No. of Recommendations: 24
This board loudly and arrogantly said there was zero way to stem the flow at the southern border unless the GOP got on its knees for the democrats…how’s that prediction working out?
Pretty good, actually.
You may recall that the main argument in defense of the border bill was not about "stemming the flow" at the southern border, but instead about giving the government the tools to deal with the folks here in the U.S. The ability of the federal government to deport people is constrained by the resources they have. In order to deport folks, you need border patrol and law enforcement officers and immigration judges and detention facilities. Those factors constrain the "throughput" of deportees. The most significant portion of the border bill would have vastly increased the amount of resources appropriated for those uses. And the government needs those extra resources in order to materially increase deportations.
BTW, this is also the argument that a number of Republican Senators have been making in defense of the "two bill" reconciliation strategy. They know that that the Administration can't make a dent in the deportation backlog until more border resources are appropriated. Since it will take a very long time to get the tax/deficit stuff worked out in the House, they wanted to push the border piece forward quickly.
Conservatives opposed to the 2024 border bill pushed back on that claim, dismissing arguments that the government was deporting those in the U.S. to the limits of its resources already. Instead, they argued that the federal government had more than enough resources already - that the main reason that there wasn't more volume of arrests and deportations was the Biden Administration choosing to refrain from deportation.
But it turns out that the Democratic position (and that of Senate Republicans) was correct. There isn't a backlog of "easy" deportations that were being allowed to stay just because of policy. It takes a lot of resources to arrest and deport someone. You can create a quick illusory jump in stats if you reallocate resources just to pushing through the ones that are ready for arrest and away from building the cases for the next batch - but then you end up crashing down to reality.
Had the GOP passed the border bill last year, Trump would have had vastly more resources to pursue arrests and deportations. But they didn't, so he doesn't. It doesn't matter how hard they whip the top folks at ICE - without more resources, they can't move materially more people through the pipeline. Having turned down the bill that would have increased those resources last year, they have to wait for the new Congress to take action.
