Border crisis

Forget the towering slabs of steel and concrete sprawling across the southern border. Quietly, beneath the tangible symbols of Donald Trump’s immigration clampdown, another revolution has taken hold. A revolution of invisible digital watchtowers, wires and algorithms – that is as impressive as it is unsettling.The curtain shielding this vast expansion of America’s digital surveillance technology has, thanks to recent disclosures, been drawn back to reveal at its core a controversial and critically influential digital engine churning through data.Enter Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency. DoGE has recently launched a master database targeting undocumented migrants, WIRED reports.

Washington makes a fundamental error when it sees the present border crisis as an immigration problem, rather than the national security problem it has become under President Biden. For border states such as Texas, which bear the brunt of the situation, it’s also becoming a constitutional problem. In January, the US Supreme Court vacated an injunction prohibiting the feds from cutting razor wire that Texas had placed across a 2.5-mile stretch of border near the town of Eagle Pass. Governor Greg Abbott responded by asserting his state’s fundamental right to self-defense in the face of federal inaction, citing constitutional authority.

If a motion to vacate the speaker of the House fails resoundingly, does it make a sound?The answer is, of course, yes — with a Capitol Hill press corps that loves nothing more than pitting all-too-willing Republicans against one another. Next week, Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene is poised to finally pull the trigger on her quixotic quest to oust Speaker Mike Johnson — but she’s likely to be left holding a bag of small-dollar donations and press clippings, which is what her detractors think she is actually motivated by.On one side of the push to oust Johnson is a trio of Greene, Thomas Massie and Paul Gosar.

It’s been a banner week for armchair lawyers. Here’s what you need to know about Donald Trump’s trials in New York City and before the Supreme Court.In the Big Apple, where Trump has scored rave reviews in bodegas and from construction workers. This week, David Pecker, the former publisher of the National Enquirer, confirmed what Ted Cruz long suspected during the 2016 campaign — that the tabloid was deeply plugged-in with the Trump orbit, even to the point of manufacturing conspiracies that Cruz’s father was involved in the assassination of President John F. Kennedy.“We mashed the photos and the different picture with Lee Harvey Oswald and mashed the two together,” Pecker said. “And that’s how that story was prepared — created, I would say.

“If there’s anyone who deserves impeachment, it's Alejandro Mayorkas. Not only has he failed to enforce the law, he’s violated his oath of office with impunity.” Greg Abbott is not mincing words. The Republican governor of Texas is at the center of the biggest issue on the minds of many 2024 voters — the border, where his policy clashes with Joe Biden’s White House and administration have become a focal point for Republican candidates nationwide and will be a major part of the 2024 Trump campaign. Multiple polls show the border/migrant issue to be top of mind for voters, especially for Republican-leaning independent voters — more on that below.

As much as things have changed since 2020, the campaign styles and strategies of Trump and Biden have mostly stayed the same. On Tuesday, President Biden held a phone call with Xi Jinping, the president of China. The two were set to speak about a host of important issues for the first time since 2022. Keep in mind that the day before, Biden struggled to get through a softball interview with weatherman Al Roker at the White House Easter Egg Roll. But sure, let’s all pretend that Joe’s conversation with Xi about artificial intelligence went smoothly. Often times Joe’s daily presidential duties — phone calls with world leaders, receiving the presidential daily briefing, attending various ceremonies — are the only things on his calendar.

The most effective ad ever made for a presidential election featured a violent, career-criminal, Willie Horton, walking out of a Massachusetts prison on a weekend pass. On one of those passes, he went on another vicious crime spree. George H. W. Bush used those crimes — and the lax policies that let Horton roam the country — to destroy his Democratic opponent, Massachusetts governor Mike Dukakis. The past is prologue. Once again, voters are worried about their safety and angry about the open-border policies that have degraded it. Donald Trump knows that, so he will be using ads like the one Bush used against Dukakis. They will have the same devastating impact. A little background is helpful.

Hunter Biden, the Biden family’s Mr. Worldwide, spent much of today behind closed doors in the Capitol for a deposition in front of the House Oversight and Judiciary Committees. The younger Biden accused Republicans on the committee of peddling lies and operating on the “false premise” that his father, President Joe Biden, had any involvement with his foreign business dealings, a focal point of the GOP’s impeachment inquiry.“I did not involve my father in my business,” Hunter said. “Never.” The first son has been on an image rehab tour, recently sitting down with Axios to discuss how his continued sobriety is essential in the “fight for the future of democracy.” Today’s deposition was a substantial departure from Biden’s previous Capitol Hill trip.

