What are your thoughts on the article?
Excerpt from the first few paragraphs of the article (the rest is inside):
In 2019, I stood outside a for-profit child migrant jail in the city of Homestead, Florida. I was watching then-presidential hopeful Sen. Kamala Harris speak out against the facility, initially opened under the Obama administration and reopened under former President Donald Trump. “It’s a human rights abuse being committed by the United States government,” Harris said at the time, flanked by fellow Democratic candidates Julian Castro, Pete Buttigieg and Kirsten Gillibrand.
The parade of candidates making the obligatory campaign stop at this immigrant jail that caused so much outrage across the country included every Democratic presidential candidate competing in the 2020 cycle, excluding Joe Biden — who probably wanted to avoid uncomfortable questions regarding the facility’s origins while he was the sitting vice president. I was the political director of a statewide immigrant rights organization at the time, and part of my job was to help coordinate visits to this facility by different campaigns and to generate media coverage of the mistreatment of minors we knew was happening within its walls.
The facility was closed not too long after that, and it was celebrated by politicians and talking heads associated with the Democratic Party as a resounding victory against Trump-era anti-immigrant policies.
Five years later, Democratic politicians sound increasingly like Trump when debating immigration. After a military aid package to Ukraine faced Republican obstruction, the Biden administration decided to play four-dimensional chess and proposed combining it into so-called border security. Since Republicans have tied so much of their political identity to curtailing immigration into the country, this political play would be the sweetener that would dislodge military aid from legislative gridlock.
While lobbying Congress for passage of the bill, President Biden said it would give him the authority to “shut down the border on day one.” The proposal would have gutted the asylum system by creating a rushed and tougher process for asylum seekers, requiring them to adjudicate their claims within six months and meet higher requirements for approval. It sought to revive failed Trump-era policies like Title 42 and the construction of the border wall. If the border sees more than 8,500 entries per day, it would automatically be shut down under the bill, and the same would happen if there are 5,000 entries per day, on a rolling seven-day basis. It would have provided $3.2 billion to expand immigrant detention, including private prisons.
However, the deal collapsed after weeks of secret negotiations between the White House and a small group of senators that included Republican James Lankford, Democrat Chris Murphy and Independent Kyrsten Sinema. The proposal died before it could even get a vote in either chamber of Congress. Its failure preserved our asylum system and the international right to seek refuge, as the proposal would have enacted the most restrictive set of immigration policies in decades.
"four-dimensional chess"
Biden's too old to play chess.
I want to go out and troll democrats pushing the "You have to support Biden because Trump is worse" line by using this to argue that republicans are currently standing between democrats and both a draconian expansion of immigration policing and a dangerous escalation of the conflict in Ukraine.
Of course, if we're not being politically naive, we understand that the reason that they're doing it is because they know they'll be able to do all much worse once they're in power again, and making the democrats look ineffectual at everything that they do has worked so far, so why stop now?
What is confusing here is why the Democrats still think that means they should try to outflank the republicans on the right. The republican voter isn't stupid, they know playbook at this point and will continue to pull the lever for Rs regardless of what they do or don't do. There's nothing to be gained there; immigration is purely a red meat play, the typical suburban swing voter might make noises about immigration but it's not something they actually care about above other priorities. This isn't four-dimensional chess, it's boring reverse psychology briar patching and the embarrassing thing is nobody's taking the bait.
The actual play is to use procedural shenanigans to steamroll republicans, get your agenda (the good one) in anyway, and look tough for the easily buffaloed. But that'll never happen because that's not what the democratic party's donors want.
Frankly, immigration policing is an attack on democracy and the new slate of legislation attacks what little democratic rights we have in the most blatant way possible.