It’s useful to review how to fix conditions of overcrowding in a facility. There are two fixes available.
1. You build more capacity
2. You increase training and oversight of the personnel running the facilities if they’re not behaving adequately
Both of these fixes require more money allocated by Congress. It helps when the Executive requests more funding but Congress doesn’t require it.
Go look at the legislative history. President Trump asked for more funds, Congress turned him down. It wasn’t his own party that denied him, it was the Democratic delegation that was against relief.
President Trump sought to work around the restrictions by declaring an emergency and using military construction money. It was left wing advocates who went to court to fight Trump, preventing him from building more facilities.
The left wing solution is to cause so much suffering so that our hearts break and we stop enforcing the law.
That’s cruel. It’s cruel on purpose.
Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez alleges misbehavior by camp personnel. She is one of a small select group, just 535 people strong who could directly improve the situation by introducing legislation that would force improvements in behavior. She has yet to introduce any.
The Congresswoman is a prominent part of the cruelty agenda.
In a normal country, hard questions would be asked by the mainstream media of those who have recently been part of this cruelty agenda.
Miss AOC is an actress selected by a casting call and auditions of 10,000 people, most of whom lost their elections.
She has been quite successful, considering that she knows nothing of history or economics. She is being given lines to memorize, as the left used to say about Reagan, but he was very successful in actually doing something. She is likely to hit a wall if her constituents realize that she has been harming them.
There is even a story circulating that she was employed by Amazon, which had no intention of building that second headquarters but needed a diversion to get out of the deal.
The immigration thing has been a problem for a *long* time.
It was in the news back in 1991, when the media were weeping crocodile tears over the tent camps the illegals were being temporarily housed in.
My brother was in Saudi Arabia at the time, in the US Army. He observed the illegals had *much* nicer housing and facilities than he did, and he was a government employee…
I note most of the Democratic presidential candidates seem to have a rather large homes, with two or three residents in a 5 or 8 room home. Which might be only one of several. Perhaps we could house excess “migrants” with them. After all, shouldn’t they be leading the way by sharing their good fortune?
There is a third fix available — the fix that President Eisenhower used when illegal immigrants began to flood across the border: Send them home.
Foolish laws and Far-Left judges now make that sensible solution impossible. By dangling the prospect of escape to the USA in front of poor people in Central America, Democrats are creating misery for many.
Preventing crisis or solving crisis is not the play. Using every real or contrived crisis to maximum effect to increase division, discredit advocaries and increase government power and control is the intent. There is no end state envisioned except that what is must be replaced with the woke. The resistance/revolution is the end state. Truth, rules, equal justice before the law, civility and accountability are not of any concern. Just win by any means possible.
Death6
If I may offer an unwelcome bit of reality.
1) Conditions in the detention facilities are caused by overcrowding.
2) No matter how much we spend to expand and upgrade those facilities, it is far easier and cheaper for the domestic and foreign enemies of this country to flood the border with more invaders.
3) It is not physically possible for us to fix things because of that.
4) If you want to get ahead of the number of new enemy invaders to either improve conditions in the facilities or close facilites, you have to restrict or end the invasion.
5) There are only three ways to do this. a) close the border, b) make it so unpleasant here for uncaptured invaders that they voluntarily return to enemy territory, and c) make the consequences of capture sufficiently counterproductive for the invaders that they will not return. These may be done singly or in combination.
Option 5a will involve the routine use of deadly force and a level of will to accept that our country is actually being invaded in the guise of immigration. q.v. Roman Empire and the waves of barbarians from the east. Military closure of the borders, with possible fortified and defended ports of entry for trade is one possibility. Or just engage in a total trade embargo with Mexico until they close the border to invading forces with say a control zone maybe 20 miles wide on their side of the border. If the invaders come to breach our border, they need to be killed; men women and children. That is the reality of it.
That does not preclude legal immigration, but it must be on our terms with our country deciding who comes in. No room for it here, but last week I wrote for publication elsewhere a 2500 word piece laying out an immigration system that serves our purposes, does NOT discriminate based on race in any way [there is some species discrimination because Antarctica gets no quota for the penguins], and actually increases the number of immigrants. Legal immigrants who want to become Americans are very much a good thing.
Option 5b could be made more stringent, but I envision at first absolute denial of any Federally funded [in whole or in part with states and localities cut off completely if they violate the conditions with Federal money] social welfare programs for any foreign nationals here illegally. Also, stringent enforcement of e-Verify for any employment. Employment of an illegal invader by any person or corporate entity should involve jail time for the employer and a fine equal to 100 times the annual wage of every illegally employed invader and the invader and any illegal family in this country subject to immediate deportation. Suitable raids with warrants would be part of this.
Note that if any minor children of the invader are US citizens that they can either be given into the custody of a US citizen relative in the country or that they can be deported with their family [the best caretaker for them in any case] AFTER fingerprints, retinal patterns, and DNA samples are taken and preserved. After they reach the age of 21 they can present themselves at any US diplomatic mission to claim their citizenship. They can have their fingerprints and retinal patterns taken there and sent to the US for confirmation. If confirmed, they can be brought to the US and a DNA sample taken and matched with the one stored. If everything matches, they are citizens and probably should receive a grant for education here.
