If you mean denying a visa to the spouse of someone who's in the United States, say so. "Separate families" in this context is very obviously an attempt to imply he's doing something much darker which he isn't doing. Biden actually started the task force to find and reunite those separated families, although the policy itself had already been abandoned, being too evil to continue for all that long under even the Trump administration.
As with a lot of these stories, I am interested to know why someone who is supposedly deeply concerned with the plight of migrant families is specifically attacking one of the parts of the US government equation that is trying to do something good for them, and instead creating (with quite a bit of success) a whole Goebbels-style reality where he's doing the exact opposite, partly by blaming him and specifically him for anything any part of the fairly racist and unreasonable US immigration apparatus ever does even down to the individual level, and ignoring the question of what the Biden administration itself is doing to shape policy, to the benefit of the team that actually is thirsting and sharpening their knives for what terribly overly malicious things they might get to do to migrants as an affirmative goal of theirs (and not a minor one) under a second Trump administration.
Yeah, but a big part of the Goebbels game is to create an overall picture of separate events that paint the larger falsehood you want to create. For anyone other than the single-digit percent of people who decide to click on the article, the headline forms one more little thing they're scrolling past that paints an overall picture of "Biden is malicious on immigration and trying to hurt people," which I think is actually one of the most successful totally-made-up realities they've managed to get into the public consciousness to try to depress support for him among people that would otherwise be inclined to.
I'm a little suspicious of the meat of the article, too -- like how much connection is there between these particular lawyers who made this filing, and Biden (presumably he didn't weigh in on this particular case, but are they even State Dept lawyers? The article says so, but I thought usually the lawyers for this kind of thing would be rank and file DOJ immigration lawyers, maybe I am mistaken)
Are the tattoos that they said justified non renewal really totally innocent non MS13 tattoos that the racist immigration apparatus freaked out about, as his lawyers are claiming? (easily possible but also not guaranteed to me simply because his lawyers are claiming it)
But the meat of the article is maybe at the "IDK I have some questions" level, whereas the headline is what'll have honestly most of the impact on the public consciousness, and it's well up into "get the fuck out of here with that explicit propaganda" level.
I have begun to identify arguing against something that isn’t quite what your opponent is saying, as a way of disagreeing with something that it’s hard to muster up any good faith arguments against, as one of the key hallmarks of bad faith debating on Lemmy.
Obviously I am not saying that any part of the article is purely made up; I am saying this is a specific technique of highlighting individual data points to paint a misleading picture, and then giving what I feel is additional context which gives the lie to the picture that they’re trying to paint. And, I would add that it’s also using wildly inaccurate phrasing to communicate technically-not-lies to dial even further up the level of dishonesty that can be achieved. But no, I’m not aware of any of the data points actually being lies or made up.
I think I made my explanation pretty clear already
Because the State Dept actually does work for Biden, whereas the DOJ is very specifically separated from direct control by the executive weighing in on individual cases even though it’s part of the executive branch
If you have actual gang tattoos that’s an indication of criminality. Again, for all I know, that part is crap and US immigration is just being racist against innocent tattoos; I’m just pointing out that there is such a thing as gang tattoos and I would support using them as a reason to make a bad inference about the person.
“Unrestricted power” is patently false; no less than 3 different courts spent quite a while evaluating whether to restrict the State Dept’s power in this case, and presumably they’ll still be able to do that and US immigration will still have to show a judge good reasons if they want to remove someone from the country in the future. The issue is just where are the boundaries and restrictions on the power. Also, “separate families” is grossly misleading, since it could lead a reasonable reader who wasn’t up to speed on the minutiae of immigration policy to claim (as multiple Lemmy users have done to me in the past) that Biden is continuing and even expanding the policies of removing children from parents that were so infamous in the Trump administration.
I’m not going to keep the numbered thing up, because a few of those answers are good enough for me.
I don’t think the headline is wrong, I think this headline is indicative of the problem with headlines in general: they fundamentally can’t provide appropriate context. The state department does have the unrestricted power to separate spouses now, in a very narrow context where the non-citizen is not in the US (for now - we know where SCOTUS and Trump want this to go). Yes, it could have been better, they always can be. I’ve only seen maybe a handful of perfect headlines in my entire life, and most have come from the Rolling Stone. I don’t think this slant is any worse than mainstream headlines, and miles better than anything that would come from conservative media. I think the reaction is that as a country, we’re used to these angles coming from the right so it feels wrong for there to be leftist critique in news.
Why would it matter either way if the lawyers report directly to him or to the DOJ? The DOJ is still administered by Biden’s handpicked appointee. This decision is inextricably linked to Biden’s administration. We don’t need to know if this is what he wanted in his heart-of-hearts, we just need to know that his administration is why we now have this majority ruling in the first place. The lawsuit would not have existed if the State Department didn’t try to fuck with people’s lives.
This decision deeply undermines precedent and established law. Sure, he might have announced a “keep families together” campaign, but his administration pushed the issue and has granted the state department the ability to deny visas to people legally married to US citizens.
I don't even know what you're talking about here. "Announced a keep families together campaign" is horseshit. (Edit: see below) He started a specific task force to go through all the kids still in custody, try to find their families (which given the general chaos and sloppiness level of the bureaucracies involved on both sides of the border was pretty fucking difficult) and give them back. Before that they were just in custody, basically just waiting to grow up in a lifetime of orphaned misery. Now they're home, when they could even find the families.
