High noon Texas style -El Paso vs Baby Trump

I don’ timagine SFB’s handlers will let teh blimp into his lie fest.  Pity.

Greg Sargent gets to the nub of the “beds” debate.

According to a House Democratic aide, Democrats on the conference committee asked ICE for a breakdown of the current 20,000 or so in custody — how many are dangerous criminals, and how many are merely longtime residents with no criminal record or who have committed minor infractions, like traffic violations?

The aide tells me that ICE is refusing to answer that question. “We have sought a breakdown of how many people in interior enforcement detention are actually dangerous, but they simply won’t engage in constructively answering,” the aide said.

Instead, the aide noted, ICE has responded by saying, in essence, that there’s no point in breaking down those detained, because “they’re all dangerous,” as the aide put it. “They want us to believe that people with minor traffic violations are dangerous criminals who should be deported,” the aide says.

Democrats are asking the administration to justify their demand for more detention beds, and say they’re getting nothing serious back. A spokesperson for DHS didn’t immediately return an email for comment.

My money says ICE doesn’t know that number, but knows that if they DID it would be much less than the 16,500 the Dems offered.  Of course SFB knows that if he can keep those numbers out of the mix and mischaracterize all of the detainees as dangerous criminals (like the women and children they have detained and either split up or kept together) his base won’t get the distinction and he will  be able to justify wit his base shutting the gov’t down.

That will be the best half a boat buck you spend on your boat.  I doubt the cable is bad but it’s basically covered in petrified plastic now and I wouldn’t stake my boat (or my ass) on changing out the ends.

That snow looks like something shy of a foot, Jamie – which tells me there ain’t enough plows up there to deal with a foot of snow, or even half f that.  But if the caffeine addicted population can’t access Starbucks we are definitely talking about an emergency declaration issuing from Olympia.  My BIL and his wife would have to break out the emergency coffee press.

In anticipation of the dueling rallies tonight, a little wall history, courtesy of Politifact.

In his speech in El Paso on immigration reform on May 10, 2011, President Obama declared that the fence along the border with Mexico is “now basically complete.”

Still, he predicted that many Republican opponents won’t be satisfied.

“We have gone above and beyond what was requested by the very Republicans who said they supported broader reform as long as we got serious about enforcement,” Obama said. “All the stuff they asked for, we’ve done. But even though we’ve answered these concerns, I’ve got to say I suspect there are still going to be some who are trying to move the goal posts on us one more time.” 

“They’ll want want a higher fence,” Obama said. “Maybe they’ll need a moat. Maybe they want alligators in the moat. They’ll never be satisfied. And I understand that. That’s politics.”
 

But the same day as Obama’s speech, Sen. Jim DeMint penned an op-ed forNational Reviewin which he countered that the Obama administration has “not done its job to finish the border fence that is a critical part of keeping Americans safe and stopping illegal immigration.”

“Five years ago, legislation was passed to build a 700-mile double-layer border fence along the southwest border,” DeMint wrote. “This is a promise that has not been kept. Today, according to staff at the Department of Homeland Security, just 5 percent of the double-layer fencing is complete, only 36.3 miles.”

You need to go back to the Secure Fence Act of 2006, which was passed by a Republican Congress and signed by President George W. Bush. It authorized the construction of hundreds of miles of additional fencing along the border with Mexico. The act specified “at least two layers of reinforced fencing.”

But the law was quietly altered in a significant way the following year.

Responding to urging from the Department of Homeland Security — which argued that different border terrains required different types of fencing, that a one-size-fits-all approach across the entire border didn’t make sense — Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison, R-Texas,  proposed an amendment to give DHS the discretion to decide what type of fence was appropriate in different areas. The law was amended to read,  “nothing in this paragraph shall require the Secretary of Homeland Security to install fencing, physical barriers, roads, lighting, cameras, and sensors in a particular location along an international border of the United States, if the Secretary determines that the use or placement of such resources is not the most appropriate means to achieve and maintain operational control over the international border at such location.”

In other words, Border Patrol would have the leeway to decide which type of fencing was appropriate in various regions.

Note to all – this was all done by Republicans, and the squabbles were between Republicans over the amendment of the Act – until Obama implemented building fence, etc. pursuant to the language in the Act, although the 2007 amedment came out of a Dem controlled congress, but was proposed by Repug Hutchison and signed into law by Shrub.  But it was all Obama’s fault according to the nationalists – DeMint, Hunter and King.  Of course still it was repugs who passed it and repugs who proposed amending it.  So STFU about Obama.

(Full disclosure – the article is much more lengthy than what I cited from it and I was too lazy to put triple asterisks to indicate where I jumped forward – IOW, read the article i fyou want toknow what I skipped and you are missing.)