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What were they thinking? Did President Biden and the folks who put together his immigration policy imagine the voting public would celebrate policies that resulted in a record-high number of migration encounters more than three-quarters of a million in the usually low-immigration months of October, November and December 2023?

Did they think letting in hundreds of thousands of people they would classify preliminarily as asylum-seekers and telling them to report for hearings as late as 2031 would go unnoticed?

Did they think having the government fly illegal immigrants by night into sanctuary cities such as New York and Chicago would go unnoticed?

Did they think Republican governors in border states wouldnt launch their own flights of illegal immigrants to New York City from Texas, or to Marthas Vineyard from Florida?

Did they ever contemplate that election-year pollsters would report that the issue brought up most often by voters would be immigration?

I must imagine the answer to these questions is no. Politicians do not lightly inflict political damage on themselves.

And anyone who has experienced, and presumably has some memory of, the voting publics dissatisfaction with illegal immigration surges in the 1980s, 1990s, and up through the housing market collapse in 2007 and 2008 a category that includes Mr. Biden and the homeland security secretary, Alejandro Mayorkas should understand the negative political potential of unchecked illegal immigration.

So how to explain the Biden administrations adoption of immigration policies that amount to something difficult to distinguish from open borders?

One explanation, proffered by original and sometimes eccentric commentator Michael Lind, is that the Biden Democrats are trying to import better voters.

Letting in several million more illegal immigrants no one can be sure just how many will, in time, produce, either through loose voter qualification laws or citizen children of illegal immigrants, a rising number of Democratic voters.

These, the theory goes, will replace the descendants of Ellis Islander immigrants of 1892-1924 who fell away from Democratic allegiance in the 1970s and 80s.

The problem is that its not clear that people of color will turn out to be as unanimously Democratic as Black voters were in the years from Barry Goldwater to Barack Obama.

Theres increasing evidence, even in left-leaning California, that many Hispanic immigrants of 1982-2007 and their progeny are becoming Trump Republicans, just as many white ethnics became Reagan Republicans 40 years ago.

Another explanation is that Team Biden was misled by changing attitudes of their fellow Democratic voters that, as neighborhood signs say, no human is illegal.

Since 2007, support for increasing immigration levels has increased to 40 percent from 10 percent levels among Democrats while remaining around 10 percent among Republicans, according to General Social Survey.

Certainly, through his 50-plus-year political career, Mr. Biden has not veered far from the prevailing opinion in his party. And within the Democratic bubble, its natural to believe overturning any policy associated with President Trump is widely popular.

Its natural to believe as well that sympathetic press will try to cover up any unfavorable news, as most media has on illegal immigration during most of the Biden presidency.

Theres another factor operating here, one that helps to explain the increasing opposition to Israel and support for Palestinians among Democratic voters: the tendency, encouraged for two generations on college campuses, to see the world as separated between the oppressed and the oppressors.

In this paradigm, Mr. Trump and his America First followers are seen as the oppressors, and people illegally crossing the border are seen as the oppressed. And just as oppressors are always vicious, the oppressed are always virtuous.

In that background, eliminating border controls, as Mr. Biden did by multiple executive orders, wasnt politically dangerous. Mexican immigration has been low since 2007, and Vice President Harris could cure any ills that might prompt Central Americans to venture overland through Mexico to the Rio Grande.

It turns out, though, Biden-era illegal immigrants come from multiple places and often with malign motives. Theyre ready to pay off Mexican cartels to get a chance to game the system inside the United States. And theyve surely been coming in numbers much larger than Biden policymakers expected.

The huge number of illegal crossings in late 2023, together with poll numbers, had the Biden administration contemplating a policy reversal, but Politico reports thats now off.

The plan now is to blame Mr. Trump and House Republicans for opposing the bipartisan legislation of Senator Lankford, Republican of Oklahoma. Donald Trump broke the border, a Biden-Harris billboard proclaims.

This seems unconvincing. If theres anything Mr. Trump is known for, its denouncing illegal immigration, and there was and is nothing to stop Mr. Biden from issuing executive orders reversing the day-one executive orders that opened the floodgates.

Disorder works against incumbents, and its hard to see how the disorder produced by Mr. Bidens orange man bad immigration policies will be blamed, by anyone but partisan Democrats, on Republicans.

Creators.com

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Biden's Miscalculations When He Opened the Border to Unchecked Illegal Immigration - The New York Sun

STORY: Donald Trump called immigrants who were illegally in the United States "not human" in a speech in Michigan on Tuesday, as he intensified his focus on border issues with incendiary rhetoric on his campaign trail.

The Republican presidential candidate spoke in Grand Rapids, appearing with several law enforcement officers.

He focused on several criminal cases involving suspects who may have been in the country illegally and labelled them as sub-human.

