Biden tried to fix a lot of the problems with our immigration system, and when he couldn’t get it through congress, he offered some cruelty to the Republicans as a gesture of compromise. His bill still would have massively reduced the level of suffering. A lot of the things Trump has been shutting down were things he initiated (a streamlined app for requesting asylum, instead of crossing the border illegally and then showing up and turning yourself in being the officially recommended system, for example).
Why was that all presented to the public as “being tough on immigration just like Trump is”? I have no idea, although I suspect that severely mentally challenged campaign consultants who the Democrats should have fired into the sun were involved. But the reality was different, and the left as it often does is entirely happy just to pretend everything the blue man did was bad, just because we don’t like what’s happening and don’t want to understand details.
As part of this investigation, Amnesty International performed an analysis of the CBP One Android application with a view to identifying any privacy or security concerns. The application’s use of facial recognition, GPS tracking and cloud storage to collect data on asylum seekers prior to their entry into the United States raise serious privacy and non-discrimination concerns. Asylum seekers often lacked understanding of CBP One’s privacy policy but agreed to it anyways because it was the only way for them to be able to use the application. Considering that use of CBP One is one of the limited exceptions to not being ineligible for asylum under the Final Rule, it is arguable whether use of the application is truly voluntary. Concerns also extend to the undisclosed sharing of data with third-party services like Google’s Firebase and the potential for discriminatory outcomes in facial recognition processes, as evidenced by documented demographic biases. The CBP One application risks violating international human rights standards, particularly regarding privacy and non-discrimination, and reinforce border regimes that disproportionately affect marginalized groups, potentially leading to wrongful identification and denial of asylum rights.
…
Amnesty International considers that the Circumvention of Lawful Pathways Final Rule and the mandatory use of the CBP One application are the newest iteration of migration and asylum policies implemented by the US government at the US-Mexico border which drastically limit access to asylum in violation of international human rights and refugee law. While the organization recognizes that innovations such as electronic entry management systems could potentially provide for safe transit and more orderly border access, programs like CBP One cannot be used as the exclusive manner of entry into the United States to seek international protection. The organization considers that the CBP One mobile application must not be used to create obstacles, but instead should be one of a variety of means to access the right to seek asylum.
when you’re calling it a “streamlined app” and Amnesty International has a 71-page report about the technical problems it has and that the requirement to use it violates international law, maybe you shouldn’t be talking about how other people “don’t want to understand details”
Why was that all presented to the public as “being tough on immigration just like Trump is”?
For Biden, who announced his Democratic reelection campaign a week ago, the decision signals his administration is taking seriously an effort to tamp down the number of illegal crossings, a potent source of Republican attacks, and sends a message to potential border crossers not to attempt the journey. But it also draws potentially unwelcome comparisons to Biden’s Republican predecessor, whose policies Biden frequently criticized. Congress, meanwhile, has refused to take any substantial immigration-related actions.
Harris’ pitch completes a turnaround from 2019, when she took more left-leaning positions as a presidential candidate including by backing a call to reduce illegal border crossings to a civil — not criminal — violation and by objecting to Obama-era deportations.
Biden and Harris were almost literally doing the “HIRE 👏 MORE 👏 WOMEN 👏 GUARDS 👏” meme but with ICE agents.
Should he have just abolished ICE instead? Probably. Did he make things worse on purpose? Fuck no, he made them better. Is it some bad-faith bullshit that people keep attacking him pretending that he did? Yes it is, Cap, yes it is.
my comment linked 6 different sources - contemporaneous news articles, from reputable outlets, and a 71-page report from Amnesty International about that “streamlined app” you think is so great.
and in response you tell me I should read a Wikipedia article. (which I’d already read, btw, while looking up actual sources for my original comment)
so again, tell me more about how the problem is other people not wanting to understand details.
