A Republican invasion of self-defeating immorality
Republicans call the surge in illegal border crossings an “invasion.” They are frightened, and spreading alarm about the resulting national security implications. The threat to our national sovereignty, health and safety is urgent, they say, and terrorist attacks on American soil are imminent.
Despite their rage and hysterics, amplified on the hour by Fox News, Republicans intend to kill their own border legislation to please Donald Trump.
Trump doesn’t want the immigration problem solved this year because border legislation, if signed into law, could give President Joe Biden bragging rights going into the November election. (Biden is already promising to “shut down” the border if the legislation passes.)
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By doing Trump’s political bidding instead of protecting the American public as they are sworn to do, MAGA members are jeopardizing national security to please a strongman who tried to stay in power by force. I smell a new category in the next edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual.
Preserving and even worsening the optics of a border “crisis” to use as a weapon against Biden greatly appeals to Trump, as it would. House Speaker Mike Johnson, who spearheaded Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election, has therefore declared that the Senate’s new immigration proposal will be “dead on arrival” in the House.
Republicans are killing painstaking reform
Our immigration system is undoubtedly broken, and a strong majority of Americans — across party lines — want Congress to fix it. Even special interests that are typically on opposite sides — notably, labor unions and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce — agree in principle that such reform is needed.
But despite this ongoing public demand for comprehensive reform, Congress has failed to act for decades, largely because of elected Republicans’ shifting perceptions of political liability vs. expediency.
Senators who have invested serious time into the current effort are not happy about Trump’s latest command. Sen. James Lankford (R-OK), the GOP’s lead immigration negotiator, said on Fox News that Republicans who clamored for immigration reform for so long were apparently “just kidding … [they] actually don’t want a change in law because it’s a presidential election year.”
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The border legislation Lankford helped craft would increase resources to accelerate asylum review, which has long suffered from intentional congressional underfunding, while also toughening border enforcement. It would require the United States to close the border if, on any given day, 5,000 migrants cross illegally. The bipartisan deal would also increase the number of Border Patrol agents, asylum officers, detention beds and deportation flights out.
The idea is to detain, process and more quickly deport people who enter the country illegally, ending “catch-and-release” under which immigrants remain in the country for years pending their hearing, often prohibited from working by law.
Impeaching Mayorkas is deflecting from their own malfeasance
Right-wing Republicans have used immigration to bludgeon political foes for decades. The late Republican Sen. John McCain blamed the Freedom Caucus 10 years ago for killing reform just to preserve immigration as a political weapon.
To deflect from their own perfidy, and to offset the optics of nonstop chaos, dysfunction and extremism under Johnson’s helm, House Republicans have pivoted entirely from fixing the border to a full frontal assault on Biden’s Secretary of Homeland Security, Alejandro Mayorkas. Johnson, who promised to move the articles of impeachment against Mayorkas quickly, hopes to shift media attention away from his own political malfeasance and subservience to Trump by serving up the drama of a presidential cabinet impeachment.
In what Democrats have called a “remarkably fact-free affair,” Mayorkas would be the first Cabinet secretary to be impeached since 1876. Republicans have now voted to advance the impeachment articles through a resolution claiming Mayorkas committed high crimes and misdemeanors, without identifying either a high crime or a misdemeanor; differing interpretations of how best to execute existing law is neither.
The exercise is pure MAGA theater in any event, as the Democratic-controlled Senate will assuredly acquit.
Biden, responding to shifting migration, is willing to compromise
Republicans are not wrong about a dramatic increase in border crossings, which are part of the largest recorded global movement of displaced people since World War II. Following an unprecedented spike in the number of migrant crossings, Biden embraced the bipartisan border fix, which would also unlock additional American financial support for Ukraine in its defense against Russia.
Adapting to the surge in migrants, Biden has demonstrated a strong willingness to compromise by accepting an enforcement-heavy border deal that wouldn’t have been acceptable three years ago, even though the surge is attributed to factors outside Biden’s control.
People are fleeing economic collapse, political instability, wars and violence in Central America, South America, Africa, parts of Europe and the Middle East. Many more are escaping regions rendered dangerous, or even uninhabitable, by climate change. The U.N. reports that in 2022, 84 percent of refugees and asylum seekers were fleeing highly climate-vulnerable countries, an increase from 61 percent in 2010.
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Although Trump, Johnson and MAGA talking heads pin today’s border problems on Biden, a November 2023 study from Cato Institute found that migrants arrested at the southern border were far more likely to be released during Trump’s presidency than that of Biden. On a monthly basis, even though cash-strapped, Biden’s Department of Homeland Security has deported three times more border crossers than the Department of Homeland Security deported under Trump.
Trump may talk tough, but numbers — unlike him — don’t lie. Chest thumping, Trump is anxious for everyone to know that he’s the puppeteer killing the border deal, and bragged about it at a recent rally. According to Trump, “A Border Deal now would be another Gift to the Radical Left Democrats. They need it politically, but don’t care about our Border...” Framing immigration as the seminal issue for his own campaign, he then posted, “If you want to have a really Secure Border, your ONLY HOPE is to vote for TRUMP2024.”
Sen. Josh Hawley (R-MO.), who raised a fist in solidarity with the January 6 mob before he ran from them in fear, backed Trump up on Fox, saying, there’s “no reason to agree to (immigration) policies that would further enable Joe Biden.”
MAGA craves another civil war over the southern border
Meanwhile, the U.S. Supreme Court, to the wild displeasure of Texas Gov. Greg Abbot, recently affirmed the right of federal Border Patrol agents to cut razor wire that Texas installed along portions of the Southern border. Effectively seizing the territory, Abbott had strategically placed the Texas National Guard along the border to block federal border agents.
Claiming the constitutional right to “defend itself” against the border “invasion,” Texas is directly challenging federal sovereignty over the U.S. border. Demonstrating his acute ignorance of American history, Trump supports Texas’ challenge.
Since the Civil War, state power has been subordinate to federal power. The United States is not a confederation of 50 independent nation-states, much to the still-lingering resentment of some. Since the Supreme Court granted the Biden administration’s request to remove Texas’ razor wire, Abbott has remained defiant. Quoting from the 1860 South Carolina Succession Proclamation, Abbott claims the feds have “broken the compact between the United States and the States.”
Not a word about Trump and Johnson’s insistence that the border remain broken.
Trump, Johnson and 25 Republican governors are cheering Abbott on, despite their own refusal to fix the problem.
The destabilizing potential of challenging the feds’ territorial sovereignty is as serious today as it was in 1860. It’s becoming clear that MAGA would prefer to re-litigate the Civil War — or embrace fascism — rather than accept changing American demographics under which white Christians will lose their presumptive majority.
Meanwhile, voters outside the MAGA bubble are disturbed by the plausible candidacy of a violent insurrectionist, an indicted authoritarian pawing at the door of the White House.
Watching Trump assert his malign influence over the GOP without even holding office is compelling evidence, by now redundant, that the American experiment could succumb to his malignancy. The only thing evil men need to succeed is for good men to do nothing.
Sabrina Haake is a columnist and 25-year federal trial attorney specializing in First and 14th Amendment defense. Follow her on Substack.