dems were not only willing to give concessions but were actively asking for them.
Illegal immigration has cooled a bit since its apex in December of 2023. In the CBP’s most recent report from March, encounters are down by 45%. This is still massively elevated from where it was before, but it will at least allow Biden to claim he’s on top of the issue. It seems he’s doing this with ad-hoc fixes, like making deals with intermediate countries that are unlikely to really solve much long-term. In killing the bill, Trump has likely undercut one of his attack vectors against Biden somewhat. When pressed in a debate about the issue, Biden can say “I tried to fix it, but you wouldn’t let me”. In the end, few peoples’ minds will be changed, and the most likely outcome no matter who becomes president is that the US continues muddling along with the status quo on immigration, which means more bandaids and can-kicking. In the off chance that an immigration reform bill actually does pass, it will likely be far less conservative than this bill would have been.
Your post has many at best misleading statements and characterizations. I'll try to discuss just one I'm familiar with in some depth:
tl;dr: Both of these claims are simply wrong. No, it doesn't end "catch and release," i.e., quickly releasing people waiting for their immigration hearings. There is a whole section which describes catch-and-release, i.e., "non custodial removal proceedings" and funds it with billions a year under "alternatives to detention" expansion. Not only does it not end it, it mandates supervision under "alternatives to detention" in situations like an adult border migrant who meets initial screening criteria. And it doesn't even actually require "alternative to detention" supervision either.
For context, Congress in the mid 1990s amended the Immigration and Naturalization Act to make release of people encountered at the border more difficult. Border migrants were detained unless there was a specific showing on an individual basis their release was necessary due to "urgent humanitarian reasons or any significant public benefit" which historically going back decades meant a high bar almost all would fail to meet. Border patrol encountering border migrants had two options; normal removal proceedings or an expedited removal process. Border migrants in either process were to be detained until their hearing, unless they met the strict requirements for release waiting for their process. Trump enforced this strict requirement for release in the US (release on parole) or they could be released and away the removal process outside the country (remain in Mexico). This policy under current law was upheld.
The Biden administration in July 2021 decided to issue an order which essentially required the border patrol to release border migrants under section 212(d)(5)(A) of the Immigration and Naturalization Act (which they did within ~15-30 minutes, see Florida v. US). "Urgent humanitarian reasons or any significant public benefit" meant almost all migrants would now qualify for release. Florida sued and won, the policy was knocked down. The Biden administration came out with a nearly identical policy two months later. Florida sued and won. This went up on appeal and was affirmed at the circuit level. The Biden admin continued along with essentially the same policy and same result anyway.
So, let's move on to this bill. The bill expands release on parole under the expedited removal process. It adds new categories, it adds new discretionary authority to the DHS secretary, it makes "urgent humanitarian reason" into an essentially subjective criteria of the DHS secretary. Instead of formalizing the strict language which was used for decades, it sets out that precedent as its own exception and then adds discretionary authority to the secretary of the DHS to determine what that separate vague language means (a DHS which has argued in court that climate change may satisfy this language). It doesn't even close the one "catch and release" door the Biden admin is currently abusing!
The most damning part for any claim the bill ends "Catch and Release" is that it adds a (b) subsection to section 235 which creates "Provisional Noncustodial Removal Proceedings." Under 235 (b), the DHS Secretary has broad discretion based on undefined "operational circumstances" to require any migrant making an asylum claim to go through this process and mandate release. Unlike the expedited removal proceeding under current law which mandates detention of most asylum claimants, 235 (b) mandates noncustodial supervision under the expanded "alternatives to detention" program which means they will be released. And even then, "alternatives to detention" supervision is not actually mandatory either! The bill allows mandatory release of any border migrant under 235(b) for up to 90 days before any determination whatsoever is completed (currently, the CBP is required to perform an asylum screen before any action is taken). It still gets worse! Any border migrant who failed to be given a "protection determination" within 90 days - there are over 1,000,000 cases on backlog for just initial "fear" screenings before AOs right now - are released and eligible for work permits immediately, and automatically passed on to end review. Wow! This subsection essentially codifies broad swathes of the Biden administration "Asylum Officer" regulatory scheme which is currently in court and likely to lose also.
It is honestly ridiculous to claim this "Ends 'Catch and Release.'" It does no such thing; a hostile administration will not only not be required to stop catch and release, but they're given new tools to justify catching and releasing any migrant found on the border and even mandate it in certain situations!
If you want to argue otherwise, please tell me the exact part of the bill which actually forces a hostile administration, one which has for years ignored court rulings by making slight changes to catch-and-release policies, to stop releasing border migrants into the United States? "We're not doing catch and release, we catch them and then quickly release them under an expanded program which releases them but under government supervision, but also we don't have to do that either" isn't ending catch and release.
The only way this bill ends "catch and release" under a hostile administration is that the Asylum Officers stamp "approved" on every asylum claim and let out the new residents with automatic work permits into the United States.
One, illegally allow in tens of millions of people into the United States; two, trick the (hopefully) absolute morons in the GOP to pass a "compromise bill" which allows a hostile administration to staff a army of bureaucrats which can more quickly adjudicate asylum claims under a "more strict" standard (it's really not) than one which could be adopted by executive fiat and then quickly stamp "approved" on large percentages of the illegally released people who now get automatic work permits. And it would have worked if it wasn't for that stupid Trump who is just so bad, doesn't care about immigration or the country, and opposes it because he just doesn't want Biden to get a win. And thank God for that.
