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🟩Week of April 21: I'm in Washington with a moderate schedule, I think, and should be reachable except for Wednesday afternoon and much of Thursday (Border Update-writing time).
m looking forward to testifying in Congress again at 11:00 Eastern on Thursday, this time in a hearing of the House of Representatives' Foreign Affairs Subcommittee on the Western Hemisphere about the State Department's counter-drug and law enforcement programs.
This is not a very polarizing issue—neither side has found a silver bullet solution to drug trafficking and organized crime in the region—so I’m hoping for some constructive exchanges with members from both parties.
My written testimony is here, on the hearing repository page. I finished it at 2:00 this morning—there’s never a lot of advance prep time to write these—but hopefully it doesn’t read like that.
I got in a shouting match with Sen. Josh Hawley in a hearing. Here's evidence backing up my arguments about "migrant crime" and the Laken Riley Act.
Another congressional hearing testimony, another nasty shouting match. These aren’t fun because you don’t have the floor, but you have to stand up to bullies.
If you don’t want to watch the video, here’s how the Fox News website covered it:
“Here’s Laken Riley,” said Hawley as her picture was posted behind him. “Her murder, her horrific murder at the hands of this illegal migrant who was also unlawfully paroled in the United States. [Is] her death not an actual issue?”
The activist, Adam Isacson, who works as director of defense oversight at the Washington Office on Latin America, responded by saying: “Of course it’s an issue, it’s a tragedy.”
“I didn’t say that Laken Riley’s death was not an actual issue, I said that migrant crime is not an actual issue,” said Isacson. “Migrant crime is much less of an issue than U.S. citizen-committed crime.”
To which Hawley answered, “[Riley] is dead because of migrant crime.”
Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Missouri) was citing these two sentences from a March 1, 2024 “Border Update” video. (It took me a while even to find it, because things said in videos don’t show up in online searches. That’s good opposition research.)
The horrific murder of a nursing student in Georgia has a lot of people on the right talking about ‘migrant crime’ like it’s an actual issue. But the data, in fact, show that migrants commit fewer crimes than US citizens.
Of course I stand by that. I’m telling the truth. Evidence shows that migrants—undocumented, asylum-seeking, and otherwise—commit crimes at lower rates than U.S. citizens. If you’re governing a community and want to make sure it’s protected from crime, you’re doing it wrong if you divert law enforcement resources to targeting immigrants, who (with tragic exceptions because all humans commit crimes) break laws less often.
Here are some of the sources I was drawing from at the time:
“More recently, there’s been an explosion of research in this area because of public perception and interest. And what’s pretty amazing is, across all this research, by and large, we find that immigrants do not engage in more crime than native-born counterparts, and immigration actually can cause crime to go down, rather than up, so quite contrary to public perception.” — Charis Kurbin of UC Irvine, author of the book Immigration and Crime: Taking Stock, on PBS Newshour.
“The repetition of the phrase ‘migrant crime’ is a tactic stolen from Victor Orban, who used to use ‘Gypsy crime’ in the same way.” — writerAnne Applebaum, author of a few books about democracy and authoritarianism, on Twitter.
In full smarm mode, Sen. Hawley feigned shock that a witness invited by the Democrats might oppose the Laken Riley Act, a bad bill. In fact, more than three-quarters of Senate Democrats voted against it on Friday: it avoided a U.S. Senate filibuster due to just 10 Democratic senators’ votes.
This bill is almost certainly unconstitutional and could harm innocent people, some of them people seeking protection in the United States:
It will require that migrants be detained—including those with documented status like DACA and TPS recipients, and people with pending asylum cases—until an immigration judge resolves their cases, which could take a year or more, if they’re accused of minor crimes like shoplifting. And I mean “accused”: the text of the law reads “is charged with, is arrested for.” They don’t have to be found guilty in court: all it takes is a false accusation that leads to an arrest, even for allegedly stealing a candy bar from a CVS. “Innocent until proven guilty” goes out the window. The potential for abuse is tremendous.