Should he have just abolished ICE instead? Probably.
we’re 6 months in to Trump’s 2nd term, and somehow you’re still a “probably” about abolishing ICE?
what would it take to get you to “yes”?
what would it take to get you to “yes, the next Democratic president needs to abolish ICE, no excuses”?
how many concentration camps would ICE need to build to convince you? apparently the first one in Florida wasn’t enough.
their stated goal is 3000 arrests per day. how many days of that would it take to convince you?
Trump and the right-wing want to make things worse for immigrants, on purpose. we can at least agree on that.
but then you’re setting the bar for Democrats so low that it’s basically meaningless.
if a Democrat makes things worse, but does so unintentionally…is criticizing them for that just off the table?
if a Democrat tries to make things better, and ends up with a mixed record where some things get better and others get worse…are we allowed to talk about the things that got worse?
CBP One is fucking terrible. sending troops to the border was fucking terrible. Title 42 was fucking terrible. quoting from that Wikipedia page you assumed I hadn’t read:
In October, the Biden administration invoked Title 42, a Trump era measure, to expel Venezuelan migrants to Mexico. Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch criticized the decision. On November 15, 2022, the United States District Court for the District of Columbia ruled that expulsions under Title 42 were a violation of the Administrative Procedure Act and that it was an “arbitrary and capricious" violation of the Act. The ruling required the United States government to process all asylum seekers under immigrant law as previous to Title 42’s implementation. The ruling was celebrated by the ACLU, a plaintiff in the case.
Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, and the ACLU all opposed the Biden administration on that. were they wrong? was Biden justified, because he was just a smol bean whomst had good intentions?
or maybe we shouldn’t blame Biden for the actions of the Biden administration, because he had so many other things on his plate that he probably didn’t even really know or understand what was going on. maybe it was some staffer or Cabinet official who’s really to blame, and Biden just rubber-stamped the decision?
my comment linked 6 different sources - contemporaneous news articles, from reputable outlets, and a 71-page report from Amnesty International about that “streamlined app” you think is so great.
and in response you tell me I should read a Wikipedia article. (which I’d already read, btw, while looking up actual sources for my original comment)
so again, tell me more about how the problem is other people not wanting to understand details.
My point is, it’s easy to spin up a big narrative by picking individual points.
Biden said, “Hey, this is horrifying, people are coming into the country trying for asylum and then being treated like criminals, if they get picked up before they can turn themselves in / if they fuck up the process / because they technically broke the law anyway because that’s what the process told them to do.” And so, he created a formal way for them to communicate with CBP before needing to enter the country or find someone physically.
Is that process perfect? Absolutely not. Does that mean that extensive nitpicking about privacy issues and whatnot about that process suddenly represents a really good argument about why it was horrifying for him to create the app? Is it relevant at all, honestly? No, it is not.
You can just always use this stuff as a way to attack any Democratic politician at any time. If Biden had made the whole signature effort of his campaign to reform immigration and get rid of all the horrifying inhumanity he inherited from his predecessor, then you would be giving him shit for failing to act on climate change or working people’s issues. Instead, he did the opposite: Went to bat in a huge way on those two things, and got some small but significant gains, and so we’re here talking about Gaza and immigration and everything he fucked up.
Honestly, I just don’t really want to go point-for-point back and forth through dueling essays. That’s why I just linked the Wikipedia page. Anyone reading this can go read the page, and then compare the picture it paints to the picture you just painted, and see why you’re spinning up some kind of determined effort to make him look bad on this issue.
If you want to complain about stuff he did wrong, sure! Let’s rap. If you want to spin it up into backwards-land and cherry pick some things to make it look like that’s all that happened, he fucked a bunch of stuff up on purpose, all these human rights organizations hate Biden overall instead of on those individual decisions, then I’m going to offer you the change to take a step back, read the article for the actual complete picture, instead of getting in this towering link-stuffed waste of time slap fight with you.
you’re accusing me of “spinning a narrative”…and then in the very next paragraph you spin a narrative of your own:
Biden said, “…”
And so, he created a formal way for them to communicate with CBP before needing to enter the country or find someone physically.
