GOP Immigration Playbook: Intentionally Break the System and Call it a Humanitarian Crisis

I’ve seen Arizona Congress-critters Biggs and Schweikert recently taking to the House floor to complain that the mean old Dems are ignoring a humanitarian crisis on the Mexican border. They both bemoan that the facilities of ICE are overflowing with asylum seekers and seek to lay the blame on Democrats for ignoring the crisis.

Well, they ought to be addressing the Trump Administration. Since Trump dumped the immigration portfolio into Steven Miller’s lap the “crisis” has gone from bad to worse. The reason ICE facilities are bursting at the seams with asylum seekers is that the Admin has adopted a policy of holding asylum seekers in detention to the maximum extent possible under current law and then pushing the envelope of the law as far as possible. They even considered housing unaccompanied minors in the infamous Guantanamo Bay detention facilities!

So, the Admin creates a “crisis” by holding asylum seekers in detention, often in deplorable or dangerous conditions for the health and welfare of refugees, then has their Congressional flying monkeys screech about a humanitarian crisis at the border that the Dems won’t fund.

No. We won’t fund more detention facilities so that this Admin can expand its detention and internment policies toward refugees. Let them out with court dates: DOJ statistics show that in 2017, 89% showed up for their asylum hearings. They don’t pose any additional risk to the communities they settle into to await their hearings: they criminally offend at rates far lower than native-born.

We will not respond to the Administration’s self-created humanitarian crisis. Let them out. End the crisis.