“In the months since President Joe Biden imposed sweeping restrictions on asylum at the U.S.-Mexico border, the policy appears to be working exactly as he hoped and his critics feared.
The number of people asking for haven in the United States has dropped by 50% since June, according to new figures from the Department of Homeland Security. Border agents are operating more efficiently, administration officials say, and many of the hot spots along the border, like Eagle Pass, Texas, have calmed.”
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“Under the new rules, border agents are no longer required to ask migrants whether they fear for their lives if they are returned home. Unless the migrants raise such a fear on their own, they are quickly processed for deportation to their home countries.
It is difficult to know how many people with legitimate cases are turned back because they don’t know to “manifest fear,” as the practice is known. But critics of the new policy say it is deeply unfair to desperate people who have no idea how to seek help in America.”
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“The order mandates that only people who enter the country at an official port of entry with an appointment can be considered for asylum at the southern border, with only limited exceptions for unaccompanied children, victims of human trafficking and people facing serious medical emergencies or threats to their lives.
Before the new rules went into effect, migrants would cross the border illegally and seek out border agents to surrender, knowing that anyone who set foot on U.S. soil could ask for protection. Often, after an initial screening, they would be released into the United States to wait, sometimes for years, for their cases to come up.
Biden’s order changed that. Now, the majority of migrants are turned back quickly.”
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“An administration official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the policy freely, said the new rules allow the agency to focus on migrants who are more likely to have legitimate claims. The person said more than 1,000 migrants a day can schedule an appointment to claim asylum at an official port of entry, so there is still a pathway for people seeking refuge.”
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“Biden’s executive order is not the only reason the numbers have dropped.
Mexico has ramped up enforcement, intercepting migrants en route to the border. And illegal crossings typically fall after a major policy change — only to rise again later — as migrants try to make sense of the new rules.
But it is clear that the restrictions are having a significant effect.
The number of people crossing into the United States has plummeted since Biden imposed the restrictions. In July, there were about 56,000 illegal crossings, the lowest monthly tally of the Biden administration. In December alone, that number was 250,000.
The number of people seeking asylum, in turn, also fell precipitously. Although the Department of Homeland Security did not give exact figures, the agency said in a court filing last week that asylum requests had dropped more than 50%.”
“The vice president was never in charge of the border. That job belongs to Alejandro Mayorkas, the secretary of homeland security, and to Xavier Becerra, the secretary of health and human services.
Still, a combination of right-wing spin, media fascination during Harris’s early tenure, miscommunication from the White House, and growing migrant surges during the Biden presidency have all made that label stick. Now, it stands as one of the more serious challenges Harris faces”
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“in March 2021, when Biden announced that he would be giving Harris essentially the same assignment he got during his own vice presidency: coordinating diplomatic relationships to address the “root causes” of migration into the United States.
“I’ve asked her, the VP, today — because she’s the most qualified person to do it — to lead our efforts with Mexico and the Northern Triangle and the countries that help — are going to need help in stemming the movement of so many folks, stemming the migration to our southern border,” Biden said during a White House meeting on migration on March 24, 2021.
The idea behind this approach is a long-term strategy: Border surges were just one symptom of deeper economic, diplomatic, and security problems these countries face that cause people to make the trek north. The assignment was a bit cursed from the start — a “politically treacherous job with little short-term payoff,” as it was described by the Los Angeles Times — because any benefits from addressing these root causes would obviously take time to appear. Meanwhile, the border saw more legal as well as illegal crossings every month.
Senior White House officials who briefed reporters before the announcement emphasized at the time that this was a diplomatic assignment: a two-pronged approach to build diplomatic ties with these countries and to oversee investment and implementation of foreign aid to these countries to address infrastructure, grow business, and strengthen civil society.”
“Vance is perhaps the GOP’s leading practitioner of responding to questions about Russia’s invasion of Ukraine by pivoting to Mexico and fentanyl. “What are we talking about?” he asked at a voter forum in February 2022 as the invasion was imminent. “We’re talking about a border 5,000 miles away between Ukraine and Russia. That’s what our leaders are focused on. If we had leaders half as concerned about their own border as they were about the Ukraine-Russia border, we would not have a border crisis in this country.””
