Happy Fourth of July midweek! The Morning Jolt will return Thursday. Making today’s click-through worthwhile: why we have good reason to doubt Democrats when they say that “Abolish ICE!” doesn’t mean ending immigration law enforcement; the you-know-what hits the fan in San Francisco; and the evidence that ’90s television helped fuel belief in conspiracy theories.
Democrats’ Immigration-Enforcement Mirage
The first reason we should be wary of Democrats’ calling to “abolish ICE” in the context of protests against the family-separation policy is that ICE is only one agency out of four playing a role in the policy. (It’s five if you count the Department of Defense building tent cities at Fort Bliss and Goodfellow Air Force Base in Texas to temporarily house migrants.)
Families that cross the border illegally or turn themselves in at ports of entry in hope of gaining asylum typically first encounter the U.S. Customs and Border Protection, the largest law enforcement agency in the U.S. with nearly 20,000 agents.
Under the Trump administration’s “zero tolerance” policy, adults who cross into the U.S. illegally — in between ports of entry along the nearly 2,000-mile border — are transferred to the custody of the U.S. Marshals under the U.S. Department of Justice. They are then bused to federal courts along the border where they are prosecuted.
Once prosecuted, adults are sent to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, one of several agencies under the umbrella of the Department of Homeland Security. The agency oversees or contracts with more than 200 detention centers, jails and prisons across the country. Parents can be detained anywhere in the country, often far away from they where they were separated from their children on the southern border.
Under the family separations policy, children held at the border were handed over to the Department of Health and Human Services, where they became part of more than 11,000 “unaccompanied minors” held under a program managed by the Office of Refugee Resettlement. Many are teenagers who crossed the border without their parents.
In other words, it’s the U.S. Border Patrol that does the separating, the Department of Justice that does the prosecuting, ICE holds the adults and prepares them for deportation and then deports them, and HHS handles the care of the children while the adults are being detained. Notice which agency is attracting the most ire from the Left.
Over in USA Today, attorney Raul Reyes lists the allegations of abuse and mismanagement and declares, “No one is calling for a halt to immigration enforcement. Either ICE needs to do it in a more humane way with greater oversight, or the agency should be dismantled and its functions reassigned to other agencies.”
But I notice liberal protesters aren’t chanting, “Reform ICE! Reform ICE!” or “Reassign the duties to other agencies! Reassign the duties to other agencies!” Apparently, we’re being tremendously unfair by believing that they actually want to do what they say.
It’s rather hard to believe that these protesters only want a change in methods.
San Francisco: “Demonstrators pitched five tents, a small pavilion and a section of chain-link fence with barbed wire outside San Francisco’s U.S. Citizenship & Immigration Services office Monday night.”
Portland: “A U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement spokeswoman says the agency’s Portland headquarters will resume normal operations Tuesday. The office was closed June 20 after protesters upset with President Trump’s immigration policies blocked entrances to the facility.”
Philadelphia: “Establishing a small encampment for a prolonged occupation, several hundred protesters gathered late Monday afternoon outside the Immigration and Customs Enforcement office in Center City to demand an end to that agency’s policies and cooperation between the city of Philadelphia and ICE . . . Protesters were still there Tuesday morning.”
Hartford, Conn.: “Nearly 500 people participated in the protest, including clergy and American Civil Liberties Union observers. In an act of civil disobedience, some protesters tried to shut down an ICE office on Main Street for the day by blocking the entrance. Hartford Police Department said 35 people were arrested.”
The article above quotes organizer Carolina Bortolleto of the Connecticut Immigrant Rights Alliance as saying, “We don’t need ICE to be reformed. We need it gone.” If these rallies really are just a call for a change in tactics, someone ought to inform the protesters.
We keep hearing comments like this one from New Jersey senator Cory Booker, “Achieving [ICE’s] high-minded purpose might be achieved better in other ways.” But we never hear much about what those “other ways” might be.
In fact, some Democratic lawmakers get really slippery when pressed for details about how they envision the immigration laws being enforced. Here’s Congressman Adriano Espaillat, New York Democrat, in an interview with NPR:
Ari Shapiro: Isn’t there a need for some branch of the government to address immigration enforcement, whether you call that ICE or something else?
Adriano Espaillat: I don’t know. Let’s see what other countries are doing because immigration is not a U.S.-only debate. Let’s take a look at best practices of around the world. And let’s try to develop a new agency that has a heart and is able to enforce the law.
When a lawmaker is asked, “Isn’t there a need for some branch of the government to address immigration enforcement?” and his answer is not an immediate “yes,” it means he really thinks the answer is “no” but doesn’t want to admit it.
