Should we defund ICE?

[Steve]

IIRC there is some law regulating such contempt charges. Susan MacDougal (of Whitewater scandal fame) was held for the full eighteen months for refusing to testify in the Starr OIC's grand jury into said scandal. Then the contempt charge expired and she was considered to be serving time for her conviction in the related scandal.

[Admiral X]

Shouldn't the Fifth Amendment have protected her (or anyone else) from something like that, though?

[TGLS]

Her reasoning was, "If I testify, I'll be tried for perjury", which is a pretty weak argument.

[LittleRaven]

Going back to the original question: Should we defund ICE?

No. At least, not unless we're going to just open the border, which is a proposal that doesn't even enjoy much support from the left. Controlling the border is one of the primary reasons that a nation state exists, and while ~70% of the country disagrees with Trump's child separation policy, he enjoys much broader support on the notion of controlling the border in general. Heck, I would argue that immigration is largely the reason that he's President today. It was, you'll recall, the issue that ultimately crippled all of his opposition in the Republican primary and set the stage for his showdown with Hillary. Most people, regardless of their political orientation, feel that there should be at least SOME kind of formal process when it comes to entering the country.

Of course, we didn't always have ICE, so maybe we could just, you know, go back to what we had before. And sure, we could. But that isn't likely to solve anything, because the problem today isn't so much that ICE is singularly evil or incompetent, but rather that they are being faced with a very, VERY difficult problem. Since October, 252,187 people have been apprehended trying to cross into the US. That's a little over one thousand people EVERY DAY...there's a significant logistical challenge there. And while it's true that the number of attempted crossings has been even higher in the past, what's changed recently has been the composition and motivation of the migrants. Back around 2000, when border crossings were at their peak, the people we were catching were overwhelmingly Mexicans looking for work. Those people were quite easy to deal with - you simply deported them, which consisted of just putting them on a bus heading back to Mexico. (usually, a couple of hours away from the border) There was no need to lock anyone up for long periods of time...the buses ran all day long, and we didn't need to spend a lot of time on anyone's case - they were usually happy to admit why they were here, knowing that the worst that would happen is that they would get a bus ride back to Mexico.

But the world has changed. Now, most of the people who are showing up at our border are from much farther away, and are asking for political asylum, not economic opportunity. This changes how we have to deal with them. If we catch someone and they say "If you send me back, they will kill me." then we can't simply deport them. There's a process involved. We have to determine where they came from, they have be interviewed by an appropriate official who can gauge the strength of their claim, and possibly be referred to a judge for a formal ruling. All of this takes time...considerable time, in fact, because while both Bush and Obama strengthened the security apparatus responsible for catching people, neither expanded the judicial capacity for processing people, so backlogs started to build up. And in cases where they don't meet standards for asylum, deporting them is not as simple as putting them on a bus. You can't take a bus to Guatemala or Columbia. And unlike the economic migrants of times past, these people are bringing their children with them...which is perfectly understandable, given what they are trying to do, but makes the job of ICE much harder, because the Flores amendment means that we cannot hold a child in detention for more than 20 days. But processing a political asylum claim almost always takes longer than that, so you either have to release the parents along with the child, or separate the family.

Obama, ever the political pragmatist, largely punted on this issue. He tried to get Congress to allocate additional funds to both beef up our processing capacity and help stabilize regions that the migrants were coming from, but the House was mostly concerned with their 486th vote to overturn Obamacare, so not much happened there. He settled for simply letting most people go. This created a huge opportunity that Trump was able to successfully exploit. Yes, his solutions vary from laughably stupid to blatantly unconstitutional, but he is at least promising to do something, while Democrats have a very hard time advocating specific policy when it comes to the border, because there is no real unity within the Democratic party about what should be done.

And there's good reason for that. This is a DIFFICULT problem. There is no easy answer. And the US is not alone in struggling with it. This issue is pressuring western governments all around the world. Merkel may very well lose her job over this. Brexit marketed itself heavily on the notion of Britain 'controlling its own borders.' (read: fewer migrants, especially brown ones) Italy is getting downright scary. France is no safe haven. Even the socialist paradise of Sweden is quaking before the tides of migrants, with the far-right Sweden Democrats in a dead heat with center-left Social Democrats, a situation that would have been considered farcical just a few years ago.

Sadly, as climate change accelerates, this situation is probably only going to get worse. So if you have a great idea, please step up. We all could use it.

[Fuzzy Necromancer]

LittleRaven, I feel like you and I are approaching the same idea from opposite angles.

I don't think it's that hard to fix the immigration system. I think that most of our entrenched leaders and powerful institutions WANT a clunky, inefficient immigration system where it can take years, decades, to become a legal citizen. Because it's so much easier if you have a large portion of the population with very few legal rights, and a dubious legal status. You can pay them less than minimum wage and deport them at the first sign of trouble. You can blame them for things. You can sell them and enslave them. Seperating children from their parents is another plus, because foreign nations have been giving american adopters higher scrutiny, and there's a lot of white evangelicals that want to spread the gospel by raising brown babies in dubious circumstances.

Maybe it's cynical, but that's how it looks to me. It's not a bug, it's a feature.

[Steve]

I'd agree that in many ways it's a feature, but that's more because anti-immigrant sentiments aren't new to our country and those sentiments are easy to tap. We're all familiar with "They take our jobs!", and the ancillary 'They accept lower wages, dragging our wages down!" And that's not counting perceptions of being culturally incompatible or the even scarier "they'll take over" (just look at the paranoia about "Aztlan" stuff).

[Fuzzy Necromancer]

So, I learned that apparently the people in cages are ASYLUM SEEKERS who have committed no crime. Literally.

Does that change any of ya'lls opinion on this?

[LittleRaven]

Does that change any of ya'lls opinion on this?

Not really. You seem to think that someone claiming asylum makes the job of ICE easier. The truth is just the opposite.

Unless you simply want to open the border, which is a fine position to have but not one that enjoys much support among American citizens, you can't simply let everyone who claims asylum into the country, because people are not idiots, and have no problem claiming all kinds of things if they think it will get them something. Investigation is in order. You have to figure out what language the person speaks, find a translator, interview them, verify their statements, figure out how they fit into the byzantine and ever-changing standards for US asylum, schedule a hearing, build a case, present the case, get a ruling, then either deport the person or relocate them to their new home in the US.

None of these steps are necessarily trivial. Some of them take quite a long time, especially since we haven't expanded any of our judicial capacity for these things in decades. And you have to do something with these people in the meantime. Under Obama, we mostly....although not always....let them go while we figured things out. Trump, of course, has never met a situation he can't make worse, so we're now going to keep everyone locked up while we figure things out. But either way, we do have to figure things out, and that process is going to take a lot of time. We have to do SOMETHING with them in the meantime.

[Steve]

What we need is to expand the system that processes these claims, to proceed with them more quickly. But that would require more funding being diverted.

[Fuzzy Necromancer]

What we need is to expand the system that processes these claims, to proceed with them more quickly. But that would require more funding being diverted.

"Oh no, that needs more funding!"

Yeah, we ALWAYS have money for foreign wars, but the moment somebody suggests a USEFUL law that improves the lives of people and the functioning of america, it's all "oh dear, too pricy!"