It gives state attorneys-general superpowers to sue to block aspects of U.S. immigration law, disfiguring the federal government’s ability to carry out immigration policies for the greater good. As the New Republic’s Greg Sargent pointed out, this could even cause a schism within MAGA. Trump backers who oppose legal immigration, like Steve Bannon, have been in a public fight with Trump’s tech-sector backers, like Elon Musk, over visas for skilled overseas workers. Bannon will need only enlist an attorney-general like Texas’s Ken Paxton to sue to block migrants from countries like India, from where companies like Musk’s hire many immigrants.
The hearing episode got me a wave of insults on social media and in my comms accounts from people who hate migrants or think I somehow don’t care about a tragic murder. Most of the insults are lame and probably written by people in Belarus, but some of them (like “beta-male f*ckstick”) are sheer poetry and I plan to use them.
Overview of my testimony before the Senate Homeland Security Committee on the "Remain in Mexico" program.
It was fun—at times—to engage with senators on the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee this morning on Republican-led proposals to revive the “Remain in Mexico” policy. There’s a lot to say about it and I’ll post more later. For now:
Chairman Paul, Ranking Member Peters, members of the Committee, thank you for inviting me to testify today.
I did a lot of fieldwork and data work along the U.S.-Mexico border when Remain in Mexico—MPP—was first implemented. The evidence I saw is clear: Remain in Mexico enriched cartels. It failed to meaningfully deter migration. And it soured relations with a key ally. Pursuing it again would harm U.S. interests.
Instead, I urge this Committee to focus on fixing our asylum system. That system saves tens of thousands of lives each year, but we need it to be both fair and efficient. No one supports the idea of five-year waits for asylum decisions: the backlogs create a pull factor of their own. But this is an administrative challenge, and the U.S. government is good at handling administrative challenges. It’s just a question of processing, case management, and adjudication.
People truly did suffer while remaining in Mexico. I personally heard harrowing accounts of torture and abuse. Nearly all of that abuse was the work of organized crime groups, or cartels.
The cartels’ cruelty and sadism wasn’t just a human rights issue, though. These criminals aren’t barbaric just for its own sake. This is their economic model, and that makes it a national security issue.
Organized crime is trying to extract as much money out of migrants and their loved ones as it can while those migrants are present on the “turf” that they control. Cartels fight each other for this business.
“Remain in Mexico” kept migrants on cartels’ turf for very long periods of time: months or even years in Mexican border cities waiting for their hearings. MPP created a new market opportunity for cartels.
That’s a big difference from CBP One. The app also requires months-long waits to come to a U.S. port of entry, but it makes it easier to wait elsewhere, in parts of Mexico that are safer than its northern border zone, where states are under State Department travel warnings because of cartel crime and kidnapping.
When outsiders are waiting for months in Mexico’s border zone, they are sitting ducks for the cartels:
First, there was extortion: foreigners had to pay just to exist for that long in cartel-controlled neighborhoods. If you don’t pay, it’s not safe to go outside your shelter.
Second, if people wanted to give up on the long wait for MPP, cartels offered “coyote” services: the chance to cross the border and try to evade Border Patrol. They charge several thousand dollars for that.
Third was kidnapping for ransom: cartels held people in horrific conditions, raping and torturing them, as their relatives—frequently in the United States—had to wire thousands of dollars to free them.
The financial scale of this exploitation is staggering. Let’s consider it. Take a conservative estimate of $1,000 per migrant in extortions, ransoms, or coyote fees—I ran that figure by some border-area experts and they laughed at how low that estimated amount is. Multiply that by 71,000 people in MPP, and you get $71 million in cartel profits, an amount equal to the annual base salaries of 1,000 U.S. Border Patrol agents.
For all that, Remain in Mexico didn’t really do that much to reduce or control migration.
For more than 10 years now, there’s been a series of crackdowns on asylum seekers. My testimony maps them out in a graphic. These crackdowns follow the same pattern: you get an initial drop in migration numbers, it lasts a few months, and then there’s a rebound.
Title 42 and its expansions? A classic example. So was “Remain in Mexico.”
After it expanded in June 2019, Border Patrol’s apprehensions did fall for four months. Then the migration numbers plateaued—at the same level they were in mid-2018. In fact, at the same level as the Obama administration’s eight-year monthly average. And that’s where the numbers stayed.