As part of Options 5b and 5c, any illegal invader caught in this country needs to be marked as having invaded our country. I suggest deep surgical implantation of something similar to the pet ID chips that can be detected with a scanner. But there may be other methods. Then they can be deported and permanently banned from re-entry and legal immigration.
If caught invading our country again, OR if they are or have been found guilty of a felony while invading this country, something in addition to benign marking is needed. Noting that I am not a nice person, I know of various body parts that if damaged will result in various levels of permanent disability. This can be done [once again to ALL invaders in this category] before being returned to their country of origin. And while I am not a nice person, I note that the obvious alternative to this is capital punishment, which would be also acceptable. Reality.
In passing, the treatment of invaders who have been convicted of felonies by these rules would do wonders for prison overcrowding. It has been over a decade since I was an LEO, but I ran across some stats from back in those days. In Colorado, about 1/3 of incarcerated prison inmates were Hispanic. Not really too far out of line from the general state population. But half of those Hispanics were illegal invaders. Think about how many fewer convicts we would be paying for at the state and Federal level if this was in effect.
Taken together, these measures of deterrence would reduce the number of invaders coming in now, and those currently in place. But it means facing facts, not fantasies.
Now, having engaged in sufficient fecal agitation for the day, I await reactions.
Subotai Bahadur
Subotai: Your modest proposal just wouldn’t work. The fact is that for an overwhelming majority of people from Central America, and most of the world for that matter, even becoming crippled in America if you happened to be caught would still be preferable economically to their current lives. The only possible way to stop the flow is to impose crushing penalties on American businesses that employ illegals. If you get caught employing illegals, and can’t prove that you used e-Verify and/or took any other necessary precautions, your business is terminated and you are completely ruined. Make the penalty far worse than the benefit you get from hiring them. There’s no way to do the same for illegals, to deter them.
We are never going to solve the problem if we do not accurately identify the problem, the bad actors causing it, and do our best to build winning, durable coalitions. The sovereign states of Central America are not at war with the United States. Their territory is not enemy territory. To think in such terms makes us less likely to win.
I want to win.
In general, the best life is to find a great job where you were born and live in the culture you were raised in, taking full advantage of the social capital you built up throughout your lifetime.
Leaving your country is a sacrifice. It has significant costs. There are plenty of people who simply don’t want to undergo those costs. My in-laws are two of them. They have the right to come to the US and immigrate. They don’t want to. They like the US but picking up and making a new life is too much trouble.
In this case, what we are facing is a case where people are lowering the cost of attempting to enter the US. They are organizing convoys and teaching people how to game the system.
In short, we are dealing with a criminal conspiracy. Are we targeting the conspirators? I’ve seen little evidence that we are. Illegal border crossing is a small charge, conspiring to overwhelm the border should be a 10 year sentence and a crippling fine that is non-dischargeable by bankruptcy.
In an anti-conspirator strategy, a few green cards issued in exchange for testimony that puts the organizers behind bars and sets these people up for criminal RICO would be a small price to pay to put an end to the conspiracy.
I agree with the post except for the part about media in a normal country. There aren’t any other countries that have an unbiased media. Japan, perhaps. I can’t think of any others.
The solution to overcrowding within our border facilities? Eliminate the incentives which attract people to enter illegally.
Others have touched on these needed changes, send them back, stop giving them benefits, enforce e verify, create barriers which allow us to stop their entry, make them apply for asylum at our Embassy within their home country and/or in the first country they enter after fleeing their home country, end the “anchor-baby” practice, (you do not become a citizen if born here of parents who entered illegally, or if of parents who entered with the sole purpose of having a child born American ((as Intent is harder to prove this is challenging but doable)), accept that being an American (U.S.A.) is a special distinction which must be preserved for those qualified and given with deliberate purpose to those who wish to join. Accept that preserving the ability to decide who is American is a continuous challenge which requires a continuous effort to meet the changing methods of circumventing our best intentions to control our membership. There will always be those who seek loopholes and get arounds to cheat the system, to cheat our right to decide who is in our club. The U.S.A. Is a special experiment in human cooperation. Laws are how we express our commonly agreed upon set of accepted practices. Or, perhaps more accurately, Laws delineate the unacceptable practices. Cheating the Law is unacceptable and railing against such cheaters should be our first priority in affirming our unity as this set of experimenters, who having been handed a unique mandate, seek to preserve the flexibility of our Founder’s intuition while perfecting the bond which was created in the founding of this experiment of self governance.
Preserving the right to decide who qualifies as a interested promoter of the furtherance of our founding effort is fundamental to all progress. Finding united dedication to the effort to protect and defend our borders, and hence our membership, and hence finding and implementing solutions to problems created by those who wish to take a shortcut in joining something they likely don’t understand (and clearly and certainly don’t support when they choose to break the pact, the Laws which bind us, in order to join an experiment based solely on those Laws), is fundamental to the preservation of our union. Fundamental to remaining a place ideas and respect can flourish.