Democrats really represent less and less of what I believe in every day. What a crazy time to see Democrats fully embrace the completely false narrative about the border “crisis”. Not only that, but giving the GOP everything they want for free.
I don’t care if they think this is a saavy political ploy to rob the GOP of one of their campaign points, it’s utterly irresponsible and a betrayal.
I don’t want to hear a peep out of neolibs that it was progressives fault Biden lost.
There is actually a crisis at the border, just not the kind that Fox News thinks is going on.
The rate of people coming into the country has shot up, which means there's this massive amount of people either waiting in sort of open-air camps on the Mexican border, just living in a crowded, dusty field for months and months waiting for their turn, and a massive amount of people already in the country in overcrowded detention centers awaiting their chance to be heard for asylum by a judge or to be processed out and sent home. Just typing it out like that maybe doesn't sound so bad, but it's grim. Some are families, some are sick (like real sick), all are with no jobs or money or a lot of times no civilized infrastructure like water or like that. Some are stuffed into overcrowded detention centers with racist, violent guards and no real rights of any kind.
Part of the Democratic immigration plan is to boost resources for ICE (more detention centers i.e. less overcrowding) and increase the number of judges to clear the backlog, which will decrease that side of the misery. Part of the plan is to deliberately increase the cruelty in some parts of the system (e.g. make it harder for people to get asylum even if your home is objectively unlivable, give ICE more aggressive tools to be racist with, things like that), so that the Republicans will make a deal and actually pass the thing. I honestly don't know what proportion is for each part, but there's some of both.
I honestly don't know that much about it, except that it's weird that people are so eagerly blaming the Democrats both for the present levels of misery in the system (which are substantial), and for their attempts to get something passed which will take some steps to alleviate the worst of the misery (how dare you give ICE more resources, etc). But since the Republicans have been rejecting any change no matter what its nature, it seems like maybe kind of a moot point.
ICE is a fascist organization that serves no purpose other than terrorizing migrants. Anyone who funds them is also a fascist. There’s not overcrowding because of a lack of means, it’s because that’s explicitly what ICE (and right-wingers) want; human suffering as a deterrent.
The crisis at the border is manufacturered by the right (both democrats and republicans). There is only a crisis in so far as they started treating migrants as if they were terrorists. The way to end the crisis is to be less fascist, not more.
Democrats are pushing extremely far right legislation. They’re not trying to make legal migration more orderly, they’re trying to “crackdown” same as the GOP. It’s why Biden rolled back very few if any of Trump’s insane policies; they’re both deeply racist.
that serves no purpose other than terrorizing migrants
Debatable but yeah you could make a pretty strong case. Certainly that's one of their core missions if not the core mission.
Anyone who funds them is also a fascist
You fund them, through taxes, if you live in the US
Oh wait, you might say, that's different because I don't really have a choice because of etc etc
How does it feel funding a fascist organization?
There's not overcrowding because of lack of means
Citation needed
Are you suggesting that there are empty ICE detention facilities somewhere, that aren't holding any migrants so that they can be deliberately put into only a few of them?
Or that they're all full and there is money to build more / staff more that's just not being touched on purpose, because ICE cares so much about being cruel that they're forgoing hiring more people and adding more hours just so they can run a smaller operation?
They don't really have a shortage of ways to be cruel, even if there were no overcrowding.
Democrats are pushing extremely far right legislation. They're not trying to make legal migration more orderly, they're trying to "crackdown" same as the GOP. It's why Biden rolled back very few if any of Trump's insane policies; they're both deeply racist.
This all sounds like all assertion no citation, to me.
Actually family separation (rather starting a task force to find the families of the separated kids) was one of the first reversals of Trump's policies that Biden did but there are a whole bunch of them. The separation was already stopped because it was too horrifying even for US immigration authorities, but the kids were still in custody with no effort to give them back to their parents until Biden. It was like one of his first things he did.
No idea why you're so committed to rocking back and forth chanting to yourself, Biden's a bad man, Biden's a bad man, Biden's a bad man. You can talk about Gaza and find no shortage of terrible things he did; you don't have to react to something factual by just starting to chant it again in every case.