And then in the first months of 2020, Border Patrol apprehensions started rising. They were on pace to grow by a double-digit percentage from February to March. But then COVID came, and all but ended March 10 days early.
Title 42 ended up eclipsing Remain in Mexico: no more hearing dates; asylum seekers got expelled. Remain in Mexico became irrelevant and the Trump administration rarely used it again.
MPP also strained relations with Mexico. The Mexican government at first resisted the program, agreeing to it only after very heavy diplomatic pressure. This complicated cooperation on other shared priorities.
There are a lot of those priorities, from trade to fentanyl. Mexico is one of the ten largest countries in the world, with the 14th-largest economy. The border is just one reason why the United States needs good relations with Mexico.
Compelling Mexico to agree to a new Remain in Mexico takes bandwidth away from those priorities. Why do all that for a policy that actually enriches drug cartels? Why do all that for a policy that doesn’t even have a clear and lasting effect on migration?
Tune in at 9:00 Eastern on Thursday when I testify in the Senate Homeland Security Committee in opposition to proposals to restart the "Remain in Mexico" program.
Tune in at 9:00 Eastern on Thursday when I testify in the Senate Homeland Security Committee in opposition to proposals to restart the “Remain in Mexico” program.
Remain in Mexico was a human rights travesty. It enriched Mexican organized crime. It complicated U.S.-Mexico relations. And in the end, it didn’t do much to deter migrants.
I look forward to making all of those points in a few days. Wish me luck—and I apologize if not much gets posted here over the next few days while I prepare testimony.
A spending bill with compromise language restricting migrants' access to asylum just failed on the Senate floor. Four Republicans voted "yes" and five Democrats voted "no."
Republican senators refused to consider a big Ukraine-Israel-border funding bill unless it included language changing U.S. law to make it harder for migrants to access asylum at the U.S.-Mexico border. A group of senators negotiated for two and a half months, coming up with a set of measures three days ago that outraged both migrants’ rights defenders who feared people would be harmed, and far-right Republicans who wanted it to go further.
The bill with the compromise language just failed on the Senate floor, by a vote of 49-50. (It was a procedural vote that needed 60 votes to allow debate to begin.)
Republicans demanded that the border-migration language be included, but in the end only four voted for it (Susan Collins of Maine, Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, Mitt Romney of Utah, and the Republicans’ chief negotiator, James Lankford of Oklahoma). Even Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Kentucky), who had vocally backed Lankford’s negotiating effort, voted “no.”
Five Democrats voted “no.” (Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-New York) had to change his vote to “no” for procedural reasons allowing a reconsideration of the bill.) They were Ed Markey and Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts, Bob Menendez of New Jersey, Alex Padilla of California, and Bernie Sanders (I) of Vermont, who opposed the unconditional Israel aid in the bill.
I hope that the senators move soon to approve aid to Ukraine, this time without weakening the right to asylum.
Here's what the Senate bill text released on February 4 would do to the right to seek asylum in the United States. And it probably won't pass.
The Senate’s leadership has just dropped the text of a $118 billion supplemental appropriation, complying with a Biden administration request, which would provide additional aid to Ukraine and Israel, among other priorities including $20 billion for border and migration needs.
Republican senators’ price for allowing this bill to go forward in the Senate—where Democrats have a majority but most legislation requires 60 votes to end debate and proceed to a vote—was new restrictions on migration at the U.S.-Mexico border.
This 370-page legislative text has been out for less than 2 hours as I write this, so my reading this Sunday evening has not been thorough. But it appears to include a lot of the controversial limits on access to asylum that had already been reported in media. (I summarized those last week in a Q&A document and in our weekly Border Update.)
Provisions include:
Requiring asylum seekers placed in “expedited removal”—usually 20-25,000 per month right now, but likely to expand—to meet a much higher standard of “credible fear” in screening interviews with asylum officers. The goal is to thin out asylum applications and make it unnecessary for as many cases as possible to go to immigration court.
Reducing the time for a large number of asylum seekers’ cases from years to a few months, often while in tightly controlled, costly alternatives-to-detention programs.
It does not appear to tighten the presidential use of humanitarian parole authority to permit some classes of migrants to enter the United States, though it adds a detailed reporting requirement.
