this post was submitted on 31 Jul 2025
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Biden tried to fix a lot of the problems with our immigration system, and when he couldn't get it through congress, he offered some cruelty to the Republicans as a gesture of compromise. His bill still would have massively reduced the level of suffering. A lot of the things Trump has been shutting down were things he initiated (a streamlined app for requesting asylum, instead of crossing the border illegally and then showing up and turning yourself in being the officially recommended system, for example).
Why was that all presented to the public as "being tough on immigration just like Trump is"? I have no idea, although I suspect that severely mentally challenged campaign consultants who the Democrats should have fired into the sun were involved. But the reality was different, and the left as it often does is entirely happy just to pretend everything the blue man did was bad, just because we don't like what's happening and don't want to understand details.
trying to fix problems with immigration with a "streamlined app" is some Buttigieg-brained neoliberal nonsense...
Seeking asylum at the U.S.-Mexico border? You’d better speak English or Spanish
The dangers of CBP One, the app to request asylum at the US-Mexico border
Amnesty International has a report about it:
when you're calling it a "streamlined app" and Amnesty International has a 71-page report about the technical problems it has and that the requirement to use it violates international law, maybe you shouldn't be talking about how other people "don’t want to understand details"
yeah, it's a real mystery...
Biden sending 1,500 troops for Mexico border migrant surge
and then Biden claimed the Border Patrol endorsed him in the debate he had with Trump.
and Kamala Harris, as well:
Kamala Harris' tough-on-migration pitch at the border points to a shifting national mood
Biden and Harris were almost literally doing the "HIRE 👏 MORE 👏 WOMEN 👏 GUARDS 👏" meme but with ICE agents.
Here, just read this:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Immigration_policy_of_the_Joe_Biden_administration
Should he have just abolished ICE instead? Probably. Did he make things worse on purpose? Fuck no, he made them better. Is it some bad-faith bullshit that people keep attacking him pretending that he did? Yes it is, Cap, yes it is.
I think there is a serious disconnect where biden/haris’s government campaigned on “we’re going to stop the bad things that trump is doing” which to the base read as “we’re going to restructure the system” but they meant “we’re going to mitigate the harms of the system but fundamentally leave it intact (because we lack the political capital to actually solve the issue)”.
Haris walked out on stage and said “look what a good job we’re doing” and everyone was pissed because the problem was manifestly not solved. Partially because “the immigration crisis” is not really a single political issues, it’s two political issues that get lumped together in polling. One group of voters have been petrified by stories of “violent foreign gangs” and another is worried about a system harming some of the most vulnerable people.
They shouldn’t have campaigned on it, they should have tried to redirect the focus of the campaign on to something else, and they should have been clear about the messaging on it. It was a colossal fuck up to lean in to it as core issue of the campaign because neither side of the issue cared about how well the existing system was being run. both sides hated the existing system, one side wanted a new system that wasn’t cruel, and one side just didn’t want immigrants at all.
Honestly, as far as campaign fuckups, I feel like you and I are completely in agreement. Like I said I think the DNC should basically fire its consultants into the sun at this point, instead of giving them millions of dollars in exchange for all these dogshit strategies and lost elections. I was talking more about the reality.
Making a cruel institution 10% less cruel but maintaining/reinforcing its capacity, was a worse call than just knee capping the institution and gutting it as much as they could while they had the opportunity.
Perhaps it would have been divisive, but what does that matter when doing what they did mobilized the opposition’s base just as much.
Okay, so now we're talking about the reality again?
The reality is that changing ICE requires congress, and a lot of who's in congress is reactionary idiots, and so "kneecapping" ICE would have just not passed and accomplished nothing. And, there were genuine emergencies (overcrowding in ICE facilities, deliberate racism and cruelty by ICE, and the massive backlog of people waiting to get in the country with nowhere to go) that needed to be dealt with, which a performative effort to kneecap it that actually accomplished nothing would have done nothing at all to solve.
Not to mention all those people separated from their families which the Biden administration was trying to find and reunite. It's just not that simple in reality. Accomplishing good things (and failing to accomplish some other realistic things which are also good things) is just not the same as deliberately causing all the cruelty in the system on purpose because you're a terrible person. It's like the Alice in Wonderland thing about mountains and valleys.
As the current administration is showing, it is entirely possible for the executive to unilaterally knee cap an organization.
So you think the answer is that Biden should have torn up the constitution first, before Trump could do it?
I think we may have to agree to disagree. I think fixing a lot of the structural things that got us here (legalized bribery in government, massive corruption / dysfunction in media and education, a basic lack of real direct democracy, gilded age economic dysfunction, among other issues) would have been a better way. "I'll seize control and fix it, trust me, look at the good things I'm doing" generally doesn't work out real well even if the good things are on the side that you think they should be done for.
don’t need to break the law to seriously gum up an organization.
And what good is playing by the spirit of the law, or maintaining political norms, when it’s been made very clear that no one else is going to.
If the option is to maintain a needlessly immigration cruel system, or let it rot on the vine. Let it rot on the vine and salt the earth under it.
That's actually one of the significant problems that came about during his admin: If you just let ICE "rot on the vine" (which was more or less what was happening, not even because of anything Biden did but just some additional factors in the world), then they keep arresting people but just keep them in increasingly overcrowded and shitty conditions. Which was precisely what happened. It was a fucking nightmare for anyone in detention, and some people died.
This just overall sounds like you have no idea how things work and are making sweeping proclamations about how easy things would be.
Use the over crowded conditions and illegal behavior to fire staff from the organization, then don’t rehire replacements.
Direct them to stop arresting people. Divert internal funds to other things. Cut off their access to information to arrest prople.
A million things they could have done to rot the organization and diminish it’s capability to inflict cruelty.
Okey dokey. If I ever make a simulator that lets you step into a political organization (like Sim City) and try various theories about how to make changes and what's going to happen as a result, I'll be sure to include this scenario, and I'll send you a link so you can give it a shot.
Well, clearly, the strategy of rebuilding and reinforcing the system, in hopes that it would diffuse the right’s ability to campaign on immigration issues didn’t work.
Clearly the plan of playing respectability politics and hoping the right comes back to the table for “bipartisan reforms” didn’t work.
The democratic party establishment can keep claiming that they’re all about responsible governance, sensible strategy and practical methods, but if it keeps failing, is it really sensible, practical and reasonable? We can blame Harris’s consultants for leading her astray during the campaign, but it was Harris her self who adopted the strategy of leaning in to immigration policy as her big thing as VP.