“Today is a day the residents of Denver should be heartbroken,” Mayor Mike Johnston said in an Instagram post after Senate Republicans blocked passage of immigration reform legislation backed by Democratic mayors and governors across the country.
“If that measure had succeeded,” Johnston continued, “there would not be a crisis.”
In one sense, Johnston is right. If the legislation he endorsed had become law, the fiscal crisis facing his city, and sanctuary cities like his across the country, would have temporarily been alleviated.
Denver has spent more than $42 million just housing and feeding immigrants since President Joe Biden began releasing them into the country. Denver’s public schools have spent another $17.5 million educating immigrant children, and Denver’s hospitals are spending $10 million a year providing them free healthcare.
“Our city’s resources are going to be depleted trying to help these people,” Common Sense Institute Director of Policy DJ Summers told reporters. “If this situation continues to worsen, it will absolutely exacerbate the impact on Denver’s taxpayers and city services.”
The Senate legislation would have “solved” Denver’s fiscal emergency by flooding the city, and sanctuary cities nationwide, with $3.7 billion in borrowed bailout dollars. With that cash infusion, Denver could continue paying for all the free housing, food, education, and healthcare it was providing immigrants. In that sense, the problem would have been “solved.”
But nothing in the Senate legislation would have forced Biden to stop the real underlying problems: the catching and releasing of immigrants into the United States. In fact, the legislation did the exact opposite. It created a brand new system for processing immigrants caught illegally crossing the southern border that mandates their release.
Under current law, Biden is required to detain all immigrants arrested for illegally crossing the southern border. Biden currently gets around this legal requirement by abusing his statutory humanitarian parole powers.
Not only did the Senate legislation preserve existing loopholes for Biden to continue abusing this power, but it even created an entirely new “noncustodial removal proceedings” process that Biden would be allowed to process all immigrants through. They don’t even have to express a credible fear of being persecuted in their home country. As long as any immigrant “indicates an intention to apply for a protection,” the new law allows Biden to enroll the imimigrant in these “noncustodial” proceedings.
And here’s the best part: All immigrants referred to these proceedings MUST be released from custody. The law literally requires catch and release. “Aliens referred for proceedings under this section shall be released from physical custody,” the legislation reads on page 116.
Once immigrants are released into the United States, nothing in the Senate bill forced Biden to track them down, arrest them, and deport them. Sure, the legislation says that an asylum officer should try and meet with the immigrant within 90 days, to determine if they qualify for asylum. And in theory, immigrants who fail to meet this standard are eligible for deportation. But placing an immigrant in deportation proceedings and actually deporting an immigrant are two entirely different things.
Again, the Senate legislation mandated the release of all immigrants. The earliest they could be deported is three months. That means in order to deport them, Biden would have to send ICE officers to find them, catch them, hold them, process them, and then finally deport them.
Does anyone believe Biden would actually do that? There are literally millions of immigrants already eligible for deportation in the United States, and Biden is doing literally nothing to actually deport any of them (unless they commit a felony).
And also, will Denver lift a finger to help ICE deport all the immigrants released into their community? Unless Denver changes its existing sanctuary city policy, the answer to that question is no.
“This isn’t an ideological debate,” Johnston said. “This is, do you want to solve a humanitarian crisis? And do you want to solve a fiscal crisis?”
Those are actually two separate crises. And which one we actually want to solve is absolutely an ideological debate. Do we want to solve the border crisis with bailouts or by stopping immigrants at the border?
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The Senate immigration bill only solved one crisis, the fiscal crisis, and even then, it didn’t really solve it. It just kicked it down the road with borrowed bailout money.
To solve the humanitarian crisis, all Biden needs to do is start enforcing existing immigration law and stop catching and releasing immigrants into the United States. Nothing in the Senate bill even tried to do that.