That Slippery Slope Thing

The kicker here of course is that they're creating a new agency to grace this fucked up racist shit with the appropriate official imprimatur.

And I realize this is the classic Slippery Slope Fallacy, but if this thing is left to its own devices, it will morph into a spoils system, where people can point at an immigrant-owned business or property, make whatever claims of illegality that seem to fit, and confiscate that commercial entity, splitting the proceeds with the coin-operated asshole running the Missouri Illegal Alien Certified Bounty Hunter Program.

Sure hope everybody's ready for an American version of Kristallnacht. Cuz that's where we're headed if we don't wise up and stop it.

Missouri Republican proposes $1,000 bounty program to turn in undocumented immigrants

State Representative An incoming Missouri Republican lawmaker introduced a bill this week that would offer $1,000 bounties to residents who turn in undocumented immigrants to the state highway patrol.

The bill, filed by Sen.-elect David Gregory, a St. Louis-area Republican, would require the Missouri Department of Public Safety to create phone and email hotlines as well as an online portal where Missourians would be able to report alleged undocumented immigrants.

The bill is among several pieces of legislation that deal with illegal immigration ahead of next month’s legislative session. They come as President-elect Donald Trump and Republicans across the country have made frustrations with immigration, and the U.S.-Mexico border, a hot-button issue.

In addition to the payouts, Gregory’s bill would require the Department of Public Safety to create a “Missouri Illegal Alien Certified Bounty Hunter Program.” The program would certify people to become bounty hunters to find and detain undocumented immigrants.

Individuals who are licensed as bail bond agents or surety recovery agents would be able to apply to become bounty hunters under Gregory’s bill.

Undocumented immigrants who are caught by the bounty hunters would be considered guilty of “trespass by an illegal alien.” Those found guilty of the offense could face jail time and would be prohibited from voting and other rights.

Gregory, who did not immediately respond to a request for comment, had made illegal immigration one of the central focuses of his Senate campaign. He filmed a campaign ad at the southern border with Mexico and has promoted media coverage of his bill on social media.

Edgar Palacios, executive director of Revolución Educativa, a Kansas City group focused on education issues in the Latino community, said Gregory’s bill was “horrendous.”

“Immigrants are human and humans aren’t meant to be hunted,” Palacios said in an interview. “This idea of having a bounty hunter for immigrants is wild and I think it displays a narrative that, again, people see, not everybody, but certain people see immigrants as inhuman.”

Nimrod Chapel, president of the Missouri NAACP State Conference, drew parallels between Gregory’s bill and legislation historically aimed at marginalized groups such as the 1820 Missouri Compromise which admitted Missouri as a slave state.

“This bill by our new senator has returned exactly to those roots,” Chapel said. “You’re going to create a system that is not only going to differentiate people based on how God made them, which, in my spiritual belief, is just fundamentally wrong, but then you’re going to try to create in a system…that seeks to differentiate people in much the same way that some of the Jim Crow laws did.”

Chapel referred to the bill as “a really draconian and racist piece of legislation.”

“It scares the hell out of me,” he said. “And the reason it does is because I already know that Black and brown people have been catching hell in the state of Missouri for a very long time.”

Impact on Kansas City

While Gregory faces blowback for his bill, it comes as Missouri politics have been awash in rhetoric about migrants. The focus on immigration would have an outsized impact on the Kansas City region, which has become a center of migrant arrivals over the last decade, according to U.S. immigration court data analyzed by The Washington Post.

Since 2014, roughly 8,300 migrants have settled in Jackson County since 2014 and 37% came from Honduras.

Earlier this year, Republican Gov. Mike Parson sent Missouri National Guard troops to aid Texas, which has promoted a plan dubbed “Operation Lone Star” that uses Texas state resources to combat illegal border crossings.

Parson, who will term out of office next month, heavily promoted the deployment, even though he later vetoed funding to continue it.

Candidates for office in both major parties emphasized illegal immigration on the campaign trail, including Democrat Lucas Kunce. But the issue was perhaps the most prevalent in the race to succeed Parson as governor, with all three major GOP candidates touting immigration frustrations in campaign ads and public statements.

Each of the three candidates, including Gov.-elect Mike Kehoe, also seized on comments Kansas City Mayor Quinton Lucas made in April welcoming migrant workers who are in the United States legally.

Amid the campaign rhetoric, outgoing House Speaker Dean Plocher, a Des Peres Republican, also created a committee that focused on “Illegal Immigrant Crimes.” The committee held hearings across the state, including in Kansas City, to maximize public attention on the issue.

For Palacios, with Revolución Educativa, immigrants are coming to the U.S. in search of a better life and to pursue “the American dream.” He said politicians should be focused on ensuring everyone has access to education and opportunities.

“I think the narrative is harmful. I think it’s designed to create fear amongst certain members of our community,” Palacios said. “It riles up a base that may not fully appreciate, again, the value that immigrants and folks from the migrant community bring, not to our state, but to our country.”

Careful What You Wish For

Mary Trump

Concentration camps.

Trump's Plans

A concentration camp is a concentration camp is a concentration camp.

Trump confirms plans to use military for mass deportations

President-elect Trump confirmed Monday that he is planning to declare a national emergency and use the U.S. military to carry out mass deportations.

Why it matters:

Trump made his promise to deport millions of undocumented immigrants one of the cornerstones of his 2024 campaign, and his team has already begun strategizing how to carry its plan out.

Driving the news:

Tom Fitton, the president of the conservative group Judicial Watch, posted on Truth Social earlier this month that Trump was "prepared to declare a national emergency and will use military assets to reverse the Biden invasion through a mass deportation program."

Trump reposted Fitton's comment Monday with the caption, "TRUE!!"

The big picture:

There are an estimated 11 million undocumented immigrants living in the U.S. Trump's mass deportations are expected to impact roughly 20 million families across the country.

Immigration advocates and lawyers are preparing to counter the plan in court.

The president-elect's team is aiming to craft executive orders that can withstand legal challenges to avoid a similar defeat that befell Trump's Muslim ban in his first term, Politico reported.

