Recently my doctor told me I’ve been cancer-free for 8 years; she keeps track of that kind of stuff. But when I was still all hopped up on chemo— not just weak-minded but also imbued with peace and love more than a roomful of hippies— I was invited to put together a panel on something or other for political science and history students. At Stony Brook, my alma mater, which is in Suffolk County. At the time, Tom Suozzi’s congressional district included the western part of Suffolk County and I invited him to participate and he did. We’ve remained friendly ever since, even if he’s more conservative than most of the other members of Congress I’ve maintained friends with. At least part of that is because he never pretended to be anything other than what he is. And… he made a case to me several years ago that when it comes to his record on immigrants, no one is more progressive than he is.
When he was Nassau County Executive, he was best-known as a corruption righter, but he was also an environmental champion and a champion for immigrants. In fact, going back to 1994, as Mayor of Glen Cove, Suozzi created one of the first day laborer centers on the East Coast. When he was honored by the New York Immigration Coalition (for creating an environment of welcome and inclusion for immigrants in Nassau County) in 2011, he told the audience that “Those men who were standing on the street corner looking for work back in 1994 are the same men who now have their own businesses as landscapers and contractors. They have bought their own homes. Their children are now going to the same public schools as my children. They are living the American Dream... What ICE officials were doing [massive raids] was wrong.” He asked the audience to put themselves in the place of immigrant children “who saw ICE come bursting through the door in the middle of the night, some of them carrying shotguns, to take away members of their family. Do you think that child will ever trust law enforcement again? This issue has become an excuse for racism in this country and we have to constantly work to persuade people that we are talking about human beings and their lives. We have a lot more work to do together. We have a lot of people to convince.”
Watch this Suozzi floor speech from January, 2018 by clicking on it:
Yesterday, Mica Soellner reported that “Suozzi is taking the reins of the House Democrats’ border security task force after his co-chair Rep. Henry Cuellar (D-TX) was indicted on federal bribery and money laundering charges late last month… The task force, formally titled ‘Democrats for Border Security,’ is meant to be a messaging solution for Frontliners who are getting hammered on border security and immigration by Republicans… Suozzi is already leading the border security caucus. Suozzi was handing out plans to members on Wednesday about their next meeting. The caucus, which hasn’t met since it launched in March, will hold its next meeting on June 3.”
Yesterday, Schumer brought the bipartisan border bill up for a vote in the Senate and, predictably, with Trump adamantly against addressing the realities of the problem, it failed, despite a Monday call from Biden to McConnell (and MAGA Mike) imploring them to to “stop playing politics and act quickly to pass this bipartisan border legislation.” A White House statement reiterated that this bill “would add thousands of Border Patrol agents and personnel, invest in technology to catch fentanyl and combat drug trafficking, and make our country safer.”
MAGA Mike’s response was to announce that even if the Senate passed it, it would be dead on arrival in the House, which wouldn’t even debate it. Senate Republicans see it as a political stunt intended to boost vulnerable Democratic incumbents— primarily John Tester (D-MT), Jacky Rosen (D-NV), Tammy Baldwin (D-WI) Bob Casey (D-PA) and Sherrod Brown (D-OH).
It needed 60 votes to proceed and didn’t even get a majority, failing to break through the GOP filibuster 43-50. Senators who voted for it the first time it was presented and flipped into the “no” column today were, two of the authors, James Lankford (R-OK) and Kyrsten Sinema (I-AZ), plus Susan Collins (R-ME), Mitt Romney (R-UT), Cory Booker (D-NJ) and Laphonza Butler (D-CA). Menendez, who voted against it the first time around, was on trial yesterday for selling out the country and couldn't vote.
Brian Schatz (D-HI), one of Schumer’s messaging members, said, “We are not going to stop talking about this. We’re tired of being on defense about this. Frankly, our argument is better. The Republicans unanimously tanked tough border policy because their boss told them to.”
As Andrew Egger pointed out earlier in the week, “The chances of a magical revitalization of the border package Republicans already killed earlier this year are zero. Even James Lankford, the Republican negotiated the package in the Senate and tried in vain to sell his party on its merits, is a ‘no’ this time around, arguing negotiators need to go back to the drawing board and figure out something that can pass. But the point for Democrats right now isn’t to pass something. It’s to underscore again that Biden can’t count on Congress’s help for immigration as he finally starts to roll out actions he hopes will assuage the border crisis on his own.”
It’s a nasty political bind Biden’s in. There’s little question he needs to do something to change up the narrative on illegal immigration, which a number of polls this year have shown to be voters’ top concern ahead of November’s elections. Border crossings may not still be smashing records on a monthly basis like they were at the beginning of the year, but they’re still historically high.
The systems in place to sort and process crossers are comically inadequate: Those migrants who get immigration court dates go into a system where each immigration judge on the bench has a backlog of more than 4,500 cases; average processing times have ballooned to four years. Many, many more never get court dates at all— they’re simply released into the country by a Border Patrol buckling under the strain of the brutal math problem of crossers divided by officers.
The level of dysfunction and chaos is tough to wrap your mind around. “AP visits immigration courts across US, finds nonstop chaos,” reads one Associated Press headline— from January 2020. At that time, new quarterly immigration-court cases only rarely topped 50,000 and had never exceeded 100,000. Last quarter, they were at nearly 450,000.
Something has to change. But Republicans have stonewalled legislative efforts, ostensibly on the grounds that Democrats haven’t been willing to accept nearly stringent enough changes, more realistically on the grounds that it’s poor political practice to throw a drowning enemy a life preserver. That leaves executive action— but any action Biden takes now has its own political risks.
… [I]f Biden takes a page out of Donald Trump’s book and tries more hard-edged, disruptive executive action, as he has reportedly been mulling for months, he runs the risk of running aground in the courts. And he’s hemmed in on that front too by political realities of his own making, as the White House has continually insisted it is already doing all it can to stem the flow of migrants absent further congressional action. So any major new move invites the immediate critique: Okay, so why didn’t you do this before?
Biden's response after the bill failed: “Congressional Republicans do not care about securing the border or fixing America’s broken immigration system. If they did, they would have voted for the toughest border enforcement in history. Instead, today, they put partisan politics ahead of our country’s national security.”
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