Biden created the CBP One app. yeah. great. is that all he did?
no. he mandated that using the app was the only way to apply for asylum.
quoting again from Amnesty International’s report, emphasis added:
Following the termination of Title 42 and in accordance with the Final Rule, people seeking asylum are now required to use the CBP One application to schedule a time to arrive at participating ports of entry along the US-Mexico border in order to present their asylum claims, unless they are able to demonstrate “by a preponderance of the evidence that it was not possible to access or use the CBP One app due to language barrier, illiteracy, significant technical failure, or other ongoing and serious obstacle”. Asylum seekers who arrive at ports of entry without having previously scheduled an appointment through CBP One and who are unable to prove that it was not possible to access or use the application, or who do not meet one of the two other exceptions in the Final Rule, will be presumed to be ineligible for asylum.
if you want to defend Biden from criticism, have at it. but you need to actually understand the criticism that’s being made.
the criticism of CBP One is not that Biden created an app, it’s that he mandated use of the app.
he made it so if you didn’t use the app, you were presumptively ineligible for asylum. the burden of proof was on the asylum-seeker to show why they couldn’t use the app.
you’re spinning a narrative here. I don’t think you’re doing it consciously, but it’s still spin. you’re talking entirely about creating the app and not at all about requiring the app.
trying to dismiss this criticism as “nitpicking about privacy issues” is spin.
even if the app was perfect, even if it was bug-free, even if it had no privacy concerns - mandating it as the only way to apply for asylum violates international law.
if you think Biden violating international law is fine, because he’s doing it with good intentions and not maliciously, just be honest about that. it would save a lot of time.
You can just always use this stuff as a way to attack any Democratic politician at any time.
ummmm…yeah?
I think it’s fair game to criticize any politician, of any party, if they do something bad.
do you disagree?
do you think Democrats should be immune from criticism?
do you think Democrats should be only criticized about policies if they make them “signature” issues of their campaign? because that’s what this suggests to me:
If Biden had made the whole signature effort of his campaign…
do you think you’re the gatekeeper of what criticism is “allowed” and what isn’t? of what is “good faith” and what isn’t?
Honestly, I just don’t really want to go point-for-point back and forth through dueling essays. That’s why I just linked the Wikipedia page.
you started this thread by talking about people on the left who “don’t want to understand details”.
I brought up details.
then you moved the goalposts so fast they broke the sound barrier.
because now you don’t want to talk about details. you just want to talk in broad strokes. read the wikipedia summary. look at the whole picture of everything Biden did. the details aren’t really that important. disagreements over details are a “towering link-stuffed waste of time slap fight” apparently.
because now you don’t want to talk about details. you just want to talk in broad strokes. read the wikipedia summary. look at the whole picture of everything Biden did.
Yeah, pretty much. Put it in context, then talk about details and complain about them when they’re wrong. Doing it the other way around, picking individual details and then using the specific ones you picked as a reason to conclude things about the whole of what his intent was, seems wrong to me.
conclude things about the whole of what his intent was
you keep talking about Biden’s “intent”, and that seems to me to be the root of what we disagree about (or rather, what you’re misunderstanding about what I’m trying to say)
I didn’t say anything about Biden’s intentions, until you brought it up:
Did he make things worse on purpose? Fuck no, he made them better.
you have a gigantic false dichtomy here - making things worse on purpose vs making them better. there’s a gap in the middle, of making things worse unintentionally, which is the point I’ve been trying to make this whole time.
you seem to be arguing “Biden had good intentions, so even if he did some bad things, you should give him a pass because he had good intentions”
I’ve been disagreeing with that, and you seem to be misinterpreting that disagreement as me claiming “Biden had bad intentions”.
what I’ve actually been trying to get across is that Biden’s intentions don’t matter. they’re ultimately unknowable, so arguing about them is pointless.
the purpose of a system is what it does. if Biden’s actions as president resulted in good outcomes, they were good actions, regardless of whether he had good intentions or not. and likewise, if his actions resulted in bad outcomes, they were bad actions, regardless of good or bad intentions.