"The 22-year-old nursing student in Georgia who was barbarically murdered by an illegal alien animal. The Democrats say, 'please don't call them animals, they're humans.' I said 'no, they're not humans, they're animals.'"

Trump also described meeting the family of Ruby Garcia, a local 25-year-old murdered last month.

Police say a suspect in the case was in the country illegally.

Garcia's sister denied the former president spoke with the family, according to local media reports, which also said she was angry about her sister's death being used as a political tool.

Trump titled his Michigan speech "Biden's border bloodbath" and warned that chaos would consume America if he did not win the election in November.

"This is country changing, it's country threatening and it's country wrecking. They have wrecked our country. But I stand before you today to declare that Joe Biden's border bloodbath, and that's what it is. It's a bloodbath.

... if we don't win in November 5th, I think our country is going to cease to exist."

Later on Tuesday, he gave a similar speech in Wisconsin, calling the 2024 election the nation's "final battle."

"...prisoners, murderers, drug dealers, mental patients, terrorists..."

Trump frequently claims that immigrants crossing the border with Mexico had escaped from prisons and asylums in their home countries and are fueling violent crime in the United States.

While available data on criminals' immigration status is sparse, researchers say the violent crime rate is not higher among those in the U.S. illegally than native-born Americans.

Some 38% of Republicans, and about one in five independents, say immigration is the country's top issue in a Reuters/Ipsos poll released late February.

Democratic President Joe Biden's campaign team said Trump is "engaging in extreme rhetoric that promotes division, hate and violence in our country."

Biden, who is Trump's rival in the November presidential election, also accused Trump of pushing Republican lawmakers to block bipartisan legislation that would have beefed up border security and brought in measures to reduce illegal immigration.

Michigan and Wisconsin are two swing states that could determine who returns to the White House next year.

Although both Trump and Biden have mathematically clinched their presidential nominations, they were still on their party's presidential primary ballots in Wisconsin on Tuesday.

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'Animals': Trump ups rhetoric on illegal immigration - Yahoo! Voices

(WIBC) One in 4 Indiana Republicans say that stopping the flow of illegal immigrants into the state is the most important issue for the governor and state legislature to focus on.

Thats according to a recent poll from Indy Politics and Crossroads Public Affairs.

In a survey of 500 likely Republican primary voters, the data says stopping the flow of illegal immigrants is their most important issue to 31% of respondents; 18% said tackling inflation was their top issue; 14% said creating jobs and attracting and retaining businesses, and 11% said fighting violent crime and drugs.

Immigration is a major issue all around the country and Indiana is no exception, said pollster Andrew Weissert. Itll be front and center in the presidential election this fall and its an issue very important to Republican voters right now.

You may recall the legal battle between the state and now-former Senate candidate John Rust. He sued the state over its election laws that state you have to have voted in the previous two primaries of the party you are running as in order to run for statewide office; 61% of Republicans surveyed say they agree with that law.

On the subject of legalizing pot in Indiana, 67% support some type of legalization, with 33% indicating support for recreational use and 34% supporting medicinal use only.

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Illegal Immigration, Legal Pot Top Of Mind For Hoosiers - WISH TV Indianapolis, IN

A federal judge has ruled that illegal immigrants stuck in makeshift outdoor detention sites in Southern California are technically in the governments custody and agents must now follow strict rules for delivering care to the children among them.

U.S. District Judge Dolly Gees ruling deals with a particularly tricky situation where large groups of migrants have been crossing the border illegally and demanding to be arrested by Border Patrol agents, expecting to be caught and then quickly released.

But agents are so overwhelmed they say they cant process the migrants fast enough and often leave them to camp out on the U.S. side of the border for days, enduring the cold, lack of food, and the threat from snakes and scorpions as they wait to be arrested.

U.S. Customs and Border Protection agents said the migrants can walk away, disappearing into the country without even being processed, and thus are not actually in custody. Judge Gee disagreed, saying that since CPB agents exert a lot of control over the staging area, the agency has custody of those in it.

Although it may be true that CBP did not initially intend for these locations to become [open-air detention sites] collectively holding thousands of migrants, it is nonetheless true that the situation has evolved such that the minors held there are in the legal custody of CBP, she wrote in the April 3 decision.

She said the government is required to provide better bathroom facilities and supplies of water, offer meals every six hours, at least some of them hot, and work faster to process the children and get them into more stable situations.

Its not yet clear how the Border Patrol will adjust to the order.

U.S. Customs and Border Protection is reviewing the courts order. CBP will continue to transport vulnerable individuals and children encountered on the border to its facilities as quickly as possible, the agency told The Washington Times.

The ruling is the latest in a yearslong odyssey surrounding the treatment of illegal immigrant children. The Flores settlement, a 1990s-era agreement revised about a decade ago, governs much of that treatment, and by extension much of U.S. immigration policy.

