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Exclusive: How Biden botched the border Alex Thompson and Stef W. Kight. 2024 2 12. Axios. https://www.axios.com/2024/02/12/how-biden-botched-border Biden faces more criticism about the US-Mexico border, one of his biggest problems heading into 2024 Will Weissert and Adriana Gomez. 2023 10 7. AP.
““When we take administrative actions as we have done a number of times, we are challenged in court. Legislation is the enduring solution,” Mayorkas told CNN’s Dana Bash. “And by the way, we can, not, through administrative action, plus up the United States border patrol, customs and border protection by 1,500 personnel like this legislation proposes; we cannot through administrative action add 4,300 asylum officers so that we can work through the backlog and turn the system into an efficient and well working one, which it hasn’t been for more than three decades.”
Legislation seems unlikely to pass in a divided Congress, particularly after House Republicans tanked a bipartisan border bill negotiated in the Senate, with Speaker Mike Johnson declaring it dead on arrival.”
https://www.politico.com/news/2024/03/03/mayorkas-executive-orders-migrant-crisis-00144585
“The U.S. government, for all the money and agents it’s thrown at the border over the past several decades, has never been able to practically “shut down the border” or achieve zero illegal crossings (all the legal issues with those proposals aside).
Between the creation of the Department of Homeland Security in 2003 and January 2021, the U.S. has spent $333 billion to fund the agencies tasked with immigration enforcement, according to the American Immigration Council, a pro-immigration nonprofit. The budgets for those agencies have been rising for years.
But more enforcement money hasn’t necessarily led to lower illegal crossings. As budgets have gone up, apprehensions of people who crossed the border between authorized ports of entry have gone up, down, and remained static. In other words, they don’t cleanly align: Though Customs and Border Protection reported 2.05 million apprehensions in FY 2023, it reported somewhat close to that number—over 1.5 million—in FY 2000. Annual apprehensions hovered below 500,000 from FY 2010 through FY 2018.”
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“The U.S.-Mexico border stretches nearly 2,000 miles, much of it treacherous. No matter the funding and no matter the enforcement mandate, there’s no way that agents could stop every illegal crosser traversing the deserts, mountains, and waters that make up the border region. That’s proven impossible along much smaller and more surveilled borders, such as the boundaries of East Germany and North Korea.”
https://reason.com/2024/02/02/zero-illegal-crossings-is-an-unattainable-goal-for-the-border/
“For well more than a century, the federal government has enjoyed near exclusive authority over immigration policy, while states have largely been restricted to assisting in carrying out federal policies. The Supreme Court has reinforced this rule many times over many decisions, such as Truax v. Raich (1915), which said that “the authority to control immigration — to admit or exclude aliens — is vested solely in the Federal Government.”
Texas, however, now wants the Supreme Court to abandon this longstanding constitutional rule, and it thinks that the political tumblers have finally aligned in a way that would lead the Court to do just that.
Texas seeks to upend the longstanding balance of power between the federal government and the states through a law, known as SB 4, which allows Texas state courts to issue deportation orders that will be carried out by Texas state officials. The law is now before the Supreme Court in two “shadow docket” cases, known as United States v. Texas and Las Americas Immigrant Advocacy v. McCraw.”
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“The reason why the federal government has historically had exclusive authority over nearly all questions of immigration policy is to prevent a single state’s mistreatment of a foreign national from damaging US relations with another nation. Indeed, Hines v. Davidowitz (1941) warned that “international controversies of the gravest moment, sometimes even leading to war, may arise from real or imagined wrongs” committed against foreign nationals.
Which isn’t to say that the United States must always treat foreign citizens with caution or deference — just that a decision that could endanger the entire nation’s relationship with a foreign state should be made by a government that represents the entire nation.”
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“the current Supreme Court has only a weak attachment to following precedent, especially when a precedent is widely disliked by modern-day Republicans. So there is at least some risk that the Court’s GOP-appointed majority will allow SB 4 to go into effect.”
https://www.vox.com/scotus/2024/3/12/24097438/supreme-court-texas-deportation-sb4-unconstitutional-border-migrants
“The migrants say they are leaving due to a slump in China’s economy as it struggles to rebound from the COVID pandemic, as well as to escape strict lockdowns and restrictions.
“The unemployment rate is very high. People cannot find work,” Xi Yan, a Chinese writer who crossed the border in April, told the Associated Press. “For small business owners, they cannot sustain their businesses.”