Credit the Huffington Post for putting the question of abolishing ICE before a polling sample, and telling its readers an answer that they probably don’t want to hear: “Just 21 percent of respondents said they support abolishing ICE, while 44 percent said they oppose it, with 35 percent undecided. Nearly 3 in 10 Americans polled said they strongly oppose the idea.”
We’re still waiting on actual legislative language from Democrats, but Ed Morrissey points out that the initial description makes it sound like a blatantly unconstitutional Congressional power grab:
House Democrat Mark Pocan is now drafting an “abolish ICE” bill that doesn’t actually abolish anything; instead, it creates a “commission” to run ICE rather than the executive branch, an option that would run into immediate constitutional issues. Even apart from this obvious flaw, the commission would have to wait for direction from Congress to act.
You can’t cut the executive branch leadership out of the management of an executive-branch agency.
I Thought You Were Only Supposed to Leave Your Heart in San Francisco
Not long ago I wrote about Gavin Newsom and the painful declines of quality of life in San Francisco and California overall, and the possibility that progressive policies can ruin even one of the most beautiful cities in America. Now there’s another piece of evidence that the city’s strengths in climate and sights and culture cannot overcome the failures of local government:
In a move that is alarming San Francisco’s biggest industry, a major medical association is pulling its annual convention out of the city — saying its members no longer feel safe.
“It’s the first time that we have had an out-and-out cancellation over the issue, and this is a group that has been coming here every three or four years since the 1980s,” said Joe D’Alessandro, president and CEO of S.F. Travel, the city’s convention bureau. . . .
The doctors group told the San Francisco delegation that while they loved the city, postconvention surveys showed their members were afraid to walk amid the open drug use, threatening behavior and mental illness that are common on the streets.
You may have seen on Drudge that report of a 20-pound bag of human waste being left on a San Francisco street corner, and Nancy Alfaro, a spokesperson for the city’s 311 service, saying that while reports of human waste are common, this large of an amount is “not typical.”
It must be difficult to have pride in a city where “reports of human waste are common.”
Did ’90s Television Make Conspiracy Theories Cool?
I came across this interesting argument that the 1990s sci-fi series The X-Files — terrific fun for the first few seasons, until it became clear that series creator Chris Carter was making it up as it went along — inadvertently legitimized, or at least romanticized, conspiracy theories and those who believe them.
I’ve heard it argued that, “We aren’t supposed to sympathize with Mulder’s crazy,” and, well, no, we really rather are. Mulder is constantly vindicated. It is he who wins Scully to his side by the end of the series, not the other way around. And I don’t think that conspiracy theory narratives are going to go away — nor should they go away — but I want to think that we’re reaching a level of sophistication in both our fiction and our relationship to conspiracy theorists that we need to more thoughtful about these kinds of narratives. The X-Files did absolutely romanticize Mulder’s quest for truth far more often than it played it for comedy or sexual tension, and that approach does, on some level, help to prop up this increasing proportion of the population who do believe in vast conspiracies.
It’s pretty implausible to argue that Fox Mulder and The X-Files made people paranoid or made people believe in conspiracy theories. But a little less implausible to wonder if the way the show made Mulder seem (generally) like a heroic, good character, and so often right and vindicated . . . removed some of the stigma about believing conspiracy theories. Put another way, the supporting character trio called “the Lone Gunmen” are portrayed as good-hearted weirdo conspiracy theorists — likable, but not really heroic or attractive characters in most senses of the word. But Mulder is our co-protagonist, the romantic lead, the best detective, etc. — and no doubt, this is how a lot of paranoid people see themselves.
Let’s also point out that real-world events since the 1990s might fuel people’s belief in shadowy conspiracies. If you were paranoid about Islamist terrorists before 9/11, you probably feel vindicated. No doubt the failure to find the expected weapons of mass destruction in Iraq spurred a lot of Americans to believe a shadowy conspiracy must have pushed the country into war. If you suspect corporate America is up to no good, the Enron scandal and the collapse of Lehman Brothers probably made you feel vindicated. The revelations about the NSA’s domestic collection of data vindicated a lot of the claims that “the government is watching you” — and whatever the government isn’t collecting, social-media companies probably are. And the CIA really did use a vaccine program to find Osama bin Laden.
So the fact that the vast majority of conspiracy theories are paranoid nonsense . . . doesn’t mean that all of them are, or that some of them didn’t get started with some factual basis.
ADDENDUM: I hit a nerve: “There are no permanent majorities and no permanent victories. Therefore, whatever rules you want to enact when you’re in power, you should be ready to live under those rules when you’re in the minority again.”