“Donald Trump went on national TV last week and proposed bombing Mexico.
Asked by Fox News’s Jesse Watters if he’d consider strikes against drug cartels operating in the country, Trump said yes — and framed his answer as a threat against the Mexican government. “Mexico’s gonna have to straighten it out really fast, or the answer is absolutely,” the former president said.
This is not a one-off answer to a stray question. Trump suggested firing missiles at Mexico during his presidency, asked advisers for a “battle plan” against the cartels last year, and recently proposed sending special operators to assassinate drug kingpins. The idea of war in Mexico is popular among the Republican elite; a Trump-aligned think tank even drew up a broad-strokes plan for how such a war might work.
There is every reason to take Trump’s proposal seriously. Presidents tend to at least try to deliver on campaign promises, and they have nearly unlimited war-making power nowadays. As unthinkable as it may sound, there is a reasonable chance the United States will be at war on its southern border in the coming years if Donald Trump returns to office.”
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“This is part of a bigger pattern. If you actually look at Trump’s policy agenda, he’s called for some wild stuff: policies so extreme that, had they been proposed prior to 2016, would have defined the entire course of the campaign. Today, a few get some coverage, but mostly feel like sideshows — with policy as a category taking a backseat to personality and polling.
Recently, the lack of policy focus is partly due to a remarkably chaotic stretch of American political life. One candidate, the incumbent president, bungled his debate performance so badly that his party replaced him with his vice president. The other almost got killed on national television by a would-be assassin.
But even in more normal times this is a general problem with the media: Policy is technical and boring, while horse-race reporting is exciting and easier for audiences to grasp.
Elements of Trump’s persona also make policy reporting a lot tougher. The combination of habitual lying, flip-flopping, and personal disinterest in detail can make it tough to know what’s an actual proposal and what’s something he said just for the hell of it.”
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“Before I started writing this story, I asked my colleagues at Vox what stood out as Trump’s signature policy proposals in this election — the equivalent of “Build the Wall” in 2016. We came up with two big answers: Trump’s proposal for a general 10 percent tariff and his plan for “the largest deportation in American history.”
Each of these policies is genuinely extreme.
A 10 percent blanket tariff isn’t just putting a tax on specific imports to protect a particular industry, or to retaliate against a country like China engaging in unfair trade practices. It’s a blanket attempt to make all imports from every country, including from neighbors like Canada and allies like the European Union, 10 percent more expensive.
This is a radical shift from the way that trade policy typically works in the United States — one with huge and predictably negative implications for US consumers and the economy.
The tariffs mean that people will either buy American-made goods that cost more than their current foreign competitors, or they will keep buying foreign-made goods at a 10 percent markup. That’s inflation basically by definition: an odd proposal for a candidate running against inflation as his central issue.
The center-right Tax Foundation estimates that the tariffs would shave nearly 1 percent off of US GDP growth annually, costing roughly 684,000 jobs. This estimate did not take into account retaliation from other countries, who almost certainly would impose their own tariffs on American goods in response. A second estimate, from the centrist Peterson Institute, finds that every group of Americans — from the poorest to the wealthiest — would see drops in their annual income.
Neither of these estimates takes into account the all-but-certain retaliation from the affected countries, especially China (who Trump wants to hit with a special 60 percent across-the-board tariff).”
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“No one is exactly sure how many people are going to be targeted for deportations: Trump never sets a specific target, but often implies he’s going to deport every undocumented immigrant in the United States (there are currently around 11 million). A group of four NBC reporters tried to figure out how deporting so many people was supposed to work, and ended up concluding that it was such a break with the way immigration enforcement typically works that it was near-impossible to grasp the scope of the effort.
Typically, police don’t go out looking for undocumented migrants currently residing in the United States. They find them by accident, during a traffic stop or criminal arrest, and then discover that they are undocumented and notify ICE to begin deportation. Targeted enforcement raids happen, but they’re comparatively rare and make up only a fraction of annual deportations.