Plus, the big one:
As expected, the bill would allow the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) to impose a Title 42-like expulsion authority, “summarily removing” asylum-seekers from the United States (except for hard-to-prove Convention Against Torture appeals), when unauthorized migrant encounters reach a daily threshold.
That threshold is:
An average of 4,000 migrant encounters per day over 7 days, which would allow DHS to start expelling people at the Secretary’s discretion.
Expulsions become mandatory once the average hits 5,000 per day, or if encounters hit 8,500 in a single day.
“Encounters” means people who come to the border and end up in Customs and Border Protection (CBP, which includes Border Patrol) custody without documents or authorization. Even if all 5,000 of them are deported or detained, the expulsions authority would still kick in.
“Encounters” includes people who come to ports of entry with appointments made using the CBP One smartphone app; the bill requires DHS to maintain the capacity to keep receiving at least 1,400 of these people each day (nearly the current number of daily CBP One appointments), even when it is expelling people.
While these 1,400 would not be in danger of expulsion, they do count toward the daily “encounter” threshold. If CBP takes 1,400 per day at ports of entry, then the expulsions could kick in if Border Patrol apprehends 2,600 or 3,600 more per day between ports of entry (for the 4,000 and 5,000 thresholds).
Border Patrol apprehensions between ports of entry have averaged less than 3,600 per day during only 2 of the Biden administration’s first 36 full months. They have never averaged less than 2,600 per day.
It is not clear whether Mexico would agree to take back expelled migrants, and if so from which countries.
The expulsions would stop if the past week’s daily average dropped to 75 percent of the amount that triggered it (3,000 per day if the 4,000-encounter threshold was used; 3,750 per day if the 5,000-encounter threshold kicked in).
A previously undisclosed element of the new Title 42-style authority: it would automatically “sunset,” or repeal, after three years. And DHS would have fewer days per year to employ it during each of those three years. (It would take an act of Congress to renew the authority or make it permanent—which is certainly not impossible.)
What do I make of this?
Just as we pointed out in our Q&A last week, if this became law it would send thousands of people back to likely danger. The expulsion authority will ensnare many people with legitimate and urgent asylum claims, denying them due process. It will place many at the mercy of organized crime along the migration route and in Mexican border cities. And it wouldn’t even be justified with a thin “public health” reasoning, like Title 42 was: asylum seekers would be kicked out just because too many other people were fleeing. “The United States cannot deny someone the right to seek safety and protection just because they are number 5,001 in line that day,” a statement tonight from Human Rights First put it.
And again, as the Q&A and another post from last week made clear, it won’t reduce migration, except perhaps for an initial few months. We seem to forget that the Title 42 era (March 2020-May 2023) was one of the busiest times ever for migration at the U.S.-Mexico border. The experience of Title 42 should have made clear for everyone the futility of deterring protection-seeking migrants.
Either way, though, this legislation is probably not going to pass. Though I’m complaining here about some of these provisions’ cruelty, I don’t see enough red meat here to satisfy far-right and rabidly pro-Trump Republicans, especially in the GOP-majority House of Representatives. Even those who were willing to live without a full return to Trump’s policies were demanding a lower threshold number for expulsions, and curbs on the presidential humanitarian parole authority. Since they didn’t get those, they may obstruct the bill.
So the negotiators of this text added language that may endanger people. They took great pains, though, to minimize the harm it might do to asylum seekers. It is good that they tried to do so—but it means that it will be rough going in the MAGA-heavy, election-year House of Representatives.
After more than two months of internal discussions, we're about to see the text of the "asylum restrictions for Ukraine aid" deal that Senate Democratic and Republican negotiators have drawn up.
After more than two months of internal discussions, we’re about to see the text of the “asylum restrictions for Ukraine aid” deal that Senate Democratic and Republican negotiators have drawn up.
What do we know about what’s coming out of the Senate asylum-restrictions-for-Ukraine-aid negotiations? What's the human cost? Would it actually deter migration? What do Republican hardliners want? What would a better policy look like?
