Category: reason

“We are not a country that detains migrant children indefinitely or denies them access to soap, toothbrushes, or beds,” future president Joe Biden tweeted in September 2019. “We are a country that welcomes those in search of a better life—the tired, the poor, the huddled masses yearning to breathe free. Trump doesn’t get that.”

Biden doesn’t seem to get it either. “Hundreds of immigrant children and teenagers have been detained at a Border Patrol tent facility in packed conditions, with some sleeping on the floor because there aren’t enough mats, according to nonprofit lawyers who conduct oversight of immigrant detention centers,” the Associated Press reported on March 12. “Some have to wait five days or more to shower, and there isn’t always soap available, just shampoo, according to the lawyers.”

Biden did nix former President Donald Trump’s “zero tolerance” policy at the U.S.-Mexico border, which required that parents who crossed the border illegally be separated from their children. It was a hideous idea that generated considerable bipartisan backlash—so much so that Trump himself backed away from it in the summer of 2018.

But Biden’s move was mostly symbolic, since “zero tolerance” had already been unofficially rescinded. Still, it generated significant PR buzz from media outlets, some of which neglected to include that the Biden administration is still separating families at the border. Border agents can now use discretion in deciding which parents get to stay with their children, but that doesn’t mean family separations themselves have ended.

Meanwhile, the bedlam at the border is almost entirely self-made. Government policies meant to curb immigration inadvertently create much of the chaos decried in congressional floor speeches and on cable news.

Family separations are a good example. Many families ripped apart under Trump, and likely under Biden, crossed the border trying to claim asylum. They have a legal right to do that. Yet U.S. immigration protocol essentially provides no avenue for them to do so the “right” way, so they cross the border and look for an agent with whom to file a claim. If the government chooses to prosecute that illicit crossing, they cannot stay with their children. That was true under Barack Obama and Donald Trump, and it is still true under Joe Biden.

One of Biden’s core campaign promises was that he would terminate Trump’s “Remain in Mexico” policy, the framework that forced would-be asylum seekers to await their court dates outside of the U.S. Well, here’s his new policy: Instead of allowing families to claim asylum and tossing them out of the country in the meantime, he is tossing them out of the country without a court date in hand. Progress?

That’s not the only way the government creates the border chaos it is now trying to solve, says David Bier, an immigration policy analyst at the Cato Institute’s Center for Global Liberty and Prosperity.

Take the aforementioned A.P. report—the one that exposes the very conditions Biden denounced before taking the Oval Office. Those facilities are teeming with unaccompanied children not in spite of the law, but because of it.

“If you cross the border with your parents and you’re an older child, what ends up happening is that you’re immediately expelled back into Mexico,” Bier says. “As a consequence of that, we’ve seen a number of teenagers crossing the border [alone], because if they cross as a family unit then they will be expelled. It’s really exacerbated the issues.”

Similarly, George W. Bush’s administration imposed a rule requiring children to be separated from their family if they arrive at the border with anyone other than their parents. “A grandmother, an uncle, adult sibling: In any of those circumstances, the family will be separated…and the adult family member is then expelled back to Mexico,” says Bier. “So now they’re no longer in the country at all”—a rule that he says is creating “between a quarter and a half” of the unaccompanied children, who were not actually unaccompanied.

The Associated Press notes that it “interviewed the mother of one 4-year-old girl from Guatemala who crossed the border March 5 with her aunt. Border authorities expelled the aunt and labeled the girl unaccompanied by a parent.” The child’s parents live in Maryland, according to the A.P., and the child is now alone in a border facility.

Commentators on both ends of the political spectrum—some pro-Biden, some opposed—have been starting from the same fundamentally flawed premise: that the president is doing all he can to liberalize immigration. “Biden Has Few Good Options for the Unaccompanied Children at the Border,” reads a headline in The New Yorker. “No country could survive Biden’s border policies,” asserts Fox News’ Tucker Carlson.

Neither claim makes much sense. “We’ve never had a situation where it’s been this closed to asylum seekers than what we see right now,” says Bier. 

“Even under Trump?” I ask.

“Except for a few months under Trump,” he responds, “this is one of the strictest border policies we’ve ever seen.”

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In a press conference today, New York Mayor Bill de Blasio suggested that one way to combat anti-Asian hate would be for the New York Police Department to warn people not to be hateful.

“Even if something is not a criminal case, a perpetrator being confronted by the city, whether it’s NYPD or another agency, and being told that what they’ve done was very hurtful to another person and could have ever repeated lead to criminal charges, that’s another important piece of the puzzle,” said de Blasio. “One of the things officers are trained to do is to give warnings. If someone has done something wrong, but not rising to a criminal level, it’s perfectly appropriate for an NYPD officer to talk to them, to say that was not appropriate.”

As de Blasio appeared to recognize, merely expressing hateful speech is not a crime. Hate speech is in fact protected by the First Amendment. For something to count as a hate crime, there must be underlying illegal behavior, such as assault or vandalism.