During Biden’s campaign in 2020, he promised “there will not be another foot of wall constructed in my administration.” But then he waived two dozen laws to continue constructien on the border wall, including the Endangered Species Act, the Clean Water Act and other environmental protections. [pbs]
Biden maintained Trump’s Title 42 policy, which expelled asylum seekers under the pretext of protecting public health, for more than two years after taking office, even as the ACLU was suing to put an end to the policy.
He also chose to adopt a reworked version of another Trump immigration policy innovation, prompting more lawsuits:
The Biden administration has instituted its version of Trump’s asylum transit ban. That rule allows immigration enforcement officials to turn away migrants for a number of reasons: if they do not have valid travel and identification documents, if they’ve traveled through another country without applying for asylum, if they don’t show up at a port of entry at an appointed time, and more. [Vox]
Blaine Bookey, legal director of the Center for Gender & Refugee Studies at the University of California College of the Law, San Francisco, said the deportations were “a disgrace”.
“They protect no one. They ‘deter’ no one. They violate our laws and treaty obligations, legal guidance from the UN Refugee Agency, and basic principles of humanity. They must end,” Bookey said in a statement on Friday.
The Biden administration is choosing to hold asylum seekers in detention while their case goes through the system instead of just processing them and releasing them with a court date as was the standard practice before Trump. That is why the number of detainees is ballooning:
We write to express outrage over your administration’s expansion of the cruel and unnecessary immigration detention system. Last month, you signed a spending bill that provides historically high funding for Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) detention - $3.4 billion in taxpayers’ money. Our organizations work with and advocate on behalf of people who have experienced immigration detention. They carry life long scars from the mistreatment and dehumanization they endured because of the United States’ reliance on detention, mostly through private prisons and county jails. Your administration is further entrenching this reliance, marking an utter betrayal of your campaign https://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/promises/biden-promise-tracker/promise/1613/end-profit-detention-centers/.
Detention does not provide an efficient or ethical means of border processing, and it certainly does not indicate to migrants that they are welcome in the United States. It merely exists to further the political goal of deterrence, which is cruel, inhumane and misguided – as even the most punitive forms of detention https://www.americanprogress.org/article/family-separation-detention-deter-immigration/ not to deter people from seeking safety or a better life.
Sincerely,
18 Million Rising
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Amnesty International USA
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Center for Immigration Law and Policy, UCLA School of Law
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Human Rights Watch
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Mijente
Muslim Advocates
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Refugees International
Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights
Showing Up for Racial Justice
Sikh Coalition
…
Unitarian Universalists for Social Justice
…
So, there is so much here that it's a little hard to respond to without taking a big chunk of my day to do a bunch of research. But looking over it to some extent, it looks to me like I pretty much already gave my quick take on it:
Part of the Democratic immigration plan is to boost resources for ICE ... and increase the number of judges to clear the backlog, which will decrease that side of the misery. Part of the plan is to deliberately increase the cruelty in some parts of the system ... so that the Republicans will make a deal and actually pass the thing.
As an example here's what the HRW article says:
On the date of your inauguration, fewer than 15,000 people were in ICE detention. This presented a remarkable opportunity to wind down a wasteful and abusive system. Indeed, your own 2023 and 2024 budget requests sought significantly decreased detention funding. ICE began internal reviews of the system, recommending the closure or downsizing of numerous facilities because of dangerously abusive conditions.
As the political winds shifted, so did your funding requests to Congress. In October 2023, you requested supplemental detention funding, and your FY2025 budget request sought funding for 34,000 beds instead of the 25,000 sought in the two previous cycles. The result is unsurprising: the FY2024 spending bill you signed provides ICE $3.4 billion to jail an average of 41,500 immigrants per day, historically high funding surpassing all four years of the Trump administration.