if you want an example that is more removed from the emotions of present-day politics, look at Bill Clinton signing the “crime bill” in 1994. we can recognize it had bad effects. we can talk about those bad effects. we can do that without trying to retroactively read Bill Clinton’s mind 30 years in the past and try to figure out what his “intent” was.
the lesson for present-day politics is that Republicans have bad intentions, and that’s sufficient reason not to vote for them. but a Democrat saying “hi, I have good intentions” is not sufficient reason to vote for them. the bar must be higher than that.
and if a Democrat campaigns on good intentions, and then gets elected and does bad things, “but they had good intentions” is a bullshit excuse.
you seem to be arguing “Biden had good intentions, so even if he did some bad things, you should give him a pass because he had good intentions”
Not even slightly. I’m saying that he made the situation and outcomes better, and also tried to make it better than that, but failed at some of what actually should have been done.
(And yes, I can pretty much feel the talking-point response to that coming… whatever, I’m familiar with them at this point lol)
You seem very interested in telling me what I am saying, instead of just listening to what I’m saying.
I think there is a serious disconnect where biden/haris’s government campaigned on “we’re going to stop the bad things that trump is doing” which to the base read as “we’re going to restructure the system” but they meant “we’re going to mitigate the harms of the system but fundamentally leave it intact (because we lack the political capital to actually solve the issue)”.
Haris walked out on stage and said “look what a good job we’re doing” and everyone was pissed because the problem was manifestly not solved. Partially because “the immigration crisis” is not really a single political issues, it’s two political issues that get lumped together in polling. One group of voters have been petrified by stories of “violent foreign gangs” and another is worried about a system harming some of the most vulnerable people.
They shouldn’t have campaigned on it, they should have tried to redirect the focus of the campaign on to something else, and they should have been clear about the messaging on it. It was a colossal fuck up to lean in to it as core issue of the campaign because neither side of the issue cared about how well the existing system was being run. both sides hated the existing system, one side wanted a new system that wasn’t cruel, and one side just didn’t want immigrants at all.
Honestly, as far as campaign fuckups, I feel like you and I are completely in agreement. Like I said I think the DNC should basically fire its consultants into the sun at this point, instead of giving them millions of dollars in exchange for all these dogshit strategies and lost elections. I was talking more about the reality.
Making a cruel institution 10% less cruel but maintaining/reinforcing its capacity, was a worse call than just knee capping the institution and gutting it as much as they could while they had the opportunity.
Perhaps it would have been divisive, but what does that matter when doing what they did mobilized the opposition’s base just as much.
Okay, so now we’re talking about the reality again?
The reality is that changing ICE requires congress, and a lot of who’s in congress is reactionary idiots, and so “kneecapping” ICE would have just not passed and accomplished nothing. And, there were genuine emergencies (overcrowding in ICE facilities, deliberate racism and cruelty by ICE, and the massive backlog of people waiting to get in the country with nowhere to go) that needed to be dealt with, which a performative effort to kneecap it that actually accomplished nothing would have done nothing at all to solve.
Not to mention all those people separated from their families which the Biden administration was trying to find and reunite. It’s just not that simple in reality. Accomplishing good things (and failing to accomplish some other realistic things which are also good things) is just not the same as deliberately causing all the cruelty in the system on purpose because you’re a terrible person. It’s like the Alice in Wonderland thing about mountains and valleys.
So you think the answer is that Biden should have torn up the constitution first, before Trump could do it?
I think we may have to agree to disagree. I think fixing a lot of the structural things that got us here (legalized bribery in government, massive corruption / dysfunction in media and education, a basic lack of real direct democracy, gilded age economic dysfunction, among other issues) would have been a better way. “I’ll seize control and fix it, trust me, look at the good things I’m doing” generally doesn’t work out real well even if the good things are on the side that you think they should be done for.
Biden tried to fix a lot of the problems with our immigration system, and when he couldn’t get it through congress, he offered some cruelty to the Republicans as a gesture of compromise. His bill still would have massively reduced the level of suffering. A lot of the things Trump has been shutting down were things he initiated (a streamlined app for requesting asylum, instead of crossing the border illegally and then showing up and turning yourself in being the officially recommended system, for example).