In June, China’s unemployment rate for 16-to-24-year-olds reached 21.3%, according to the National Bureau of Statistics. Sin Yen Ling, a spokesperson for the Asian American civil rights group Chinese for Affirmative Action, told the Austin American-Statesman that Beijing’s “recent crackdown on industries such as tech, real estate and education where young people have traditionally sought jobs have contributed to the high unemployment rate.”
Visas granted to Chinese nationals to work, visit or study in the U.S. have also become increasingly hard to come by, leading to the spike in finding alternate ways into the country due to recent tensions between China and the U.S.”
https://www.yahoo.com/news/why-are-so-many-chinese-crossing-the-southern-border-172637085.html
“The Cato Institute’s David Bier noted in a blog post earlier this month that the Biden administration has deported a higher share of border crossers than the Trump administration. Trump’s increased detention of migrants did not result in more removals.”
https://reason.com/2024/01/31/impending-impeachment/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2dQ4-VNaG3s
“Sen. James Lankford of Oklahoma spoke on Wednesday about the political challenges he’s encountered while serving as the top GOP negotiator on a bipartisan border security deal.
In a speech shortly before the expected failure of the deal, Lankford bemoaned the fact that some fellow Republicans were objecting to the bill for purely political reasons.
“Some of them have been very clear with me,” Lankford said of his GOP colleagues, “they have political differences with the bill. They say it’s the wrong time to solve the problem. We’ll let the presidential election solve this problem.”
Lankford went on to say that a “popular commentator” — without naming any names — threatened to “destroy” him if he negotiated the deal during a presidential election year, regardless of what was in it.
“I will do whatever I can to destroy you, because I do not want you to solve this during the presidential election,” Lankford recounted the commentator saying.
“By the way, they have been faithful to their promise, and have done everything they can to destroy me,” he added.”
https://www.yahoo.com/news/sen-lankford-says-popular-commentator-200553824.html
“The governors and Abbott claim that states have a “right of self-defense” under Article 4, Section 4 of the Constitution (which guarantees that the federal government will “protect each [state] against Invasion”) and Article 1, Section 10, Clause 3 (which allows states to “engage in War” if “actually invaded,” which Abbott says gives Texas the “constitutional authority to defend and protect itself”).
This argument misunderstands the long-established legal and practical definitions of an “invasion.” It also misconstrues the nature of unauthorized migration.
James Madison and other drafters of the Constitution, Abbott argued, “foresaw that States should not be left to the mercy of a lawless president who does nothing to stop external threats like cartels smuggling millions of illegal immigrants across the border.” But “those who cite Madison in support of equating immigration and invasion ignore the one time he directly addressed this very question,” writes the George Mason University law professor Ilya Somin at The Volokh Conspiracy, a group blog hosted by Reason. Madison did so in “the Report of 1800, which rebutted claims that the Alien Friends Act of 1798 (which gave the president broad power to expel non-citizens) was authorized by the Invasion Clause.”
“Invasion is an operation of war,” declared Madison. “To protect against invasion is an exercise of the power of war. A power therefore not incident to war, cannot be incident to a particular modification of war. And as the removal of alien friends has appeared to be no incident to a general state of war, it cannot be incident to a partial state, or a particular modification of war.”
“Every court that has reviewed the question” of what qualifies as an invasion has interpreted it as “an ‘armed hostility from another political entity,'” wrote the Cato Institute’s David J. Bier for Reason in 2021. In 1996, California made the same argument as Abbott, saying that the federal government had failed to protect it against an “invasion” of “illegal aliens.” But the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit rejected that: “Even if the issue were properly within the Court’s constitutional responsibility, there are no manageable standards to ascertain whether or when an influx of illegal immigrants should be said to constitute an invasion.” Besides, the 9th Circuit said, California ignored Madison’s conclusion in Federalist No. 43 that the Invasion Clause affords “protection in situations wherein a state is exposed to armed hostility from another political entity.”
This is where Abbott runs into another issue: Undocumented immigrants bear little resemblance to an invading foreign army. Despite the constant invocations of “military-age” men crossing the border (the fearmonger’s favorite way of saying “young men”), there has also been a historic influx of migrant families. Large groups of border crossers marching through the Sonoran Desert or trudging across the Rio Grande may make good footage for media outlets intent on fearmongering, but the overwhelming majority are coming here for economic or humanitarian reasons, not to commit crimes or sow chaos.”
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“By and large, people are happy to go through the legal immigration process if the steps are clear and accessible—but right now, they tend not to be. It’s up to Congress to pass immigration reforms that recognize these realities. Abbott’s misrepresentation of the Constitution does nothing to help.”
https://reason.com/2024/01/26/the-twisted-logic-of-greg-abbotts-border-policy/