Their plans also include ending the parole program for undocumented immigrants from Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua and Venezuela, per Politico.

Zoom out:

Trump has also already begun filling out his Cabinet positions with immigration hardliners.

This includes tapping Tom Homan, the former acting head of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), to serve as his "border czar."

In addition, Trump nominated South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem as his secretary of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS).

On The Border

I'm not the least bit crazy about the mass deportation of immigrants. Especially when so many are coming here to get away from horrendous conditions in their home countries. This is the place where good and decent people from everywhere have dreamed of coming for a very long time.

Large scale deportation just smacks of "round up all the brown people, put 'em in concentration camps, and then dump the survivors wherever".

That said, we can't be "the green spot" - the place on the other side of the hill where the grass is still green. We have to figure out how to keep those other places from being turned into "brown spots" - environmentally, politically, or whatever-ly.

And that's going to continue being a real bitch of a problem until we figure out how to get (mostly) Republicans and their voters, to stop behaving stupidly, and face up to the realities.

For every problem that's complicated,

and difficult,

and multi-faceted,

there's a solution that's simple,

and elegant,

and wrong.

Republican former President Donald Trump is promising to ramp up deportations from the United States to historic levels if reelected to another four-year term in the White House as part of his campaign to defeat President Joe Biden, a Democrat, who has struggled with record numbers of migrants caught crossing the U.S.-Mexico border illegally.

In June, Biden implemented a sweeping, new asylum ban aimed at quickly deporting more recent border crossers to their home countries or Mexico.

Even with the tougher border policy, Biden has continued to work to protect longer-term immigrants in the U.S. illegally, including through a new effort also announced in June that would ease the path to citizenship for hundreds of thousands of people married to U.S. citizens. He has shifted enforcement priorities inside the country to focus on removing migrants who the U.S.has deemed as public safety threats.

Trump’s pledge echoes his 2015 campaign promise to deport some 11 million immigrants in the U.S. illegally. After winning office in 2016, he said his administration aimed to deport 2 million to 3 million people with criminal records.

But during Trump’s term in office from January 2017 to January 2021, deportations by U.S. immigration and border authorities fell lower than most years of his Democratic predecessor Barack Obama, who some advocates for immigrants dubbed the “deporter-in-chief.”

Biden had even fewer deportations than Trump during his first two years in office when not counting rapid expulsions under a COVID-era health measure which was used millions of times to turn people back to Mexico. But, faced with much higher numbers of migrants arriving at the border, he greatly increased deportations – including those of families – in federal fiscal year 2023 and the first five months of the 2024 fiscal year, outpacing Trump.

During the first presidential debate on June 27, Trump was asked to explain how he would deport millions of people but declined to give details, saying, “We have to get a lot of these people out and we have to get them out fast.” Biden highlighted a recent drop in migrants illegally crossing the U.S.-Mexico border under his new asylum ban but did not directly address the efforts to step up deportations.

U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents can deport both those arrested at the border and immigrants who have been living in the country illegally for years. In addition to ICE deportations, there are other ways the government removes migrants from the country. Many recent crossers are quickly deported by officials from U.S. Customs and Border Protection, which is separate from ICE, or sign documents agreeing to voluntarily return to their home countries. Both agencies are part of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security.

Single adults can be encountered by immigration authorities and placed into deportation proceedings in a number of ways. (Unaccompanied children are subject to different processes.)

Trump’s mass deportation pledge

Trump in an April interview with Time magazine said he would lean more on local police to turn migrants over to ICE. During his term in office, however, some police forces limited cooperation with federal immigration authorities. Trump in the interview said he would turn to the National Guard if needed. Tom Homan, a former top ICE official who could return in a second Trump administration, told Reuters the National Guard, if used, would play a support role but that only law enforcement officers would make immigration arrests.

According to a May Reuters/Ipsos poll, a majority - or 56% - said most or all immigrants in the U.S. illegally should be deported, though the same poll suggested some Americans may be wary of some harsher deportation plans. About half of those surveyed opposed putting immigrants in the country illegally into detention camps while awaiting removal.

Trump in the Time interview downplayed reports that he would build detention camps if reelected, saying he “would not rule out anything” but there “wouldn't be that much of a need for them,” suggesting people would be removed quickly. Trump campaign spokesperson Karoline Leavitt said Americans support mass deportations, and reiterated the former president’s pledge.

“On Day One back in the White House, President Trump will begin the largest criminal deportation operation of illegal immigrants and restore the rule of law,” Leavitt said in a statement.

White House spokesperson Angelo Fernandez Hernandez touted Biden’s recent actions to deter illegal immigration as well as efforts to open up more legal pathways for would-be migrants outside the U.S., saying Biden's asylum ban would "ensure that those who cross the border unlawfully are quickly removed."

Biden and the border

During Biden’s term, the number of people apprehended at the U.S.-Mexico border has reached record highs.

Biden’s administration for several years used a Trump-era border expulsion policy, known as Title 42, to quickly send many migrants back to Mexico. The public health measure, put in place in March 2020 at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, aimed to minimize the time migrants spent in custody and allowed border agents to rapidly expel them to Mexico without a chance to seek asylum.

Border agents expelled migrants 2.8 million times under Title 42. The vast majority of those expulsions happened under Biden, who took office in January 2021, until he lifted the measure in May 2023 when the COVID emergency ended.

Migrants expelled under Title 42 were not subject to the same consequences of a more formal deportation process, which can lead to criminal charges or long bars on reentering the country. The Biden administration argued that the quick expulsions led to more people attempting to cross the border multiple times and when it lifted the measure, U.S. officials implemented new policies aimed at more effective enforcement.

Biden has repeatedly said the only way to fix the border is through legislation. A bipartisan bill proposed in the U.S. Senate, and backed by the White House, would have toughened border rules and increased funding. But Republicans scuttled the effort after Trump came out against it, saying it would not sufficiently stem crossings. Biden called it an “extremely cynical political move” by the former president.