Why was that all presented to the public as “being tough on immigration just like Trump is”? I have no idea, although I suspect that severely mentally challenged campaign consultants who the Democrats should have fired into the sun were involved. But the reality was different, and the left as it often does is entirely happy just to pretend everything the blue man did was bad, just because we don’t like what’s happening and don’t want to understand details.
trying to fix problems with immigration with a “streamlined app” is some Buttigieg-brained neoliberal nonsense…
Seeking asylum at the U.S.-Mexico border? You’d better speak English or Spanish
The dangers of CBP One, the app to request asylum at the US-Mexico border
Amnesty International has a report about it:
when you’re calling it a “streamlined app” and Amnesty International has a 71-page report about the technical problems it has and that the requirement to use it violates international law, maybe you shouldn’t be talking about how other people “don’t want to understand details”
yeah, it’s a real mystery…
Biden sending 1,500 troops for Mexico border migrant surge
and then Biden claimed the Border Patrol endorsed him in the debate he had with Trump.
and Kamala Harris, as well:
Kamala Harris’ tough-on-migration pitch at the border points to a shifting national mood
Biden and Harris were almost literally doing the “HIRE 👏 MORE 👏 WOMEN 👏 GUARDS 👏” meme but with ICE agents.
Here, just read this:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Immigration_policy_of_the_Joe_Biden_administration
Should he have just abolished ICE instead? Probably. Did he make things worse on purpose? Fuck no, he made them better. Is it some bad-faith bullshit that people keep attacking him pretending that he did? Yes it is, Cap, yes it is.
my comment linked 6 different sources - contemporaneous news articles, from reputable outlets, and a 71-page report from Amnesty International about that “streamlined app” you think is so great.
and in response you tell me I should read a Wikipedia article. (which I’d already read, btw, while looking up actual sources for my original comment)
so again, tell me more about how the problem is other people not wanting to understand details.
we’re 6 months in to Trump’s 2nd term, and somehow you’re still a “probably” about abolishing ICE?
what would it take to get you to “yes”?
what would it take to get you to “yes, the next Democratic president needs to abolish ICE, no excuses”?
how many concentration camps would ICE need to build to convince you? apparently the first one in Florida wasn’t enough.
their stated goal is 3000 arrests per day. how many days of that would it take to convince you?
how many students getting jailed for writing an op-ed would it take to convince you?
yeah, this is the problem in a nutshell
Trump and the right-wing want to make things worse for immigrants, on purpose. we can at least agree on that.
but then you’re setting the bar for Democrats so low that it’s basically meaningless.
if a Democrat makes things worse, but does so unintentionally…is criticizing them for that just off the table?
if a Democrat tries to make things better, and ends up with a mixed record where some things get better and others get worse…are we allowed to talk about the things that got worse?
CBP One is fucking terrible. sending troops to the border was fucking terrible. Title 42 was fucking terrible. quoting from that Wikipedia page you assumed I hadn’t read:
Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, and the ACLU all opposed the Biden administration on that. were they wrong? was Biden justified, because he was just a smol bean whomst had good intentions?
or maybe we shouldn’t blame Biden for the actions of the Biden administration, because he had so many other things on his plate that he probably didn’t even really know or understand what was going on. maybe it was some staffer or Cabinet official who’s really to blame, and Biden just rubber-stamped the decision?
My point is, it’s easy to spin up a big narrative by picking individual points.
Biden said, “Hey, this is horrifying, people are coming into the country trying for asylum and then being treated like criminals, if they get picked up before they can turn themselves in / if they fuck up the process / because they technically broke the law anyway because that’s what the process told them to do.” And so, he created a formal way for them to communicate with CBP before needing to enter the country or find someone physically.
Is that process perfect? Absolutely not. Does that mean that extensive nitpicking about privacy issues and whatnot about that process suddenly represents a really good argument about why it was horrifying for him to create the app? Is it relevant at all, honestly? No, it is not.
