President Trump appears to be dimly aware that he isn’t going to get the $5.7 billion he wants for his border wall. Months of rage-tweets and https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2019/02/06/fact-checking-president-trumps-state-union-address/?utm_term=.791414a1121a (lies) just didn’t get it done: Most https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/border-talks-at-impasse-as-shutdown-looms-friday-officials-say/2019/02/10/aa8ef08c-2d36-11e9-813a-0ab2f17e305b_story.html?utm_term=.8bd0a13d806f (reports)
suggest conference negotiators are converging on an agreement to spend somewhere between $1.3 billion and $2 billion on new barriers in targeted locations.
Yet a https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/border-talks-at-impasse-as-shutdown-looms-friday-officials-say/2019/02/10/aa8ef08c-2d36-11e9-813a-0ab2f17e305b_story.html?utm_term=.8bd0a13d806f (new sticking point) has now arisen: a dispute over detention beds.
But Trump is lying about this issue, too. And his administration appears to be operating in bad faith in a manner that renders a reasonable compromise less likely.
The core dispute is this: Democrats want to cap the number of beds available to detain undocumented immigrants rounded up in the interior at 16,500. Trump and Republicans claim this would result in the failure to detain “violent” offenders. Democrats say it would force Immigration and Customs Enforcement to choose among who is picked up from the interior, meaning they’d focus more on violent offenders, resulting in fewer detentions of nonviolent longtime residents.
To understand this dispute, we need to step back. ...
This gets at the much bigger argument here: Democrats don’t want to deport longtime residents and want to refocus resources away from that. Trump and Republicans do want to deport as many from the interior as possible, with no regard to their status.
The bottom line is that Trump and top adviser Stephen Miller want fewer immigrants in the United States. That’s why they want cuts to legal immigration, restrictions on asylum seeking, slashed refugee flows and (as we’re discussing now) a much broader deportation dragnet.
...
But Trump has lost this bigger argument. Polls
show large majoritiesdon’t want mass deportations, and instead want longtime immigrant residents to be provided a path to legalization. In short, most Americans think they should stay. Trump’s https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2019/02/06/fact-checking-president-trumps-state-union-address/?utm_term=.791414a1121a (lies) about the wall
and about undocumented immigrants have failed him.