Unable to pass legislation in Congress, Biden has taken several executive actions to limit access to asylum, while increasing legal ways to enter the country - including by seeking an appointment at legal ports of entry on a government-run app.

Citing these and other measures, such as increased cooperation with Western Hemisphere countries to curb migration, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security said it has ramped up the number of removals of recent border crossers after the end of Title 42 and sped up the asylum screening process.

Trump has said he would reinstate Title 42 if elected.

Humans are herd animals. We go where we're driven, in search of food, water, and shelter - and other stuff.

Progress, Anyone?

I have to think there are tiny rays of sunshine peeking thru the gloom - cuz I'm such a hopeful and optimistic fuck, don'tcha y'know.

One of the problems I have is that I rarely find a really good analysis of what any given piece of legislation actually says, and tries to accomplish.

Talking about what we need to do on our southern border, we have to put something in place that allows for compliance with our treaty obligations, while gearing up for possibly massive increases in human migration because of political and economic disruptions driven by Climate Change - and while trying to be humane about the whole fuckin' mess.

It's a puzzlement, as usual.

Anyway, we can take a shot at cutting it into bite-size chunks so we don't have to try swallowing the whole big ugly thing at once.

And maybe we're also getting a look at some pretty slick politicking on the part of some so-far-not-very impressive players.

Chuck Schumer and Mitt Romney and Tom Tillis and Bill Lankford are not names that come tripping easily off my tongue when I try to speak of the great thinkers and statesmen of the US Senate. But I have to reserve judgement until I see if this thing they're cooking up can actually serve the dual purpose of moving better Border Security into place, while also prying loose a few of Trump's fingers from the throats of Republicans.

A Slightly Different Thing

Invasion? Damn straight, skippy. But wait - who's doing the invading?

Texas Paul

• Republicans are good at phony theatrics and bad at governing
• Republicans are good at culture war bullshit and bad at policy
• Republicans are good at sliming everybody to make a point and bad at talking reality
• Republicans are good at pushing panic and bad at fixing problems
• Republicans are good at sitting on their asses in recess and bad at doing the work
• Republicans are good at making promises and bad at delivering on them
• Republicans are good at looking stupid and bad at being smart

I'm Not Racist But...

... I think the Dems are the racists because they blame white people who're just trying to keep the brown people from ruining this country.

Today's Reddit

It's a show.

Video allegedly shows a gaping hole in the Texas border wall less than half a mile from where armed guards and media are present
byu/redeemer404 inPublicFreakout

Today's Fugelsang

 John Fugelsang

What Do They Mean?

I think I know the answer to my question, but sometimes, like an idiot goat trying to get somebody to explain a typewriter to him, I find myself trying to make sense of something that isn't meant to make sense to me or anybody else.

Shutting down the borders is a pretty classic Daddy State type move. And when you can couple it with some good old-fashioned racial scapegoating - hey - why not?

They have yet to articulate what exactly "shutting down the border" would look like.  What does Mike Johnson mean as he calls for "... transformational policy change to secure our border, enforce our laws, and deter even more illegal immigration"?

I'm afraid it's not a big stretch to think it means machine guns, razor wire, and land mines.

And let's remember that a closed border serves to keep people in too.

Border dispute could force partial government shutdown

Far-right House Republicans are threatening to block legislation to keep the federal government operating without sweeping changes to immigration laws

Far-right Republicans in the House are threatening to force a partial government shutdown unless Congress enacts strict new changes to immigration law, imperiling crucial government services — and U.S. aid to Ukraine — over a long-fraught issue that could be critical in this year’s elections.

Dozens of GOP lawmakers toured a portion of the U.S.-Mexico border at Eagle Pass, Tex., on Wednesday to push House-passed legislation that would significantly limit migrants’ ability to claim asylum, restart construction of a border wall and cut into President Biden’s power to grant humanitarian parole to migrants. Members of the Republican conference’s most conservative flank demanded that legislation become law in exchange for their votes to approve federal spending for the rest of the 2024 fiscal year, though the GOP-led House already rejected such a trade in September.

“H. R. 2 needs to be the unflinching House policy because all of it’s important to securing the border,” Rep. Bob Good (R-Va.), chair of the archconservative House Freedom Caucus, told The Washington Post. “The president and Senate majority leader have no interest in securing the border, and so therefore, we as a House majority should say, ‘We’re not going to fund a government that is going to continue to facilitate this border invasion.’”

Federal agents recorded nearly 250,000 illegal crossings along the southern border in December, the highest total ever in one month, according to preliminary Customs and Border Protection data obtained by The Post.

That crisis is complicating efforts in Washington to head off a partial shutdown. Funding for roughly 20 percent of the federal government — including for essential programs such as some veterans assistance and food and drug safety services — expires on Jan. 19, and money for the rest of the government runs out shortly after that, on Feb. 2. But lawmakers have not yet agreed on how to pass full-year spending bills or more temporary funding. Without action by the first deadline, a partial government shutdown would begin. Congress returns next week with little time to work out the details.

The White House’s top budget official told reporters Friday that the GOP tactic significantly increased the risk of a shutdown.

“I wouldn’t say pessimistic, but I’m not optimistic [about the odds to avert a shutdown],” Shalanda Young, director of the Office of Management and Budget, said at a breakfast sponsored by the Christian Science Monitor. “Earlier this week, their border trip left me with more concerns about where they’re headed.”

House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) did not formally back the demands to link immigration restrictions with federal spending, but with a narrow GOP majority in a bitterly divided chamber, he relies on the Freedom Caucus, a group that has been a persistent thorn in the side of Republican leadership, to maintain power. He called that immigration bill, H.R. 2, a “necessary ingredient” to any immigration policy.

“Let me tell you what our top two priorities are right now,” Johnson told reporters Wednesday. “In summary, we want to get the border closed and secured first, and we want to make sure that we reduce nondefense discretionary spending.”