It is thus a very bad idea for the NYPD to go around sternly lecturing people who may have engaged in hateful conduct that is not actually illegal. For one thing, this straightforwardly violates people’s civil liberties: Unless you’re committing a crime, your actions are no business of the government’s.

Beyond that, there’s always a risk that routine interactions between cops and citizens will escalate into something life-threatening. Give cops more reasons to knock on people’s doors and bother them, and you increase the chances of a bad encounter. This was a central theme of last year’s protests against abusive policing. De Blasio’s plan for combatting racism hinges on doing the exact opposite of what Black Lives Matter and other anti-racist groups have been urging.

Cops’ time is better spent investigating violent crime than warning people not to be haters. Someone should explain to de Blasio that there’s not always a great deal of trust between cops and the communities they serve, and that his proposal is likely to worsen the problem.

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Kelsey Brugger of E&E News reports that three Trump Administration regulatory actions may have been derailed by the January 6 assault on the Capitol building. According to Brugger’s story, rioters ransacked the Senate offices, causing an extra-long delay before the hard-copy submissions of three rules could be submitted. Under the Congressional Review Act, major rules must be submitted to the Senate before they may take effect. In this case, the resulting delays appear to have prevented the rules from taking effect prior to January 20, meaning the rules would have been suspended by the Biden Administration before they became operative.

From Brugger’s story:

To finalize a rule, agencies must send the regulation to both the Office of the Federal Register and to Congress. Whichever happens later prompts the rule to be deemed “received.”

On Jan. 6, EPA sent three regulations to the Senate parliamentarian. One was the first-ever greenhouse gas emissions rule for airplanes, which environmentalists dismissed as useless.

Another included unchanged National Ambient Air Quality Standards for ozone, an air pollutant experts say is among the most dangerous in the United States today. EPA also sent an action affecting the Denver area.

After receiving the rules, the parliamentarian had to route them to send them to the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee — a process that can take several days.

But on Jan. 6, the mob ransacked the office. File cabinets were toppled over, and documents were strewn across the floor. And as a result, sources in and outside Capitol Hill say, the rules may have taken longer to make it to committee.

Records show that the EPA rules finally made it to EPW on Jan. 22. That’s after President Biden took office. The White House’s new chief of staff, Ron Klain, had by then issued a memo to freeze all Trump rules that had not gone into effect.

 

 

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Mapologies gives us the answer (reprinted with permission):

And high up in the Andes Mountains, on the border of Chile and Argentina, is where baby computers come from ….

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The New York legislature has passed a bill limiting the state prison system’s use of solitary confinement.

The New York Senate passed the Humane Alternatives to Long-Term Solitary Confinement (HALT) Act today by a vote of 42–21, sending it to the desk of Democratic Gov. Andrew Cuomo, who has opposed the legislation in previous years.

The bill, S2836, limits the use of solitary confinement for all incarcerated people to 15 days, with exceptions for serious disciplinary infractions. This would largely bring the state in line with the United Nations’ Nelson Mandela Rules for the treatment of prisoners, which defines solitary confinement for more than 15 days as torture.

“We remember the names Layleen Polanco, Kalief Browder, and Benjamin van Zandt, and the countless others whose lives have either been taken or destroyed by solitary confinement,” state Senate Majority Leader Andrea Stewart-Cousins (D–Yonkers) said in a press release. “Prolonged segregated confinement can cause permanent harms and does not properly address the root causes that lead to the punishment.”

The HALT Act would also ban the use of solitary confinement for pregnant women, for people under the age of 22 or older than 54, and for prisoners with certain disabilities. Solitary confinement would also be prohibited for those diagnosed with a serious mental illness. They would be sent to a residential rehabilitation unit instead.

Criminal justice reformers and civil libertarians have been trying for years to curb solitary confinement in New York, which currently has no limits on how long an incarcerated person can be held in a cell for 22 to 24 hours a day.

In a press statement, New York Civil Liberties Union executive director Donna Lieberman applauded the legislature for “ending the torture that is long-term solitary confinement.” Noting that the practice “causes severe mental and physical trauma that can lead to irreparable harm,” Lieberman pointed out that tens of thousands of New Yorkers have been “locked in solitary each year for months, years, and even decades.”

The number of people held in solitary confinement on any given day across U.S. prisons and jails has been declining over the past decade as states have slowly limited the practice. Colorado abolished it almost entirely.

The daily number sat around 60,000 people, according to a longitudinal study published in 2018. Although the use of solitary confinement has waned, the report found 4,000 people placed in solitary who were identified by their jurisdiction as seriously mentally ill. It also found 2,000 inmates who had been in solitary for six or more years.

The use of solitary confinement spiked during the COVID-19 pandemic as prison administrators tried to use it to slow the spread of the virus through facilities.

Cuomo threatened to veto the HALT Act two years ago over its projected costs, leading Democrats to pull the bill in exchange for a series of administrative reforms. Those promised reforms never materialized.

The New York State Correctional Officers and Police Benevolent Association, a union of state prison guards, opposes the legislation. According to WMHT, Cuomo hasn’t publicly commented on the bill in more than a year.

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