Passing that bill would have been unfathomably stupid strategy to reduce illegals and unfathomably stupid politics at the same time. GOP voters and supporters will recognize this bill as a deep betrayal and failure and will refuse to show up in the 2024 election guaranteeing a Trump loss as well as losses in the House and Senate. It also gives your opposition a win on their worst subject and gives slight truth to media mouthpieces to claim Democrats addressed their worst subject. "Well, I tried" but am still horribly failing and polling about the topic is horrible is in fact much worse than "I got landmark immigration bill through Congress" in terms of electoral strategy.
This bill is so unfathomably stupid and/or duplicitous, I wouldn't be surprised if it actually did come from the desk of a GOP Senator. Yet another example of "is the GOP this dumb or this smart?"
Literally none of this matters.
Almost all illegals are eventually released or make it into the interior. That was true even with Trump’s remain-in-Mexico policy because there is no wall and Trump is no closer to getting Congress to build one than he was this time in 2016. That is to say even migrants turned back eventually make it into the interior, where they’re never deported unless they commit serious violent crime and ICE arrests and deports them which of course only happens to a tiny minority of illegals migrants, and even in those cases most return illegally.
Because of 1 (a fundamental issue which, again, Trump has zero realistic plan to fix), the only difference between handing every migrant a green card (or, hell a passport) and not doing so is one generation. Every child of every single illegal migrant in the US born on US soil is a full citizen of the United States. That’s the trick with ‘amnesty’; it means nothing, because the demographic impact is guaranteed in any case. Birthright citizenship is the ultimate incentive for illegal immigration. Talk about “work permits” is hilarious; their sons and daughters have the same rights and privileges as you.
So, yeah. The only two things that would do “more” than this bill would be a meaningful end to most illegal inflows (impossible without transnational coast to coast impenetrable wall, and even then asylum seekers could just come legally and overstay visas if they could get them) and an end to birthright citizenship (almost certainly impossible without constitutional amendment). So this magic alternative to this bill (which again, would allow a GOP administration to take minor incremental steps to somewhat reduce inflows) does not exist. There is no plan, there never was, and Trump killed it because he didn’t want to give Biden what he felt was some kind of ‘win’, whatever the cost.
It's telling your standard for an alternative for this terrible bill, which you continue to essentially ignore any specifics of and vaguely handwave that it would reduce immigration or even if it doesn't under a hostile administration it would arm a friendly one to do more than is currently possible without making a specific argument for how it would ever do that, is that:
it has to "meaningful end to most illegal inflows"? This bill doesn't do any of that. It doesn't get close to that. It doesn't remotely address birth-right citizenship or any of that. It's even easier to legally (even if we assume a hostile admin would follow the law which they have demonstrably not for over 3 decades) release migrants into the US interior and it provides billions in public dollars to help them do it in addition to providing billions to the web of NGOs which facilitate the migrant inflow straight to the US border. It provides money to finish the Border wall, something which Trump made meaningful progress with, but the bill allows border migrants to knock on the door of the wall and be let in the US legally and doesn't even require a hostile admin to build the wall anyway. The bill may as well be called "Pay Democrats to Import Foreigners Act of 2023."
this bill doesn't even sniff the standard you have set out for what Trump? or whoever must deliver for you to even consider it "a plan," and in doing so you're just revealing this is some isolated demand for rigor for Trump, who is like evil and the worst or whatever, or other plans for reasons we're just left to speculate about
as if the GOP for the last 50 years has been even equal let alone better in addressing this issue; the problem was Democrats figured out Republicans are absolute clowns, called their bluff when they realized the GOP isn't actually going to do anything, and so they illegally imported 15m people in <4 years and the GOP couldn't even muster the fortitude to stop funding it; immigration and a wall wouldn't have even been a serious topic of the 2016 election if Trump didn't make it that way
for those who want to reduce immigration, if this bill is "the plan," then they may as well just admit total defeat and slam the acceleration pedal to the floor because this bill is terrible
I’m not aware of any estimates that the total number of migrants in the last four years has been that high. Most estimates seem to be 6-7 million including illegals.
The estimates giving 6-7 million tend to be based around only CBP encounters, minus explusions/deportations, plus the CBP's own estimate for 'gotaways' or undetected illegal immigration. This isn't the absolute lowest-bound possible -- some number are repeat offenders -- but it's a very low estimate, especially when the CBP is also claiming that its apprehension rate has remained stable from the lowest part of the Trump/COVID lull til today, and as immigration courts have been increasingly swamped.
((And, obviously, this excludes visa overstays.))
I don't think 15m is correct (and it might just be taken from a Trump claim), and most of the ways to get anywhere plausibly close to it depend on some questionable assumptions (eg, declaring some of the weirder refugee categorizations "illegally imported" even if it's not strictly speaking illegal for the immigrants themselves), but the Biden admin numbers are pretty hard to believe.
There's one classification that's people that the CBP (and related agencies) detected, but did not apprehend. There's still some uncertainty -- how much were the numbers fucked with? was that particular bunch of pixels in the distance of an overexposed camera a coyote or a coyote? the CBP used to exclude turn-backs from gotaway numbers, but they've stopped reporting turn-backs, does that indicate a methodology change or a reporting change -- but they're probably not entirely made up, either.
There's another classification that's everyone that the CBP didn't see at all as they crossed the border outside of a port of entry, period. The CBP's testified to Congress that this has stayed at "10 to 20%" of those detected but not apprehended, and that they have high confidence in it, but it also seems entirely pulled out of Mayorkas' backside. Unfortunately, that's true for most people: there's a lot of estimates for total apprehension rate that can be back-calculated into unknown-gotaways, or just plain estimates, but it's hard to argue why 25% or 33% or 42% is 'right'.
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