Last October, the Biden administration asked Congress for a package of funding for Ukraine, Israel, border security, and other priorities. In the Democratic-majority Senate, where it takes 60 votes to move legislation forward, Republicans refused to support this request unless it included changes to U.S. law that would restrict the right to asylum, and perhaps other migration pathways, at the U.S.-Mexico border.
A small group of senators has been negotiating those changes since November. A bill may now be forthcoming.
Tune in tomorrow morning (or on YouTube later) for what will be a really interesting discussion of how governments can protect their citizens and their institutions from organized crime, without violating human rights.
It’s unusual to have two people from one organization in these hearings. I’m a substitute for someone who just had to cancel. I’ll be talking mainly about Colombia.
Posting to this site could be a bit infrequent or erratic over the next couple of days, because I’ve just been added as a witness to Thursday’s House Foreign Affairs Committee hearing about the U.S.-Mexico border and migration. Wish me luck, or come by the Capitol Visitors’ Center at 2:00PM Thursday and send good energy.
(You don’t have to do that. It will always be on YouTube.)
Republican legislators have dug in and have given the Biden administration a list of demands. Aid for Ukraine and other items in the White House’s supplemental budget request will not get their approval, they say, unless the law is changed in ways that all but eliminate the right to seek asylum at the U.S.-Mexico border.
Here, at WOLA’s site, is an analysis of this proposal and the unspeakable harm that it would do. We urge the administration and congressional Democrats to stand strong and reject it.
From the conclusion:
If the Senate Republicans’ November 6 proposal were to become law, it would deny asylum to almost all protection-seeking migrants, unless:
That migrant sought asylum and received rejections in every country through which they passed en route to the United States.
That migrant presented at a land-border port of entry (official border crossing), even though CBP strictly limits asylum seekers’ access to these facilities.
The U.S. government could not send that migrant to a third country to seek asylum there.
In an initial “credible fear” interview within days of apprehension, that migrant met a higher screening standard.
If an asylum seeker clears those hurdles, the Republican proposal would require them to await their court hearings in ICE detention—even if they are a parent with children—or while “remaining in Mexico.”
This proposal is extraordinarily radical. Congressional Republicans’ demands to attach it to 2024 spending put the Biden administration in a tough position. It is a terrible choice to have to secure funding for Ukraine and other priorities by ending the United States’ historic role as a country of refuge, breaking international commitments dating back to the years after World War II.
As of yesterday, the House and Senate Appropriations Committees have completed work on the 2024 State and Foreign Operations appropriations bill—more colloquially, the “foreign aid bill.” The Republican-majority House appropriators approved their bill on July 12, and Senate appropriators approved theirs on July 20.
Here’s a very top-level overview of Colombia provisions in the 2023 foreign aid budget, what the Biden administration requested of Congress in March, and the House and Senate bills as they’ve emerged from committee.
U.S. Assistance to Colombia in the State/Foreign Operations Appropriation
Both houses must approve their bills (changes to Colombia provisions are unlikely).
A “conference committee” must resolve differences.
Once that revised and combined bill is approved, it gets sent to the President for signature, often combined with several other budget bills into a single “omnibus” bill.
“We applaud the Biden Administration’s support for the historic 2016 Peace Accord, and we encourage the State Department and USAID to use the new government’s commitment to fully implement the accord as an opportunity to increase investment and reenergize areas of weak implementation.”
A year ago, the U.S. Border Patrol and its parent agency, Customs and Border Protection (CBP), came under fire amid revelations of miserable and unsanitary conditions in holding cells overcrowded with apprehended children and families.
At the time, the U.S. Congress was considering legislation to provide more resources to deal with an influx of asylum-seeking migrants. Legislators included about $112 million for “consumables and medical care” to improve conditions for migrants being held for processing. Over opposition from progressive Democrats, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-California) agreed to approve a bill diminished by the Republican-majority Senate “in order to get resources to the children fastest.”
We’ve now learned that much of these resources didn’t reach the children at all.
