Inside Biden's Plan To Shut Down The Border
Happy Monday!
This is the 14th edition of Capitol.press and we’re covering President Biden's plan to shut down the border.
CNN’s MANU RAJU dropped a major Friday news dump on the migrant policy beat in the Senate.
New — Details of Senate deal on the border.
Sinema, Lankford, Murphy deal would empower US to significantly restrict border crossings if they surge to 5,000 daily average over a week. Same would apply for 8,500 crossings in a single day.
In essence, border would be effectively…
— Manu Raju (@mkraju) January 26, 2024
KYRSTEN SINEMA, an Arizona independent, has spent months brokering Joe Biden's border bill in the upper chamber of Congress. Now we're finally seeing some details of what President Biden is already insisting is "both tough but fair."
BIDEN on Friday: “What’s been negotiated would – if passed into law – be the toughest and fairest set of reforms to secure the border we’ve ever had in our country. It would give me, as President, a new emergency authority to shut down the border when it becomes overwhelmed. And if given that authority, I would use it the day I sign the bill into law."
DONALD TRUMP opposes the Biden Border Bill, making it a non-starter in the House if MITCH MCCONNELL and CHUCK SCHUMER can marshal the support to get it passed the Senate, which as of this writing, includes several key members who still haven't seen a bill text.
ALEX PADILLA, California's new senior senator, said last week he'd seen the text, making him the first of the 42-member CONGRESSIONAL HISPANIC CAUCUS with eyes on Sinema's Monster.
JAMES LANKFORD and CHRIS MURPHY helped get Biden's Border Bill where it is today after six weeks of chucklefuck ending with "parole is still a major sticking point."
This was always bullshit. Mass deportations were the sticking point, which LANKFORD and THOM TILLIS, McConnell's Republican negotiators of the Biden Border Bill, knew all along.
What does it mean to decide asylum cases in 6 months instead of several years?
Quicker expulsions. Mass deportations.
What does it mean to shut down the border if 8,500 people cross in a day?
More migrants crossing illegally in the places in between border checkpoints.
Key Context: Migrants today calmly turn themselves into border agents where they once scattered to avoid them. Migrants will likely disperse to dodge more border agents than ever before if this bill passes.
Nothing reported from the Senate negotiation stops the so-called "invasion" of migrants over the southern border. Nor would any of the details leaked give the White House the ability to “shut down” the border. If anything, the provisions just encourage "migrant surges" to avoid Uncle Sam's ports of entry.
Completely underestimating the resiliency of the American immigrant is to be expected from old farts in Washington, D.C. In most cases, at least a century has passed since their own family's migrant crossed the Atlantic, declared themselves at Ellis Island, and then waited a few years to earn full citizenship.
There's no context in our national history for the ludicrous legal immigration system that replaced what was a straightforward process for generations of refugees and economic migrants from Europe.
Of course, House Speaker Mike Johnson has called any agreement in the Senate dead on arrival in the House. But even if it were to somehow pass the House by some miracle, the White House would simply have more authority to deport more people.
Meanwhile, as migrants are likely to disperse more often, right-wing media cameras would still zoom in on surges of migrants at various parts of the border, not giving the president “a win” on the immigration policy he seeks.
Those same cameras in conjunction with the lollygagging in Congress is what leads to extremist groups heading to the border as self-proclaimed “patriot” vigilantes.
Scary times.
-- Arturo, Pablo
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