The military spending bill shows that Democrats can and will still get worse on immigration

cross-posted from: lemmygrad.ml/post/3648988

We won’t mince words: the military spending bill is the most stringent anti-immigration bill endorsed by a Democratic president in recent years. Progressives in both chambers of Congress are calling this a return to Trump-era politics. But what exactly is this 370-page bill and why does it have both parties so riled up?

This $118 billion bill which, let’s not forget, is also sending billions of dollars to aid the wars in Gaza and Ukraine, has set out to gut the entire immigration and asylum system in the United States, shutting down parts of the southern border and outright rejecting asylum claims without due process.

Here are the facts:

Detention: ICE would get double its yearly budget, at $17 billion dollars, including $3 billion set aside for increased detention capacity (yep we’re bringing back the concentration camps).

Asylum: the bill would allow asylum officers to reject the majority of claims instead of moving them through the immigration court system, and demands that asylum seekers provide “greater proof” of their need without clarifying why. The ACLU and National Immigrant Justice Center have already called out the bill for eviscerating immigration protections and denying immigration to people who move through the process legally.

Border Shutdown: the DHS would shut down the border if illegal crossings average more than 4,000 per day for a week, and would automatically deport anyone trying to cross the border.

Border Wall: this bill would force the Biden administration to use the money set aside for the border barriers to erect the 18-30 ft high steel walls along the border that would destroy protected habitats and cut through reservation land.

It doesn’t end there. This bill would increase funding for Border Patrol, drastically limit support for Afghan nationals, and completely fail to support DREAMERS. This bill is everything Republicans want and it is being backed by a Democratic president.

Even while this newsletter was in production, this bill was voted on and seems to have died on the vine, or at least the border portion has. It falls victim to a strange mélange of political cross currents that saw Congressional Republicans voting against their own anti-immigrant draconian nightmare legislation.

In spite of these developments, the critical takeaway remains the same: what all this says about Democrats. Democrats have shown with this legislation that their concern for immigrants was always conditional and transactional, that they are more than willing to champion horrific legislation that will immiserate millions if it means they think it will help Joe Biden get another term in office. The key takeaway here isn’t that the Republican Party is engaged in grotesquery; it’s that on immigration, it appears, there’s not any daylight to be seen between the two parties.

(Taken from an email sent to me by Never Again Action. Emphasis original.)