Republican lawmakers and political operatives say immigration issues work to their advantage, and hope to capitalize on the porous border to maintain control of their narrow House majority, retake the Senate and propel former president Donald Trump back to the White House.

“I would prefer the Senate Democrats found enlightenment and said, ‘H.R. 2 is what we want to do.’ Turns out I live in the real world and that’s not going to happen,” Rep. Kelly Armstrong (R-N.D.) said. “But if we can get a substantial win on the border, I think it is one of those rare cases where it actually really helps the country and helps us politically.”

That strategy has at least some support in the Senate, where Democrats control the chamber by a single vote, requiring help from Republicans to get around potential filibusters to pass new spending legislation.

“I think that we have a real fiscal crisis in our country, but I think the most significant crisis we have is what is going on at the southern border,” Sen. J.D. Vance (R-Ohio), a regular interlocutor between hard-right lawmakers in the House and more pragmatic Senate Republicans, told The Post on Friday. “And I encourage my Republican friends in the House to use all the negotiating leverage they can to solve this problem politically.

A bipartisan group in the Senate — Sens. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.), James Lankford (R-Okla.) and Kyrsten Sinema (I-Ariz.) — has been negotiating border legislation for weeks in connection with a separate spending bill that would devote more than $100 billion in U.S. aid to Ukraine and Israel and to the U.S.-Mexico border, among other priorities. That bill would include $14 billion in border security provisions. Senate Republicans have demanded immigration policy changes, as well as the security funding, before they’d vote to approve additional money for Ukraine.

But House Republicans are far more skeptical of Kyiv than their Senate counterparts, and demands to link immigration policy to ongoing government funding, instead of to the Ukraine aid, could mean the House won’t pass any assistance for the war in Ukraine.

This round of budgetary negotiations wasn’t supposed to be so complicated. In the spring, President Biden struck a deal with then-Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) to suspend the nation’s debt limit in exchange for limiting discretionary spending to $1.59 trillion in 2024, with 1 percent growth in 2025. Because that represented a cut when taking inflation into account, Biden and McCarthy agreed to spend another $69 billion each year in a side deal, with some of that offset by repurposing existing funds.

But House Republicans, led by members of the Freedom Caucus, were unsatisfied with that arrangement. A few months later, they ousted McCarthy from the speakership when he turned to Democratic votes in September to maintain those spending levels and avert a government shutdown. In a sign of stark internal divisions, though, the GOP-led House also rejected a stopgap funding measure with steep budget cuts that included the sweeping border changes the far right now seeks. (McCarthy resigned from Congress at the end of 2023.)

After taking over as speaker, Johnson in November also needed support from Democrats to pass another stopgap funding bill, which staggered expiration dates between Jan. 19 and Feb. 2.

The $69 billion side deal that McCarthy struck has been a sticking point through the fall and winter. Rep. Scott Perry (R-Pa.), then chair of the Freedom Caucus, told reporters just after Thanksgiving that his group would support the $1.59 trillion spending total that the debt ceiling law set — even though that was the amount that led some members to boot McCarthy from the speakership and drive the government to the verge of a shutdown — but only if it didn’t include the side agreements.

By early December, Johnson echoed the sentiment, declaring that the additional funding was not codified in law, but merely a handshake deal between his predecessor and Biden.

“This budget agreement was not a handshake agreement,” Young, from the White House OMB, said Friday. “It was a vote of Congress. It is not optional. They have to keep their word.”

“That group has got sway over Johnson. They’ve toppled McCarthy. They’re the reason why nothing’s got done in the last 12 months,” Rep. David Trone (D-Md.), a member of the House Appropriations Committee, told The Post.

Good, the Freedom Caucus’s new leader, said he has told Johnson that the speaker would “be a hero to the American people” if he threatened a government shutdown over border security.

“I think that’s a fight the American people will reward Speaker Johnson for waging,” Good said.

Making America Grumpy Again

While Republicans continue to bitch about how we need to unbundle the budget, and vote on individual spending bills, they insist on tying Ukraine aid to their demands to fund shittier treatment of immigrants.

There is no bottom that these clowns can't dig under.

Opinion

How Trump is wrecking hopes for a ‘reasonable’ Ukraine deal

Sen. Thom Tillis wants you to know that he’s very “reasonable.” That’s the word the North Carolina Republican used with reporters this week while describing immigration reforms that the GOP is demanding from Senate Democrats in exchange for supporting the billions in Ukraine aid that President Biden wants.

But the demands from Tillis and his fellow Republican leading the talks, Sen. James Lankford of Oklahoma, are not reasonable at all — they’re following Donald Trump’s playbook. Under the guise of seeking more “border security,” they’re insisting on provisions that would reduce legal immigration in numerous ways that could even undermine the goal of securing the border.

According to Democratic sources familiar with the negotiations, Republican demands began to shift soon after the New York Times reported that in a second Trump term, he would launch mass removals of millions of undocumented immigrants, gut asylum seeking almost entirely, and dramatically expand migrant detention in “giant camps.”

As one Senate Democratic source told me, Republicans started acting as though Trump and his immigration policy adviser Stephen Miller were “looking over their shoulders.”

Biden has asked Congress to provide tens of billions of dollars in aid to Ukraine and Israel, and an additional $14 billion to buttress the southern border with new law enforcement agents, expanded detention and other increased security measures. But Republicans won’t agree to that latter request — or the Ukraine aid — without substantial changes to immigration policy as well.

This week, Tillis told reporters that without “language on parole,” any compromise would not constitute “border security,” and without it, Republicans will oppose aid to Ukraine. That’s a reference to Biden’s use of parole authority for humanitarian purposes to allow 30,000 people from Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua and Venezuela to gain entry to the U.S. each month.

According to the Democratic sources, Republicans are demanding that presidential parole authority be scaled back so it can only be applied on an individual case-by-case basis, not to large groups from a single nationality.

That would functionally gut those programs entirely — an absurd demand. Under those parole grants, if migrants gain U.S. sponsors and pass background checks, they can live and work here for two years. This provides an orderly alternative to the mode of entry that enrages Republicans, in which migrants breach the border, seek asylum and disappear into the country while awaiting a hearing. Gutting parole could mean more of the latter.