I honestly just don't have much reaction to add to this besides what I said up above. They're not remarking on the massive backlog of people (including the people waiting on the Mexican side of the border, which is a significant source of suffering, since unlike people in custody there's no particular guarantee of food, water, or sanitation while they're just camping there for months and months). They're not wrong about the compromises Biden has been making with the Republicans, and the increased cruelty that's being allowed into the system as a result, though. They're not remarking at all on the things in Biden's proposals that will reduce the misery (increasing judges being the main one) -- which is fine, I mean, it's not their job to come up with explanations for why something might be inhumane; they're just pointing out that it's terrible and asking that he fix it. But like I say, it seems like anything whether cruel or mixed or beneficial that Biden tries to do now is going to be blocked by the Republicans, so it's all moot.
I'm just not sure how you take away from all of that any kind of conclusion that 100% of it is Biden's favorite thing (as opposed to something dictated in part by circumstances or Republican maliciousness), or that it doesn't matter whether it's Biden or Republicans because they're all the same.
This report – a joint effort by Physicians for Human Rights (PHR), Harvard Law School’s Immigration and Refugee Clinical Program (HIRCP), and researchers at Harvard Medical School (HMS) – provides a detailed overview of how solitary confinement is being used by ICE across detention facilities in the United States, and its failure to adhere to its own policies, guidance, and directives.
The study reveals that immigration detention facilities fail to comply with ICE guidelines and directives regarding solitary confinement. Despite significant documented issues, including whistleblower alarms and supposed monitoring and oversight measures, there has been negligible progress. **The report highlights a significant discrepancy between the 2020 campaign promise of U.S. President Joseph Biden to end solitary confinement and the ongoing practices observed in ICE detention.**Over the last decade, the use of solitary confinement has persisted, and worse, the recent trend under the current administration reflects an increase in frequency and duration. Data from solitary confinement use in 2023 – though likely an underestimation as this report explains – demonstrates a marked increase in the instances of solitary confinement.
This report exposes a continuing trend of ICE using solitary confinement for punitive purposes rather than as a last resort – in violation of its own directives. Many of the people interviewed were placed in solitary confinement for minor disciplinary infractions or as a form of retaliation for participating in hunger strikes or for submitting complaints. Many reported inadequate access to medical care, including mental health care, during their solitary confinement, which they said led to the exacerbation of existing conditions or the development of new ones, including symptoms consistent with depression, anxiety, and PTSD. The conditions in solitary confinement were described as dehumanizing, with people experiencing harsh living conditions, limited access to communication and recreation, and verbal abuse or harassment from facility staff.
In the last five years alone, ICE has placed people in solitary confinement over 14,000 times, with an average duration of 27 days, well exceeding the 15-day threshold that United Nations (UN) human rights experts have found constitutes torture. Many of the longest solitary confinement placements involved people with mental health conditions, indicating a failure to provide appropriate care for vulnerable populations more broadly.
The treatment of people in immigration detention facilities and the excessive, punitive use of solitary confinement is not only contrary to ICE’s own policies and guidance but also violates U.S. constitutional law and international human rights law.