The U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO) published a June 11 decision finding that instead of medicines, food, diapers, blankets, and other humanitarian needs, CBP diverted this “consumables and medical care” money into:
detention guard services;
boats;
all-terrain vehicles (ATVs);
motorcycles;
dirt bikes;
small utility vehicles;
passenger vans for moving detainees;
printers;
security camera systems;
speakers;
HVAC upgrades for CBP facilities;
sewer system upgrades for CBP facilities;
janitorial services;
canine supplies and services like dog food;
computer network upgrades “to analyze factual information in support of CBP’s border operations;”
the CBP-wide vaccine program for CBP personnel; and
“tactical gear and law enforcement equipment, such as riot helmets, and temporary portable structures.”
This is a stunning example of an agency defying the will of the legislative branch and its constitutional powers. The “consumables and medical care” outlay resulted from a long process of negotiation within Congress, and between Congress and the administration—but CBP just ignored it anyway.
That it even sought, in the first place, to portray the items in the list above as meeting humanitarian needs indicates an agency that either doesn’t know, or doesn’t care, what “humanitarian” means. That’s a huge problem, because much of CBP’s duties over the past several years have been humanitarian. Most of the undocumented migrants its agents have encountered have been children or families seeking refuge in the United States. These spending decisions evidence a lack of basic human empathy that call into question CBP’s management, training, and organizational culture.
GAO reports that “CBP plans to adjust its account for several of these obligations.” It should do so for all of them, or its management should be held in violation of the Antideficiency Act for so nakedly defying the will of the American people’s representatives in the U.S. Congress.
It’s not every day you get to record a podcast with a member of Congress. I enjoyed sitting down virtually this morning with Rep. Jim McGovern (D-Massachusetts), a longtime advocate of human rights in Colombia. He was fired up about the outrageous recent scandal involving U.S.-aided army intelligence units spying on Colombian reporters, human rights defenders, politicians, and others.
He calls here for a suspension of U.S. military aid and a much clearer U.S. commitment to implementing Colombia’s 2016 peace accords and protecting its threatened social leaders.
Rep. Jim McGovern (D-Massachusetts), the co-chair of the Tom Lantos Human Rights Commission in the U.S. Congress, is a longtime advocate of human rights, worldwide and in Latin America.
McGovern joins WOLA in this episode for a conversation about Colombia, a country to which he has traveled several times, and where he was one of the House of Representatives’ leading advocates for the negotiations that ended with a peace accord in 2016.
We’re talking weeks after new revelations that U.S.-aided Colombian military intelligence units had been spying on human rights defenders, journalists, judges, politicians, and even fellow officers. The Congressman calls for a suspension of U.S. military assistance to Colombia while the U.S. government undertakes a top-to-bottom, “penny by penny” review of the aid program. “If there’s not a consequence, there’s no incentive to change,” he explains.
He calls for the Colombian government and the international community to do far more to protect the country’s beleaguered human rights defenders, to change course on an unsuccessful drug policy, and to fulfill the peace accords’ commitments. Human rights, Rep. McGovern concludes, should be at the center of the U.S.-Colombia bilateral relationship.
Last week, with a 53-36 vote (59.6 percent), the U.S. Senate failed to get the two-thirds necessary to override President Trump’s veto of a resolution reversing his February 15 “national emergency” declaration. That declaration, coming after Trump failed to force Congress to pay billions for his “border wall” demands, would take more than $6 billion from the Defense Department budget and Treasury seized-asset funds, and plow it into border wall construction.
A quick rundown:
2019 started with much of the U.S. government “shut down” because Congress would not pass a budget giving Trump the $5.7 billion he wanted for his border wall.
Finally, after a 35-day shutdown, Trump caved and signed a budget with far less wall funding.
On February 15, using power he claimed that the 1976 National Emergencies Act gives him, Trump declared an “emergency” at the border requiring him to move money out of defense accounts and into wall-building.
Court challenges to this emergency declaration are ongoing. In July, the Supreme Court allowed wall-building to proceed while judicial deliberations continue. In mid-October, though, a federal judge in El Paso froze much of the Defense Department money.
The National Emergencies Act gives Congress the ability to challenge the emergency declaration every six months, by passing a joint resolution. A 1983 Supreme Court decision allows the President to veto this resolution; the emergency declaration would then remain in place unless two thirds of both houses of Congress vote to override the presidential veto.
Twice now—in February-March and September-October—Congress has passed joint resolutions to take down Trump’s emergency declaration. Both times, Trump has vetoed the resolutions. Both times, a strong majority, but not the necessary two-thirds, has voted to override the veto.
