It’s always fascinated me how quickly the narrative in politics can change. I swear that as short as two months ago all that I heard from one political party in this country ad nauseam ten times to Sunday every week was that there was NO CRISIS on the border—while now to hear the same exact people tell it, we’ve morphed into Nazi Germany.
I’m not even sure what this type of argument style is called. It is the equivalence of saying something similar to “A few months ago people said there isn’t an issue with peanut butter allergies. And now those same people are saying that forcing everyone to wear hazmat suits on planes is a bit excessive.” The two statements while related, are not logical inconsistencies.
From
immigrationforum.com:
immigrationforum.com said:
Are asylum seekers released before their immigration court hearings?
It depends. The 1996 Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act (IIRIRA) requires all individuals seeking asylum at ports of entry to be detained. They remain in detention even after officials confirm their claims as credible, unless the officials decide the applicants are unlikely to flee and do not pose a safety threat. In addition, they must pay a bail, which they often cannot afford. If released, many asylum seekers are monitored by GPS ankle bracelets. Data show that 96 percent of asylum applicants show up to all their immigration court hearings.
If officials determine the applicants’ claims are not credible, the asylum seekers are ordered for “expedited removal” and do not receive an immigration court hearing.
Under prior administrations, immigration authorities regularly released migrants from custody while their cases were pending in the immigration court system. Those migrants were still required to check in with immigration authorities and attend hearings in immigration court. The Trump administration has modified these policies to release as few asylum seekers as possible. A recent federal court decision requiring case-by-case determinations as to whether asylum seekers pose a flight risk or threat to public safety is likely to lead to more releases pending their hearings.
So, essentially why someone might say that there wasn’t a crisis, is that the previous administrations were able to deal with an influx of migrants because they didn’t make the choice to detain every asylum seeker, due to the majority not being flight risks. When I say majority, 96% of asylum seekers adhered to the process. It was the recent policy decision to house all asylum seekers until their hearing that caused there to be a massive overcrowding problem.
So the second statement is about the conditions surrounding how we house those immigrants. When our country chose to house all asylum seekers until their case could be heard in asylum court, there were serious ramifications. We now need far more detention facilities, and the current administration hasn’t adequately planned, nor budgeted for dealing with the consequences of their policy decision. Expecting the humane treatment of asylum seekers is not even tangentially related to believing that there is not a crisis on the border.
Making a statement that tries to correlate the two positions is at best disingenuous, and at worst willfully misleading.