“Canceling parole would significantly heighten the pressures on the border and the numbers of migrant crossings,” said Doris Meissner, a senior fellow at the Migration Policy Institute. “It’s the opposite of what’s needed to strengthen border security.”

In another absurdity, Republicans have said publicly that Democrats must agree to reduce illegal border crossings by more than 50 percent. But that’s a fuzzy demand: It’s unclear how policy changes could dramatically slash the number who attempt to enter and simply get intercepted by law enforcement. When Democratic staffers sought clarification on this point, the sources say, they got nothing back.

Republicans would also raise the legal standard to qualify for asylum, and here the situation gets particularly frustrating. One can envision a compromise that provides changes to the asylum standard in exchange for, say, legalizing “dreamers” brought here illegally as children. But Republicans have ruled out making any such concessions. (Spokespeople for Tillis and Lankford didn’t respond to requests for comment.)

What’s really bizarre about the impasse is that Republicans should support much of what’s in Biden’s initial request for border security funding. After all, it would also fund expedited asylum processing, which could reduce the window for migrants to exploit the system and prompt faster removals for those who don’t qualify. Aren’t those things Republicans want?

To his credit, Tillis did compromise on this issue last year, when he and Sen. Kyrsten Sinema (I-Ariz.) negotiated reforms that ultimately died in Congress. And Democrats say Lankford, who has acknowledged the need for both sides to compromise, is acting mostly in good faith. But Trump’s seemingly unshakable influence over the GOP stands to reshape these ongoing negotiations.

Trump’s loud broadcasting of plans for an extraordinarily cruel immigration crackdown if he is elected president again appears to be rendering Republicans even less open to compromise without him being in the room. Hence, their slapdash demand for cuts to legal immigration and other radical measures, which seems to cast about for some way to satiate the former president’s taste for draconian nativist savagery.

The bottom line: Senate Republicans are demanding that Democrats add numerous extreme concessions to a package that already gives Republicans many border security measures they ordinarily support, in exchange for Ukraine aid that many already back anyway.

Tillis and Lankford can either be “reasonable” in these negotiations, or they can satisfy Trump and Miller. But they can’t do both. Unfortunately, they appear to be privileging the latter.

On The Border

I'll go way out on a limb and say Biden will get slammed from the right because, "It's a crisis of his own making and we're glad he's finally doing what we said he should do, and blah blah bullshit blah."

And he'll get slammed from the left because "he shoulda done more/better/sooner yada yada bullshit blather."

Clowns to the left of me, jokers to the right - here I am stuck in the middle with you.

Of course, there's about 47 other shoes to drop - because there's always another 47 shoes to drop - but it's just possible Biden's approach may be starting to show some positive returns.

And that means the Republicans will soon be up to their old tricks, trying to fuck it up again, so they'll keep the destabilizing thing going and regenerate the requisite "Blame Biden" mindset for the rubes.

We'll see what we see.

Meanwhile, Greg Abbott needs to make it look as bad as possible.

Migrant crossings drop at U.S.-Mexico border after Title 42 expires

WASHINGTON, May 14 (Reuters) - Migrant crossings at the U.S.-Mexico border have unexpectedly fallen, not risen, since Title 42 curbs expired and reinstating criminal penalties for illegal entry is likely the biggest reason, the Biden administration said on Sunday.

U.S. Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas said border patrol agents have seen a 50% drop in the number of migrants crossing the border since Thursday, when President Joe Biden's administration shifted to a sweeping new asylum regulation meant to deter illegal crossings.

"The numbers we have experienced in the past two days are markedly down over what they were prior to the end of Title 42," Mayorkas said on CNN's "State of the Union" program. He said there were 6,300 border encounters on Friday and 4,200 on Saturday, but cautioned it was still early in the new regime.

Mayorkas credited the criminal penalties for migrants who illegally enter the country, which resumed under existing law after Title 42's expiration, for the decrease in crossings. The COVID-era rule adopted under former President Donald Trump allowed officials to expel migrants quickly without an asylum process but did not impose penalties.

Biden, asked during a bike ride near his vacation home in Rehoboth Beach, Delaware, how he believed the border situation was going, responded: "Much better than you all expected."

Biden said he did not have plans to visit the border in the near term.

The Biden administration plan requires migrants to schedule an immigration appointment through an app or seek protection from countries they passed through on their way to the U.S. border. If they do not follow the process and are caught entering the U.S. illegally, they are not allowed to try again, even through legal means, for five years. There are prison terms for other violations.

"There is a lawful, safe and orderly way to arrive in United States. That is through the pathways that President Biden has expanded in an unprecedented way, and then there's a consequence if one does not use those lawful pathways," Mayorkas said.

Officials from communities along the border agreed they had not seen the large numbers of migrants that many had feared would further strain U.S. border facilities and towns.

"The amount of migrants we were expecting initially - the big flow - is not here yet," Victor Trevino, mayor of Laredo, Texas, told CBS News' "Face the Nation."

But Republicans who control the U.S. House of Representatives warned a surge could still be on the way.

Migrants stand near the Rio Bravo river after crossing the border, to request asylum in the United States, as seen from Ciudad Juarez

"I do think there are caravans going up. I think they still want to get in," Representative Michael McCaul said on ABC's "This Week" program.

Representative Mark Green, Republican chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee, told CNN: "What the secretary failed to say is, this week has seen more crossings than any time, any week, in our history."

Mayorkas defended the Biden administration policy against a lawsuit by the American Civil Liberties Union that claims the restrictions violate U.S. laws and international agreements.

"This is not an asylum ban. We have a humanitarian obligation, as well as a matter of security, to cut the ruthless smugglers out," he told ABC.

'BROKEN' IMMIGRATION SYSTEM

With U.S. immigration policy in disarray, holding facilities, hospitals and towns have been left to struggle after tens of thousands of migrants waded through rivers and climbed walls and embankments onto U.S. territory last week in the days before Title 42 expired.