You can just always use this stuff as a way to attack any Democratic politician at any time. If Biden had made the whole signature effort of his campaign to reform immigration and get rid of all the horrifying inhumanity he inherited from his predecessor, then you would be giving him shit for failing to act on climate change or working people’s issues. Instead, he did the opposite: Went to bat in a huge way on those two things, and got some small but significant gains, and so we’re here talking about Gaza and immigration and everything he fucked up.
Honestly, I just don’t really want to go point-for-point back and forth through dueling essays. That’s why I just linked the Wikipedia page. Anyone reading this can go read the page, and then compare the picture it paints to the picture you just painted, and see why you’re spinning up some kind of determined effort to make him look bad on this issue.
If you want to complain about stuff he did wrong, sure! Let’s rap. If you want to spin it up into backwards-land and cherry pick some things to make it look like that’s all that happened, he fucked a bunch of stuff up on purpose, all these human rights organizations hate Biden overall instead of on those individual decisions, then I’m going to offer you the change to take a step back, read the article for the actual complete picture, instead of getting in this towering link-stuffed waste of time slap fight with you.
you’re accusing me of “spinning a narrative”…and then in the very next paragraph you spin a narrative of your own:
Biden created the CBP One app. yeah. great. is that all he did?
no. he mandated that using the app was the only way to apply for asylum.
quoting again from Amnesty International’s report, emphasis added:
if you want to defend Biden from criticism, have at it. but you need to actually understand the criticism that’s being made.
the criticism of CBP One is not that Biden created an app, it’s that he mandated use of the app.
he made it so if you didn’t use the app, you were presumptively ineligible for asylum. the burden of proof was on the asylum-seeker to show why they couldn’t use the app.
you’re spinning a narrative here. I don’t think you’re doing it consciously, but it’s still spin. you’re talking entirely about creating the app and not at all about requiring the app.
trying to dismiss this criticism as “nitpicking about privacy issues” is spin.
even if the app was perfect, even if it was bug-free, even if it had no privacy concerns - mandating it as the only way to apply for asylum violates international law.
if you think Biden violating international law is fine, because he’s doing it with good intentions and not maliciously, just be honest about that. it would save a lot of time.
ummmm…yeah?
I think it’s fair game to criticize any politician, of any party, if they do something bad.
do you disagree?
do you think Democrats should be immune from criticism?
do you think Democrats should be only criticized about policies if they make them “signature” issues of their campaign? because that’s what this suggests to me:
do you think you’re the gatekeeper of what criticism is “allowed” and what isn’t? of what is “good faith” and what isn’t?
you started this thread by talking about people on the left who “don’t want to understand details”.
I brought up details.
then you moved the goalposts so fast they broke the sound barrier.
because now you don’t want to talk about details. you just want to talk in broad strokes. read the wikipedia summary. look at the whole picture of everything Biden did. the details aren’t really that important. disagreements over details are a “towering link-stuffed waste of time slap fight” apparently.
Yeah, pretty much. Put it in context, then talk about details and complain about them when they’re wrong. Doing it the other way around, picking individual details and then using the specific ones you picked as a reason to conclude things about the whole of what his intent was, seems wrong to me.
you keep talking about Biden’s “intent”, and that seems to me to be the root of what we disagree about (or rather, what you’re misunderstanding about what I’m trying to say)
I didn’t say anything about Biden’s intentions, until you brought it up:
you have a gigantic false dichtomy here - making things worse on purpose vs making them better. there’s a gap in the middle, of making things worse unintentionally, which is the point I’ve been trying to make this whole time.
you seem to be arguing “Biden had good intentions, so even if he did some bad things, you should give him a pass because he had good intentions”
I’ve been disagreeing with that, and you seem to be misinterpreting that disagreement as me claiming “Biden had bad intentions”.
what I’ve actually been trying to get across is that Biden’s intentions don’t matter. they’re ultimately unknowable, so arguing about them is pointless.