Under Flores, illegal immigrant children must be quickly released from the Department of Homeland Securitys custody. For most unaccompanied children, that means being turned over to government-run shelters to await placement with sponsors.

For children who come with parents, it means the government must either find a way to deport them quickly or release them, virtually guaranteeing they will slip unmonitored into the U.S.

Complying with Flores requirements has become a major burden as illegal immigration has surged under President Biden.

The government set up tent cities to handle all of the children it was facing in 2021, and wrote new rules cutting corners to speed up placement of children with sponsors.

More recently, as migrants surged into Southern California, CBP officials could not deal with the numbers they have been seeing, leaving people at the staging sites until agents can get to them.

CBP blames smuggling cartels, saying theyre orchestrating the mass incursions and telling migrants to hole up and wait for agents.

Agents said they do try to keep an eye on the crowds, offering some snacks and water. They also separate single men from the families and children to try to prevent dangerous situations, and they do some crowd control and maintain a perimeter.

But the Border Patrol said the migrants it is dealing with are not actually under arrest.

Single adult men, like other populations, are free to leave areas where large groups congregate at any point prior to arrest, Brent L. Schwerdtfeger, the chief of law enforcement operations for the Border Patrols San Diego sector, told Judge Gee.

The judge ruled that the migrants are in custody nevertheless.

Immigrant rights advocates say migrants are being denied adequate medical care, suffer hypothermia from cold nights without any shelter, and have to sleep in the dirt, where they face scorpions and snakes.

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Judge rules DHS must deliver better treatment to illegal immigrants awaiting arrest - Washington Times

Sam Bankman-Fried was sentenced to 25 years in federal prison for his fraud and conspiracy convictions — but he will probably spend less than 60 percent of it, or roughly 15 years, in an actual prison. Bankman-Fried thus may serve a significantly smaller percentage of his sentence than the thousands of immigrants convicted each year for crossing the border do. This disparate treatment is unjust.

Bankman-Fried will likely receive this sentence reduction through the First Step Act. Signed by then-President Trump in 2018, the First Step Act gives some federal inmates the opportunity to shave years off their sentences. If an inmate meets the law’s qualifications, they are entitled to 15 days of “earned time credit” for every 30 days they serve. One year of that credit goes toward ending the sentence early, and the rest goes toward moving from prison into a halfway house or home confinement. If federal prisoners receive all possible earned time credit, on top of the 54 days of “good time” credit they can get each year, they will serve only about 207 days in prison for every year of their sentence. For example, Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes, who was sentenced last year to 11 years and three months in prison, will likely serve a little more than six years.

This is a major benefit to white-collar defendants like Bankman-Fried. Unfortunately, immigrant defendants with a deportation order cannot receive earned time credit — and they make up a significant portion of federal defendants. Since the early 2010s, the most commonly charged federal crime has been reentering the United States after deportation. Between 10,000 and 25,000 immigrants are charged with this crime every year, depending on the presidential administration.

While unlawful reentry is a victimless crime that simply involves entering the U.S., a conviction can carry up to 20 years in federal prison. The average sentence for unlawful reentry in 2022 was 13 months, but many of the sentences are much higher. And more than 99 percent of the defendants in these cases are from Latin America.

The First Step Act has thus created a federal prison system that discriminates by immigration status. One of the largest classes of federal defendants, which is almost entirely made up of Latin Americans, serves a much higher portion of their sentences. A deported immigrant defendant with an 11-year sentence like Holmes’s would serve nine years rather than six. Adding to the injustice, the great majority of immigrant federal defendants (unlike Holmes and Bankman-Fried) are in prison for victimless crimes. They have not been convicted for defrauding billions from customers or investors, but merely for crossing the border.

This discrimination cannot be justified by arguing that the Bureau of Prisons should save its programming resources for U.S. citizens. The First Step Act does require that a prisoner participate in programming like drug treatment and other classes if the prison recommends them. But if such classes are unavailable or deemed unnecessary, the prisoner still earns 15 days off for every 30 days served. If the Bureau of Prisons chooses not to use programming resources on immigrants, that is its prerogative, but it should give them the same treatment other prisoners receive.

The First Step Act’s system of earned time credit is a major step toward a more humane criminal justice system. It provides prisoners like Bankman-Fried with hope that they will be able to return to the community sooner, and an incentive to spend their time in prison productively.

It should not be denied to the tens of thousands of Latin American immigrants we imprison for reentering the United States. Congress should end this discrimination. And if it will not, federal judges should reduce immigrants’ sentences to correct the disparity.

Eric Fish is a law professor at the University of California, Davis. Previously, he was a federal public defender.

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Why is Sam Bankman-Fried treated more leniently than someone facing illegal immigration charges? - The Hill