Trevino said hospitals were at or near capacity, with no pediatric intensive care unit available and an emergency declaration in effect.

El Paso Mayor Oscar Leeser told CBS that the Red Cross was helping private organizations and church groups provide food and other assistance for migrants.

"The immigration process is broken. There's no ifs ands or buts about it. But we are getting the resources that we need," Leeser said.

There has been little movement toward a bipartisan agreement to address immigration in Congress.

Just before Title 42 expired on Thursday, House Republicans approved legislation that would resume construction of a border wall, expand federal law enforcement efforts and require asylum seekers to apply for U.S. protection outside the country.

The Republican bill is unlikely to be taken up by the Democratic-controlled Senate.

Migration

I'll make a wild guess, and answer the question posed in the headline below:

A lot of bad shit has happened in countries to the south of the US, but one of the main reasons for millions of those "millions of people leaving their homes" and piling up on the US/Mexico border is the simple fact that Republicans have been screaming about "open borders" for years now.

Are they thinking only Americans could hear them? But more to the point - are they thinking at all?

What’s Driving Record Levels of Migration to the U.S. Border?

The United States is trying to curtail border crossings as a Covid-era immigration policy lifts this week, but it has little control over the crises in Latin America that have upended the lives of millions.

CIUDAD JUÁREZ, Mexico — Millions of people are leaving their homes across Latin America in numbers not seen in decades, many of them pressing toward the United States.

While migration to the U.S. southern border has always fluctuated, the pandemic and the recession that followed hit Latin America harder than almost anywhere else in the world, plunging millions into hunger, destitution and despair.

A generation of progress against extreme poverty was wiped out. Unemployment hit a two-decade high. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine choked off a key pipeline for grain and fertilizer, triggering a spike in food prices.

Economic shocks were worsened by violence, as conflict between armed groups festered in once relatively peaceful countries and raged in places long accustomed to the terror.

Amid these events, smugglers and migrants alike have pushed powerful social media campaigns, many rife with misinformation, that have encouraged people to migrate to the United States.

This accumulation of grim factors means that when a pandemic-era border restriction known as Title 42 lifts this week, the United States will be confronted with an immigration challenge even more daunting than the one it faced when the measure was first imposed.

“You couldn’t come up with a worse set of facts to leave tens of millions of people with no choice but to move,” said Dan Restrepo, who served as President Barack Obama’s top adviser on Latin America. “It’s inevitable that you’d have massive displacement, it really is a perfect storm.”

For the last three years, the American government has tried to curtail the record flows of people arriving at the U.S. border by using the public-health measure to quickly expel those who crossed illegally.

However, when Title 42 expires, migrants who enter the country illegally will have the opportunity to apply for asylum, something many were barred from doing during the three years the public-health restriction was in place.

Qualifying won’t be easy — the Biden administration is rolling out new eligibility restrictions — and if the process works as intended, many will still be deported relatively quickly.

But the large flows building in northern Mexico could overwhelm the system, which means more people, especially families and children, may be released into the United States with a notice to appear before an immigration judge.

In some cases, social media is being used to falsely advertise the coming border rule changes as the opening of the floodgates. On TikTok, posts tagged #titulo42 have been viewed more than 96 million times, with one popular post claiming, “May 11: You cannot be deported. Title 42 has come to an end.”

The number of encounters at the border has already risen in recent days, a jump American officials hope will last only a few weeks and then eventually die down.

Many migrants are coming from places like Venezuela, which was suffering one of the worst economic crises in the world before the pandemic. Much of the country sank further into misery when the coronavirus shut the world down. A mass exit deepened, bringing the total number of Venezuelans who have fled since 2015 to 7.2 million — roughly a quarter of the population.

In Colombia, where worker protections are weak, joblessness reached its highest rate on record. Brazil recorded the second-highest number of Covid deaths worldwide. Immigrants who had already traveled from across Latin America to these two countries were among the first to lose their hold on any hope of a livelihood.

Nicaraguans historically migrated north in relatively small numbers. But inflation, sinking wages and an increasingly authoritarian government have prompted hundreds of thousands to leave in recent years.

Gang violence and homicides exploded in relatively tranquil Ecuador. Haiti got hit by a cholera outbreak, an extreme hunger crisis and warfare between armed criminal groups — all at the same time.

The Darién Gap, a treacherous 70-mile stretch of jungle that connects Central and South America, suddenly became a thoroughfare for people without the visas or money to make the journey any other way.

The United Nations expects as many as 400,000 people to pass through this year, nearly 40 times the yearly average from 2010 through 2020.

Sitting inside a pale pink tent on a Colombian beach not far from the jungle last year, Willian Gutiérrez, 31, a welder and bricklayer, said the situation at home in Venezuela had gone from bad to worse. He hadn’t had stable work in years, meals were meager, “and sometimes I stopped eating so they would be able to,” he said, motioning to his children, Ricardo, 5, and Yolayner, 2.

The family lived in a half-built house without electricity in the oil-rich city of Maracaibo, Mr. Gutiérrez’s wife, Johana García, 38, explained. After watching so many friends leave for the United States, she said, they had decided to risk the trek.

They went because the American economy bounced back quickly from the coronavirus and then got hungry for workers.

But they also were told — by human smugglers, relatives and people posting on Facebook, TikTok and WhatsApp — that under President Biden, they could actually cross the border and stay.

Ms. García, who had just enough money to purchase a tent, a headlamp and two bags of bread for the jungle trip, had heard this from Venezuelans who had made it to the United States before her.

“It’s difficult, yes,” they told her, “but it’s possible.”

American border authorities have in fact been regularly using Title 42 to immediately turn back people who enter the country illegally, invoking it more than 2.7 million times since March 2020.

