| No Images? Click here   Three top Texas Dems, including Rep. Beto O'Rourke, who's running for Senate against Ted Cruz, told HuffPost's Roque Planas this week that it's time to start decriminalizing unauthorized border crossings.That's a huge, huge deal. We talked to Planas about it, and he explained why.
How did this story come about? I'd wanted to go see how voters in the Rio Grande Valley, a heavily Hispanic area in South Texas, were responding to the Democratic hopefuls in a year where turnout is going to be key. The opportunity presented itself last weekend, when Rep. Beto O'Rourke, gubernatorial candidate Lupe Valdez, and the likely next rep for El Paso, Veronica Escobar, were doing a campaign swing down there. Since I anticipated having some access, I wanted to ask them their position on decriminalizing unauthorized border crossings because it's very difficult to get Democrats on the record about this system. Why is this significant? We have two systems for enforcing immigration. One is civil and the other is criminal. The civil system is what you'd think of as the deportation and immigrant detention system. If you're living here without authorization or get arrested at the border, you're going to get processed by the civil system. But the criminal system is very often misunderstood. In 1929, Congress passed a law authored by a South Carolina segregationist criminalizing illegal entry into the United States. That law played an early role in expanding the federal prison system. But it wasn't until 2005, under the George W. Bush administration, that it became a central part of immigration enforcement. That year, the departments of Homeland Security and Justice teamed up to start prosecuting migrants in addition to detaining and deporting them. By 2008, these prosecutions had swallowed up half the federal criminal docket, and that remains true today. This system left Obama with the legacy of locking up more people of color on federal criminal charges than any president in modern history, but Democrats with liberal views on immigration rarely challenged it publicly — it went completely undebated in the 2016 election, even as Trump promised to expand the system. We predicted in a piece last year that the prosecutorial system was perhaps the most powerful and least scrutinized weapon that the Trump administration would wield against undocumented immigrants. When Attorney General Jeff Sessions announced his "zero tolerance" policy of referring every migrant arrested at the border for immigration prosecution — including asylum-seekers, and then parents traveling with their kids, which gave rise to the family separation policy — we turned out to be right. And yet, for all the criticism from Democrats of family separation and zero tolerance, it remains unusual to hear any Democrats criticize a system that Congress could halt tomorrow with a two-paragraph bill. Every member of Congress who favors immigration reform needs to be on the record about this issue for transparency's sake. How might this affect these candidates' chances? That's for them to worry about. Maybe Republicans will attack them as "open borders," and maybe the people who hated the family separation policy will applaud their forthrightness. At any rate, I'm glad they answered me candidly. I think most people who study the issue carefully will ultimately conclude that criminalizing and incarcerating the people that the federal government plans to detain and deport anyway is objectively wasteful from a policy perspective. For Obama, it served as a convenient way to pretend that the people his administration deported were disproportionately criminal. The only real argument in favor of prosecuting migrants is deterrence. Some former prosecutors I've spoken with support that view. So if you're coming at the issue from a hard-line or aggressively enforcement-first approach, supporting this system is coherent. But we're at the lowest number of illegal crossings since the early 1970s and the unauthorized population of the United States has remained flat for a decade, so what exactly are we deterring? Those who favor reform need to wrestle with this issue. This criminal immigration enforcement system costs about $1 billion annually in incarceration costs alone, before taking into account all the money required for judges, public defenders, transportation and U.S. marshals to make it function. You could put 25,000 people through a full four-year state college education for that kind of money. How does the idea of decriminalizing border-crossing differ from the idea of abolishing ICE? The two move somewhat in tandem. The main criticism coming from the #AbolishICE crowd, led by the writer Sean McElwee and some of the rising progressives on the left like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, is that the criminal justice elements should be stripped from our immigration system. They view ICE as a draconian agency executing a mission that should instead be addressed from a humanitarian perspective, rather than by punishing or criminalizing people, the vast majority of whom are people of color. I'd draw a distinction between those folks and politicians who embrace the slogan because it sounds aggressive but take comfort in knowing it's so bureaucratically complex that they can get behind the hashtag without making real policy changes. Decriminalizing immigration, on the other hand, only requires a two-paragraph bill from Congress striking a pair of redundant laws. It wouldn't do much to halt deportations, as the #AbolishICE crowd wants, but it would create a line in the sand separating immigration issues from criminal ones, which is a major goal for them. And that would, in turn, have major ripple effects. Prosecuting someone who's seeking asylum, for example, can undermine an otherwise legitimate claim. It happened often prior to Trump, but it wasn't a codified policy. And perhaps most importantly, it would remove immigration prosecutions from the family separation equation. What do Democrats need to do in order to win in Texas? They have to turn out the Latino and millennial votes in a really big way — like on the order of a 10 to 15 percent increase, even though 5 percent would be a serious challenge. O'Rourke has done an impressive job campaigning. Even his opponent Ted Cruz acknowledges that. But he's a bit lonely at the top of the ticket, which lacks big names. I think if the Democratic establishment had realized how successful O'Rourke's campaign would be, more prominent candidates would've taken a chance on a statewide run. But the scale of that challenge is going to be difficult for Democrats to meet. The state has the demographics of California, but a political leadership that more closely resembles the Deep South. It doesn't really make much sense, but that dynamic won't change unless the party makes a consistent investment in turning out the Latino vote, and that likely requires a few people to take one for the team by running and losing. If O'Rourke loses by single digits and raises Latino turnout by more than 5 percent, Democrats win a long-term victory even if they lose the 2018 battle. And if O'Rourke loses gracefully, don't be surprised if he throws his hat into the 2020 presidential race. What do you want readers to take away from this story? We have a problem in the United States with criminalizing the living shit out of social problems. This quote didn't make it into the story, but the director of the Austin-based advocacy group Grassroots Leadership, Bob Libal, told me that criminalizing immigration repeats all the worst mistakes of the war on drugs, and it's easy to see his point. I hope that stories like this prompt all Americans to ask themselves whether incarceration should be the default solution to the challenges posed by unauthorized immigration.Love, |
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