(Edit: I see it; I read more of the article. (a) What I was talking about was reuniting the confiscated kids with their families, not the more recent campaign (b) is it possible perhaps that this specific campaign a few days ago was specifically a reaction by Biden to change policies in a way so that spouses in the US would be a bigger factor in visa decisions, specifically because of actions like this example over the course of the last few years that Biden wanted to make a change to?)
his administration pushed the issue
Want to explain a little more what you mean by this?
granted the state department the ability to deny visas to people legally married to US citizens.
The State Department can do whatever it wants with renewing or denying visas. Then, if something wrong happens, someone can challenge it in court, which is exactly what happened here -- and lawyers from both sides get to present a vigorous case; in this case the lawyers for the government side (part and parcel of a pretty racist and careless system which Biden didn't create, the reform of which I would be 1,000% behind the idea of but which getting rid of Biden will make 10 times worse) made their argument for his MS-13 membership.
Painting this whole thing that "forget Biden's policies, let's find something that a government lawyer argued in one particular case that many judges agreed with once they saw the details and pretend that Biden told those particular lawyers to do exactly that and that that one event represents a good representation of his whole policy, and that the outcome was definitely wrong (which -- again -- it might have been), and a huge new thing he enacted personally and not a continuation of longstanding US immigration policy of fucking up people's lives sometimes, and that something he actually did specifically order which I talked about up at the beginning which affected many many people in an unequivocally good way just kind of didn't happen"... and then summarize it with specific misleading words to make it sound even worse than that whole weirdly slant-on-top-of-slant construction... it doesn't sit well with me, sir. No sir I do not like it.
Do you intentionally try to start arguments with your comments? We’re not on reddit anymore, I don’t engage with bait. Consider it a warning, because I do want to have this conversation.
Biden issued an executive order days before this decision. You even referenced it in your own comment. I called it a campaign because I’m a lead mobilizer and steward in my union, so some wires got crossed trying to describe the EO. However, I don’t think the comparison of an EO to a mobilizing campaign is far off. The taskforce trying to reconnect families is good. This article does take a passing swing at that taskforce, mostly to say that it’s far too little and way too late, but the headline and article is specifically about the court case and the majority opinion. That’s really all I have to say about this for the time being unless we get into border policies.
I said that the administration pushed the issue, because they did. They intentionally baited the spouse of a US citizen to leave the country to strip the person of due process, and then denied the visa without a legitimate cause. When the appellate court reversed the trial decision, the Biden administration could have let the issue rest, gave an apology, and issued the visa. Instead they appealed it to the most fascist SCOTUS in the country’s history. Biden, or at least the lawyers representing the state, wanted the government to have this power.
This is how things will work now. If a non-citizen gets married in the US and has to leave the country for any reason, their visa can get denied, the spouse cannot sue in the US on their behalf, and the person trying to immigrate cannot complete the paperwork based on the state department’s current process for immigrating as a spouse. That sounds like unrestricted power to separate families if you ask me. This isn’t cherry-picking statements from lawyers, this is the court’s majority opinion.
Do you intentionally try to start arguments with your comments?
Yeah, that’s fair. This issue is somewhat personal for me and so I get more short tempered or rude about it than I really should. I apologize about being inflammatory about it.
That said, let me try again more polite: I think I was pretty explicit that the issue isn’t that I know the article is lying; it is that it’s presenting true facts in an engineered and wildly misleading fashion.
They intentionally baited the spouse of a US citizen to leave the country to strip the person of due process
This is another very misleading construction (and one that echoes another one in the article that I didn’t bother touching on.) Since you have been deeply involved in immigration activism, you are surely aware that this isn’t anything specific to this case or even a new Biden thing - it’s just always how it works; to renew your visa you have to leave the US, apply for renewal at the embassy, and then if they approve it you can come back in. It’s a heart-stopping and somewhat punitive process but pretending that the State Department somehow decided to apply it in only this case is flat out wrong. That’s how it works for everyone. The fact that the article pretends that they somehow singled out this guy and tricked him into going through that same process is another example of its open dishonesty.
When the appellate court reversed the trial decision, the Biden administration could have let the issue rest, gave an apology, and issued the visa.
Again, if you want to tell me that US immigration is vindictive and racist, I definitely won’t disagree. Going from there to implying they asked Biden what to do about this specific immigration case and had him decide, seems unlikely to me. Choosing to ignore things that we do know that he definitely did do to change policy seems partisan. Choosing to pick out ways in which he’s now trying to change policy to undo some of the maybe unjust things that happened in this case starting back a few years ago, at a systemic level, and trying to pretend that means he’s lying and wants to hurt people (instead of trying to now change the policies to help people), seems dishonest (and again in a way that’s specifically likely to help some people who really do want to hurt migrants, very very badly). To me.
Since you have been deeply involved in immigration activism
Also fair. I’m an activist that helps immigrants find working class power, not an immigration activist.
I didn’t know that was a requirement for getting a visa. When it comes to heads of government, I think about what my CEO would do and work off that. It works most of the time, but clearly not every time. It does recontextualize things for me a bit, but not enough to stop me from being absolutely pissed at the current administration or the ruling. I think we can both reach the agreement that the way immigration is about to change is total bullshit and needs a complete overhaul.
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