For Trump’s “mass deportation” policy to work, he would need to devote extraordinary resources — state, federal, and local — to finding and apprehending undocumented immigrants. Once found, they still pose a massive logistical challenge: current law does not allow ICE to deport longstanding US residents without a hearing (or the migrant’s consent), posing a huge burden on the legal system. The government would also need to figure out the travel logistics for deportation, including negotiating with home countries that might not be very happy to receive large numbers of functional refugees.
During all of this, the US government would need to house millions of people — which ICE currently lacks the capacity to do. Hence the now-infamous Trump proposals for keeping detained immigrants in camps: there’s literally nowhere else to put them while they await deportation.
All of this is not only a human rights disaster, but an economic and law enforcement one. The cost of devoting police and judicial resources to this task, in terms of trade-offs with addressing actual crime, would be significant. So too would be the financial cost of building immigrant camps and providing them with food and medical care.
Removing so many people from the workforce would also be inflationary, far outweighing any (questionable) increase in wages for native-born workers. One estimate suggests that, all told, mass deportations would cost the American economy $4.7 trillion over a 10-year period.
The point, in short, is that Trump is proposing sweeping changes to the way the US economy and legal system operates — ones with consequences for every American — and we’re barely even talking about what they would mean.”
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“there’s a difference between Trump’s random utterances, or what he might do about some obscure policy issue, and his consistent instincts on the issues central to his political identity — like trade and the southern border. And there, he could not be clearer: across-the-board tariff, mass deportation, and waging war on the drug cartels.
Even if we set aside everything else we know (or think we know) about what Trump would do, these three items alone would have the potential to transform life in America as we know it. It’s time to start covering Trump like he means what he says.”
“The number of migrants illegally crossing the U.S.-Mexico border has plummeted 40 percent since President Joe Biden clamped down on asylum earlier this month, administration officials said Wednesday.
Daily crossings have fallen below 2,400. That’s the lowest level since Jan. 17, 2021, right before the president took office. But encounters still remain too high for the president’s newly implemented restrictions to be lifted: Migrants will continue to be barred from seeking asylum in between ports of entry until average border crossings have fallen below 1,500 for seven consecutive days.”
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“It’s unclear if the slowdown in crossings will continue in the weeks or months ahead. Outside groups have also sued to block the new measures, placing it in some legal peril.”
“The new policy — which would allow federal officials to suspend asylum claims between designated ports of entry if crossings exceed an average of 2,500 per day over a week — is aimed at deterring large numbers of people from trying to enter the United States and give the government additional tools to more swiftly remove certain migrants from the country.”
“Republicans argued that he did not properly enforce immigration laws, citing, in one case, the decision to release migrants after they arrived at the southern border. In fact, that’s an established practice followed by multiple administrations, in part because the US does not have sufficient space to detain people as they await immigration hearings.
Republicans also said that Mayorkas had made false statements to Congress because he testified that the border was “secure,” and that he blocked oversight by failing to respond to subpoenas and offer sufficient access to his office.
Mayorkas has pushed back against the charges, noting that his approach may differ from that of Republicans, but he’s been committed to immigration enforcement and has worked to comply with Congress’s oversight of the agency by providing testimony and documents.
Many Constitutional law experts also said Republicans had not shown that the charges reached a legal bar for impeachment, and that they instead seemed to be founded on policy disagreements. “If allegations like this were sufficient to justify impeachment, the separation of powers would be permanently destabilized,” wrote top scholars, including Harvard’s Laurence Tribe and Berkeley’s Erwin Chemerinsky, in a January letter.
The first phase of the Senate trial on Wednesday took place because the upper chamber needed to fulfill its constitutional duty. Following a House impeachment, the Senate’s job is to hear the charges and determine whether the person should be convicted. If an official is convicted — which requires a two-third majority vote — they would then be removed from their position. The Senate also has the option to dismiss, or table, the impeachment articles if a simple majority votes to do so.
Ultimately, that’s what happened on both articles against Mayorkas, though it wasn’t without some drama. During the process, Republicans were able to force additional votes on “points of order,” or procedural motions regarding how the impeachment should move forward. They used this platform to slam Democrats repeatedly for not holding a full trial like those seen during the impeachment proceedings of former Presidents Donald Trump and Bill Clinton and to try to delay the trial to a later date. The GOP points of order all largely failed on party lines.”