Venezuelan migrants walk toward the United States to surrender themselves to Border Patrol ahead of the end of Title 42 in Ciudad Juárez, Mexico, on Saturday.Credit...Alejandro Cegarra for The New York Times

But Mexico only agreed to take in expelled migrants from a handful of countries in the region, forcing the Biden administration to fly others back to their homelands — a slower process constrained by cost, logistics and the fact that some governments have not always accepted expulsion flights from the United States.

“What on paper was in some ways the harshest border policy ever put into effect, like a complete and total ban on entry, never worked like that in practice,” said Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, policy director at the American Immigration Council, a Washington-based immigrant advocacy organization.

Since taking office, according to federal data, the Biden administration has allowed some 1.8 million migrants to stay in the country while awaiting asylum hearings, many of whom turned themselves in after crossing the border. Unknown numbers also entered the country undetected.

“People who want to get to the United States know that it has been an advantageous time to try to get into the country,” said Andrew Selee, the president of the Migration Policy Institute, a nonpartisan research organization. “They calculate their chances of getting in before they go.”

Ana Gabriela Gómez, 28, a pharmacy assistant who made less than $100 a month at home in Caracas, left Venezuela with her two young sons in September. After nine terrible days in the Darién jungle, she heard that Mr. Biden was tightening border restrictions against Venezuelans.

But so many neighbors and friends had gotten through. She didn’t quite believe the president.

“I’m going to go to see it with my own eyes,” she decided. After she got to the U.S. border with her boys, ages 5 and 6, she crossed the Rio Grande at Ciudad Juárez and turned herself in to U.S. Border Patrol agents, who let her through.

She’s now staying in a shelter in Manhattan, and plans to apply for asylum. In her view, the journey was painful, but worth it.

“My goal was to get here,” she said, “but now I have another goal: to work, to get my papers, a good school for the boys.”

In Facebook and WhatsApp groups directed at would-be migrants, a cascade of users have been encouraging migrants to make the trip to the border after the public health measure expires.

“For those who want to know if the border is open,” one person said last week in a Facebook group called Darién Jungle Migrant Survivors, “yes it is.”

What are you willing to risk?

When you know there's nothing

for you at home, and a very slim chance

at something better for your family

at the end of a very dangerous

1200-mile hike north -

what do you do?

Who Gets In? A Guide to America’s Chaotic Border Rules.

New restrictions on asylum will lead many migrants to be deported — but others will still get into the United States. Here’s what the process will look like.

On Thursday, the United States will lift a pandemic rule that had been used to immediately kick out hundreds of thousands of migrants who crossed the border illegally over the last three years.

Now, those migrants who enter the country illegally will have the opportunity to apply for asylum, which is a legal status people can get if they prove that they would face persecution or other risks at home.

That doesn’t mean it will be easy to actually qualify. The Biden administration is set to impose new restrictions on eligibility, and if the process works as planned many migrants would still be deported relatively quickly. But if new arrivals overwhelm the system, it’s possible officials will let many people stay in the country to await asylum hearings.

So what determines whether you get in or not? Sometimes it’s about how good of a case you can make, or whether you’ve followed the rules of an often chaotic system. Much of the time, it’s just luck.

Here’s what the process of getting across the border will look like under the new rules, as best as we could determine with the help of Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, the policy director at the American Immigration Council, and one of the top experts in the country on this issue.

In the last several months, President Biden used his executive authority to open what essentially amounts to a back door for certain migrants to enter the country legally: apply for what’s called “humanitarian parole.”

It gives Haitians, Venezuelans, Nicaraguans and Cubans the chance to live for two years in the United States if a sponsor files an application for them online. Hundreds of thousands have taken advantage of the program. The catch is that the number of monthly slots is limited. You also have to get someone already in the United States to take financial responsibility for you, and you need to have a valid passport and the money to pay for a plane ticket.

In January, the administration opened yet another pathway to encourage people to migrate in an orderly way rather than take a dangerous route that creates a bottleneck at the border. This one involves a new app, called CBP One. Migrants can use the app to make an appointment with border officials at a port of entry, who then can decide whether to allow them into the United States with a notice to appear in immigration court down the line.

It sounds relatively easy, except that the app has been glitchy, and the likelihood of getting an appointment has been compared to winning a lottery ticket. There are few slots available each day relative to demand. Only migrants who are in northern Mexico, near the U.S. border, or in Mexico City are eligible to use it. And many people have spent months trying day after day to make this work for them, to no avail.

First of all, it’s worth getting a basic sense of what it actually means to cross the border illegally. Sometimes it means traversing a desert or forging across a large body of water — but it’s not always that hard. In some places, like parts of Ciudad Juárez, the Mexican city across from El Paso, Texas, you can get to American soil by walking across a relatively narrow and calm stretch of the Rio Grande.

If migrants did that when Title 42 was in place, U.S. officials could send them back to Mexico within minutes, which will no longer be an option. Now, people who enter the country without proper documentation will either be put into formal deportation proceedings, which is a years-long, drawn-out process, or an expedited removal process that is intended to process and deport people much faster.

Families and children will mostly be put on the first, slower track, which means they will be given a date to appear before an immigration judge, but will be allowed to wait inside the country, living and working legally until their case is decided.

Single adults, on the other hand, will probably go through the expedited lane. If the system works as intended, those migrants could be on their way to deportation with a felony charge in hand within days.

If you entered illegally and did not enter the United States because you were fleeing persecution or serious danger, you will probably be deported. If you are seeking safe haven, you must claim fear of returning to your home country to apply for asylum. But it will be much harder to qualify than it once was, thanks to new barriers President Biden is putting in place this week.

Migrants will now have to show that they applied for asylum and were rejected by Mexico or another country they passed through on their journey in order to be considered for protection in the United States. That requirement, which critics call a “transit ban,” will probably face legal challenges by human-rights groups who say it amounts to a near prohibition on asylum. It can take months, if not years, to apply for asylum in Mexico, where the government’s system is extremely backed up. Many migrants also say they do not feel safe in countries they travel through.

If you’re put on the fast track, this might be applied just days after you crossed.

Even if you’re released into the United States, whenever you finally go before a judge you will still have to show that you were rejected for asylum by one of the countries you passed through on your way to the United States — even if that journey happened months or years ago.