Welcome to Thunderdome, where this week I want you to consider: what’s the biggest 2024 question for Democrats? You might assume that it’s Joe Biden’s age, infirmity and feeblemindedness — particularly after the Robert Hur report dropped last week. It certainly set the White House and the Biden campaign on edge — and now they’re dealing with the thorny question of whether they should release the transcript of Hur’s interviews with the president. On the one hand, it could provide information useful to Democrats pushing back against critics — see, he was just distracted by Israel, he just botched a few dates, Joe’s fine!

Few moments are less promising to reach a bipartisan deal than the months before a presidential election. And few issues present greater obstacles than limiting illegal immigration. Even the word “illegal” is contested. Progressives say it is too harsh. Conservatives say it is simply truthful. It is no surprise, then, that the compromise “border-security bill” gasped its final breath this week. The Senate bill, negotiated by a Democrat, a Republican and an Independent, met a hostile reception as soon as the text was released. House Speaker Mike Johnson declared it “dead on arrival.” Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer reluctantly brought it up for a procedural vote, where it went down in flames. Why such stiff opposition?

Senate Republicans who are negotiating an immigration reform bill with Democrats are defending their efforts after conservatives reacted angrily to leaked details for the deal. The lead negotiator, Senator James Lankford, said on Fox News Sunday that his detractors are relying on “internet rumors” to fuel their opposition to the bill.“This bill focuses on getting us to zero illegal crossings a day,” Lankford said. “There’s no amnesty, it increases the number of border patrol agents, it increases asylum officers, it increases detention beds so we can quickly detain and then deport individuals.

Given just how unpopular illegal immigration is, it is stunning to see both the likely nominees for president fumbling the issue. That’s political malpractice.  For Biden, the malpractice consists not only in keeping the border open, which is already killing him in the polls, but in resisting the strongest Republican proposals to close it. Every time Republican congressional leaders visit the White House to negotiate, they come away empty handed.   In stiff-arming the Republican proposals, the White House has put itself in the awkward position of saying it will grudgingly accept their efforts but only if Republicans make concessions on other issues.

The first thing you see when you climb out of the Rio Grande into Eagle Pass, Texas, is the homely site of the municipal golf course. Nine holes along the river expanded to eighteen via different tees, the pruned grass of the course is scuffed and torn from the hundreds of thousands of footsteps that have crossed it just this year, rubber soles that trekked from Central and South America to get to this godforsaken patch of green that signifies the US of A and everything it holds for the migrant who dreams of a new life. As welcomes go, it’s no sparkling torch of Lady Liberty.

John Nance Garner, a Texan who served as Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s vice president for eight years, famously quipped that the vice presidency was “not worth a bucket of warm piss.” Garner wasn’t necessarily wrong. But the groundbreaking election of Kamala Harris was supposed to transform the office. After all, she was the first woman, the first black person, and the first South Asian VP. Little else mattered. She was a badass, and if you didn’t acknowledge her intersectional excellence, you were a sexist, racist goon. Even many on the right thought Harris might play an outsized role as VP, given President Biden’s cognitive frailty. As we’re now halfway through Harris’s first term in office, it’s a good time to take stock of all that's gone wrong.

Numbers can be boring. So let's look at Mr. Jimenez from Ecuador and Mr. Singh from India, alongside some numbers, to keep it interesting. Both want to come to the US, one for illegal work, one to take his family to New York on a vacation. Mr. Jimenez will enter across the Southern Border near El Paso. In 2022 there were 330,037 legal immigrants to the US, or "new potential lawful permanent residents" (LPRs) entering the country. Meanwhile, more than 2.75 million "migrant encounters" occurred along the southwest border since Joe Biden took office. In the Rio Grande Valley sector alone, roughly 10,000 encounters with illegal immigrants occur every week.

Since President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris won’t come to the border, the border is coming to them. On Thursday, two buses of illegal immigrants unloaded in front of Harris’s vice presidential residence. Others have arrived in downtown New York, Chicago, and D.C., to the fury of local mayors and governors. A small planeload caused an uproar on Martha’s Vineyard when it landed on that self-proclaimed sanctuary island. More busloads are sure to come, probably in cities like Philadelphia, Boston, Minneapolis, and perhaps a beach community in Delaware. The immigrants are being transported from Republican-led border states to northern Democratic enclaves, which have long proclaimed themselves “sanctuaries” for the migrants they are now so appalled to find arriving.