Congressional Democrats are almost preternaturally talented at missing the moment, especially when it comes to immigration. They’re about to do it again.
Democrats are poised to waste the strongest leverage they’ve had yet to rein in an out-of-control Department of Homeland Security (DHS) deportation machine since Donald Trump took office. As unrepentant Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and other DHS agents wage war on American cities, thumb their nose at the law, and kill with impunity, Democrats in Congress have belatedly decided to fight the attempt to hand the department more funding, and use the unpopularity of ICE’s activities and the potential for a government shutdown to force restrictions on DHS’s activities. Unfortunately, those restrictions have turned out to be a handful of toothless reforms.
Those reforms range from the minor but welcome (agents can’t wear masks and must wear body cameras, and have to end roving patrols) to the largely irrelevant (agents must use actual judicial warrants and use-of-force standards that match local police). The reason the latter are irrelevant is because DHS agents already have strict use-of-force standards as well as a legal requirement to use judicial warrants — the problem is that they simply ignore the law and face no consequences for doing so.
Worse, it’s not just the more conservative Senate leadership pushing this. This is essentially the same set of demands that the chairs of the Congressional Progressive Caucus came out for late last week.
As the American Prospect’s David Dayen pointed out, these demands — which are actually an even less ambitious set of asks than Democrats started last week out with — are so conservative, ICE has already basically met them as part of its and Trump administration’s public relations scramble following Alex Pretti’s killing. Sen. Chuck Schumer and the Democrats are effectively letting Trump and his deportation machine off the hook even as the…
Auteur: Branko Marcetic