During the first year of the Biden administration, DHS worked with oversight agencies to review facilities with substandard conditions… The administration closed out or reduced capacity for some of the worst facilities following this review, but these actions were the “barest minimum” compared to what officials involved in the review had envisioned.[50] In August 2022, another internal DHS study recommended closing or downsizing nine immigration detention centers.[51] However, ICE only ended contracts with two of the detention centers mentioned in that review.[52]
ICE refuses to comply with recommendations from oversight bodies, such as the DHS OIG, when they issue scathing reports about life-threatening conditions. For example, the OIG issued a report in March 2022 on Torrance County Detention Facility which had already failed one Nakamoto inspection in 2021, recommending that ICE immediately stop detaining people there.[54] ICE rejected the recommendation, and continued to keep hundreds of people detained in Torrance.[55] That same month, ICE’s contracting officer also issued a report finding that violations of federal standards continued in Torrance.[56]
Later that year, in August 2022, a young man from Brazil named Kesley Vial, died in the Torrance facility.[59] ICE’s review of Kesley’s death addressed similar failures identified in the OIG report that contributed to his fatal suicide attempt.[60]
At another ICE detention facility in Port Isabel, Texas, the OIG reported in February 2023 on “unsafe conditions,” and found the facility did “not meet standards for detainee segregation.”[61] Months later, on October 8, 2023, Julio Cesar Chirino Peralta died in ICE custody after being detained at Port Isabel.[62]
Under Biden, 12 people have died in ICE custody.[64]
…
Continuing to fund ICE’s detention system is inhumane and misguided. For fiscal year 2023, U.S. taxpayers paid $2.8 billion for ICE detention.[66] Following the end of the Trump-era Title 42 mass expulsion policy in May, the Biden administration adopted a more hardline approach, implementing new “sweeping” enforcement measures, including increasing detention capacity.[67] In doing so, the administration chose to ignore years of evidence showing that punitive enforcement measures do not lead to decreases in migration numbers.[68] Detention numbers spiked, from 22,000 in May to over 39,000 by the end of October 2023.[69] In continuing to expand the incarceration of people facing administrative removal proceedings, the administration ignores clear evidence showing that legal representation and community-based support services are a more humane and effective method of ensuring compliance at immigration court hearings.[70]
It is undesirable that politicians use our tax money this way, yes. This is a pretty dumb attempt at a semantic “gotcha” given that I’m here literally criticizing the Democrats for helping fund ICE.
Yes. They are my tax dollars. No, I do not want them spent that way. The Democrats do want to spend them on fascist shit. Do you understand how that works? How not supporting a thing is not the same as supporting it?
Conservative post-truth bullshit has really scrambled people’s brains.
Are you suggesting that there are empty ICE detention facilities somewhere, that aren’t holding any migrants so that they can be deliberately put into only a few of them?
No, I’m suggesting that the entire idea behind the mass detainment is false and cruel, that it doesn’t matter how much money you give ICE they will not use it to try to fix the problem that they have intentionally created because they are a racist organization created explicitly to brutalize brown immigrants and migrants.
Like, your fascist brain can’t even wrap itself around the fact that maybe there’s some other reality here besides the one right-wingers have been portraying for the past twenty years.
Your rhetoric is quite literally indistinguishable from that of a MAGA supporter.
It is undesirable that politicians use our tax money this way, yes. This is a pretty dumb attempt at a semantic "gotcha" given that I'm here literally criticizing the Democrats for helping fund ICE.
Yes. They are my tax dollars. No, I do not want them spent that way. The Democrats do want to spend them on fascist shit. Do you understand how that works? How not supporting a thing is not the same as supporting it?
My point is that whether you say you "want" to support it or not, you are.
Similarly, whether or not Biden "wants" to support it, he's embedded in a system that sometimes might do things he doesn't want. In particular, on immigration, a lot of it is in the hands of people in congress who are explicitly malicious.
I'm not trying to excuse him for anything, and he's obviously in a better position to influence the system than you are. But, just like you not wanting your tax dollars to fund something you don't want doesn't really change whether it happens (and so, you are funding a fascist organization), Biden wanting the immigration policy to be one way or another doesn't really mean anything if congress is setting rules that he doesn't want.
I don't think it's a secret that the Republicans have been pushing for more explicit cruelty in our system and Biden has been compromising with them in order to try to accomplish other things (some of which are good things for people), even knowing that some of what comes in might be bad, in the same way that you might pay your taxes even knowing that some of what it's funding is bad.
Surely makes sense? Maybe not, IDK; apparently my brain is scrambled. But to me the analogy seemed to be pretty understandable.
Like, your fascist brain can't even wrap itself around the fact that maybe there's some other reality here besides the one right-wingers have been portraying for the past twenty years.
Your rhetoric is quite literally indistinguishable from that of a MAGA supporter.
You caught me man. If there's one thing that's a common thread in all of my comments it's love for the right-wing reality and MAGA style rhetoric. Go back and read my comments about ICE and imagine them on Truth Social, and they'd fit right in.
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