Asylum hearings can take years to complete, and most claims are denied, leaving migrants without the right to stay in the United States and eventually apply for permanent status.

A final option, which has always been available and probably always will be: You can make an often arduous, perilous, and uncertain trek through rough terrain and unforgiving elements, and then try to sneak into the United States without being caught. If you manage to make it, you live in the shadows, with the risk of the authorities finding and deporting you at any moment.

Priorities

Make sure people are fighting about immigration and not about the guns.

It simply will not do to let "conservative" voters wonder why their favorite scapegoat (ie: an "illegal immigrant") was able to get a gun, totally eluding the keen-eyed law enforcers diligently on the lookout for aliens entering the country illegally to do their dastardly immigrant mischief.

It has to be obvious - these GOP assholes want us to concentrate on one thing in order to distract us from some other thing. And when two of their absolute favorite hobby horses converge to make a giant fucked up mess, they have to prioritize.

It looks for all the world that their priority is guns, which I think brings something into focus:

They don't really care all that much about immigration because the main point, actually, is their need to keep us angry and afraid and ready to kill each other. So they pimp the xenophobia to give us a way to rationalize the gun fetish they've cultivated in us, and our gun fetish is a means to an end - to keep us shooting each other instead of shooting cynically manipulative coin-operated politicians and their plutocrat paymasters.

IMPORTANT NOTE:

Please understand that I'm not advocating shooting any coin-operated politicians and their plutocrat paymasters.

Maybe the hidden point of the exercise is to stir the shit in such a way as to provoke violent semi-organized revolt as pretext for an authoritarian clamp down. (Hey c'mon - it almost worked on Jan6, y'know)

What if a new Daddy State government that rode in on the backs of armed citizens decided suddenly that it was a bad idea to have armed citizens running around helter-skelter?

Don't think 'irony'

Don't think 'hypocrisy'

Think 'intent'

Think 'long game'

Greg Abbott Criticized for Response to Texas Shooting: 'A New Low'

Texas Gov. Greg Abbott has been criticized for his response to a mass shooting that left five people dead in his state.

Authorities appear no closer to catching the suspect, identified as Francisco Oropeza, after more than two days of searching.

Oropeza, 38, is considered armed and dangerous after fleeing the Cleveland, Texas, area on Friday night. Authorities say he entered his neighbors' home and fatally shot five people, including a 9-year-old boy after they had asked him to stop firing rounds in his yard at night because a baby was sleeping.

Abbott, a Republican, announced $50,000 in reward money for information on Sunday, noting in a press release and tweet that the victims were "illegal immigrants." The release also noted that Oropeza was in the country illegally.

State Sen. Roland Gutierrez, a Democrat, blasted Abbott's statement, calling it "a new low" and accusing the governor of "continuing to do nothing" to keep Texas safe from gun violence.

Gutierrez, who represents Uvalde, where a teenage gunman killed 19 students and two teachers last year, wrote on Twitter: "Greg, how was an undocumented person able to obtain an AR-15 in the first place? I'll tell you why. It's because you and other Republicans have made safe gun laws nonexistent. I challenge you to show some actual political courage and #DOSOMETHING."

Texas Rep. Veronica Escobar wrote: "They were part of a family, @GregAbbott_TX — and one of the victims was a child. What a disgusting lack of compassion and humanity."

The Congressional Hispanic Caucus also hit out at Abbott.

The caucus tweeted: "5 innocent lives lost to gun violence. TX @GovAbbott decides to dehumanize & delegitimize the lives of those killed in this horrific attack by calling them "illegal" immigrants. Just horrible. Thoughts are with the families and the survivors during this difficult time."

New York Rep. Ritchie Torres wrote that Abbott's "hatred for immigrants and love of AR-15s far outweigh his humanity."

Shannon Watts, the founder of Moms Demand Action, wrote that Abbott is a "racist xenophobe" who "can't bring himself to say a man with easy access to assault rifle [slaughtered] a family and child in his state."

Actor George Takei replied to Abbott's tweet: "This is despicable. I would have thought bringing up the immigration status of the innocent victims of this senseless violence would be beneath even you. But I was wrong."

Meanwhile, Carlos Eduardo Espina, an immigrant rights activist, tweeted a photo of an ID apparently belonging to one of the victims, confirming that she was a permanent resident of the U.S.

"But I guess to Greg Abbott, anyone who is from another country is an 'illegal immigrant.' Shameful," Espina wrote.

However, others praised Abbott. "Other politicians should be so forthright - call a spade a spade, and tenaciously pursue the suspect," one person tweeted, while others suggested closing the border.

Another person wrote: "Pretending nothing is happening at the border and focusing on choice of words is beyond dehumanizing. Thank you for putting up money and trying to find the killer. Your actions are stronger than words."

In a statement provided to Newsweek, Abbott spokesperson Renae Eze said information provided by federal officials after the shooting had indicated that the suspect and victims were in the country illegally.

"We've since learned that at least one of the victims may have been in the United States legally," Eze said.

"We regret if the information was incorrect and detracted from the important goal of finding and arresting the criminal. The true focus remains on catching this heinous criminal who killed five innocent people and bringing the full weight of Texas law against him."

Her statement did not address why Abbott mentioned the victims' status in his statement.

The FBI in Houston has released more images of Oropeza on Twitter, and said it would be referring to the suspect as Oropesa, not Oropeza, going forward to "better reflect his identity in law enforcement systems."

According to The Associated Press, his family lists their name as Oropeza on a sign outside their yard, as well as in public records.

The San Jacinto County Sheriff's Office and the FBI have also chipped in reward money, together offering a total of $80,000 for any information about Oropeza's whereabouts.

More than 250 officers from multiple jurisdictions were searching for Oropeza by Sunday evening.

"FBI Houston and other local, state, & federal agencies will not stop assisting SJSO until he is captured and justice is brought on behalf of the 5 victims," the FBI in Houston posted on Twitter.