the purpose of a system is what it does. if Biden’s actions as president resulted in good outcomes, they were good actions, regardless of whether he had good intentions or not. and likewise, if his actions resulted in bad outcomes, they were bad actions, regardless of good or bad intentions.
if you want an example that is more removed from the emotions of present-day politics, look at Bill Clinton signing the “crime bill” in 1994. we can recognize it had bad effects. we can talk about those bad effects. we can do that without trying to retroactively read Bill Clinton’s mind 30 years in the past and try to figure out what his “intent” was.
the lesson for present-day politics is that Republicans have bad intentions, and that’s sufficient reason not to vote for them. but a Democrat saying “hi, I have good intentions” is not sufficient reason to vote for them. the bar must be higher than that.
and if a Democrat campaigns on good intentions, and then gets elected and does bad things, “but they had good intentions” is a bullshit excuse.
Not even slightly. I’m saying that he made the situation and outcomes better, and also tried to make it better than that, but failed at some of what actually should have been done.
(And yes, I can pretty much feel the talking-point response to that coming… whatever, I’m familiar with them at this point lol)
You seem very interested in telling me what I am saying, instead of just listening to what I’m saying.
I think there is a serious disconnect where biden/haris’s government campaigned on “we’re going to stop the bad things that trump is doing” which to the base read as “we’re going to restructure the system” but they meant “we’re going to mitigate the harms of the system but fundamentally leave it intact (because we lack the political capital to actually solve the issue)”.
Haris walked out on stage and said “look what a good job we’re doing” and everyone was pissed because the problem was manifestly not solved. Partially because “the immigration crisis” is not really a single political issues, it’s two political issues that get lumped together in polling. One group of voters have been petrified by stories of “violent foreign gangs” and another is worried about a system harming some of the most vulnerable people.
They shouldn’t have campaigned on it, they should have tried to redirect the focus of the campaign on to something else, and they should have been clear about the messaging on it. It was a colossal fuck up to lean in to it as core issue of the campaign because neither side of the issue cared about how well the existing system was being run. both sides hated the existing system, one side wanted a new system that wasn’t cruel, and one side just didn’t want immigrants at all.
Honestly, as far as campaign fuckups, I feel like you and I are completely in agreement. Like I said I think the DNC should basically fire its consultants into the sun at this point, instead of giving them millions of dollars in exchange for all these dogshit strategies and lost elections. I was talking more about the reality.
Making a cruel institution 10% less cruel but maintaining/reinforcing its capacity, was a worse call than just knee capping the institution and gutting it as much as they could while they had the opportunity.
Perhaps it would have been divisive, but what does that matter when doing what they did mobilized the opposition’s base just as much.
Okay, so now we’re talking about the reality again?
The reality is that changing ICE requires congress, and a lot of who’s in congress is reactionary idiots, and so “kneecapping” ICE would have just not passed and accomplished nothing. And, there were genuine emergencies (overcrowding in ICE facilities, deliberate racism and cruelty by ICE, and the massive backlog of people waiting to get in the country with nowhere to go) that needed to be dealt with, which a performative effort to kneecap it that actually accomplished nothing would have done nothing at all to solve.
Not to mention all those people separated from their families which the Biden administration was trying to find and reunite. It’s just not that simple in reality. Accomplishing good things (and failing to accomplish some other realistic things which are also good things) is just not the same as deliberately causing all the cruelty in the system on purpose because you’re a terrible person. It’s like the Alice in Wonderland thing about mountains and valleys.
As the current administration is showing, it is entirely possible for the executive to unilaterally knee cap an organization.
So you think the answer is that Biden should have torn up the constitution first, before Trump could do it?
I think we may have to agree to disagree. I think fixing a lot of the structural things that got us here (legalized bribery in government, massive corruption / dysfunction in media and education, a basic lack of real direct democracy, gilded age economic dysfunction, among other issues) would have been a better way. “I’ll seize control and fix it, trust me, look at the good things I’m doing” generally doesn’t work out real well even if the good things are on the side that you think they should be done for.