There have now been six votes on passage and override of these joint resolutions: three in the House and three in the Senate. Not a single Democrat has voted “no” against these resolutions. Any two-thirds override vote, though, also requires a significant number of Republican votes.
Even in this polarized time, some Republicans have defied the president and voted to undo the emergency declaration. To be exact, 14 in the House and 12 in the Senate. That’s 7 percent of House Republicans, and 23 percent of Senate Republicans.
The rest of the Republican Party’s congressional delegation seems to be unconcerned about the constitutional ramifications of a president unilaterally acting in direct opposition to the clearly expressed will of a Congress that, supposedly, has “the power of the purse.”
Here are the GOP legislators who have voted to undo this authoritarian and wasteful measure. In the Senate, half are members of the Appropriations Committee, whose power to assign funds is directly challenged by the emergency declaration. Many are among the party’s few remaining moderates. Most of their votes are more about preserving Congress’s constitutional power to appropriate funds than about the wisdom of building a border wall. That’s still a principled position, and I wish more GOP legislators would take it.
Senate
Lamar Alexander (R-Tennessee, voted “yes” twice, did not vote once): member of Appropriations; said “I cannot support this national emergency declaration and be faithful to my oath to support the Constitution at the same time”
Roy Blunt (R-Missouri, voted “yes” three times): member of Appropriations; said “Those decisions should not be made without congressional action.”
Susan Collins (R-Maine, voted “yes” three times): member of Appropriations; said “while there is some discretion that he has to move money around, I think that his executive order exceeds his discretion”
Mike Lee (R-Utah, voted “yes” three times): concerned about ceding congressional power
Jerry Moran (R-Kansas, voted “yes” twice, did not vote once): member of Appropriations; said “The declaration of an emergency under these circumstances is a violation of the U.S. Constitution”
Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska, voted “yes” three times): member of Appropriations, said “This is about the administration overstepping Constitutional authority, forcing Congress to relinquish power that is fundamentally ours”
Rand Paul (R-Kentucky, voted “yes” three times): a libertarian; said “I can’t vote to give extra-Constitutional powers to the president”
Rob Portman (R-Ohio, voted “yes” three times): a relative moderate, said “the emergency declaration circumvented Congress and set a ‘dangerous new precedent’”
Mitt Romney (R-Utah, voted “yes” three times): a frequent Trump critic, concerned about ceding congressional power
Marco Rubio (R-Florida, voted “yes” twice, did not vote once): member of Appropriations, said “We have a crisis at our southern border, but no crisis justifies violating the Constitution”
Pat Toomey (R-Pennsylvania, voted “yes” three times): said he supports the wall, but “the emergency declaration undermines the constitutional responsibility of Congress to approve how money is spent”
Roger Wicker (R-Mississippi, voted “yes” three times): said he supports the wall, but “I have serious reservations as to what the Emergency Declaration might do to the Constitutional principle of checks and balances.” (Fun fact: as a member of the House in 2000, Wicker was one of few Republicans to oppose the mostly military aid package known as “Plan Colombia.”)
House
Justin Amash (I-Michigan, voted “yes” twice, then left the Republican Party): said “I think the President is violating our constitutional system”
Brian Fitzpatrick (R-Pennsylvania, voted “yes” three times): said “I think this decision should be made by Congress”
Mike Gallagher (R-Wisconsin, voted “yes” three times): said “we can’t continue to expand executive authority just because our party now controls the White House”
Jamie Herrera Beutler (R-Washington, voted “yes” three times): member of Appropriations; said “He [Trump] literally contradicted the Constitution to use this money for something other than which it was intended”
Will Hurd (R-Texas, voted “yes” twice, did not vote once): member of Appropriations; represents a border district and has been a consistent border wall critic
Dusty Johnson (R-South Dakota, voted “yes” three times): said “I spent eight years under President Obama fighting ever-expanding executive authority. I remain committed to that principle”
John Katko (R-New York, voted “yes” twice, did not vote once): said “Presidents, from either party, should not legislate from the executive branch”
Thomas Massie (R-Kentucky, voted “yes” three times): said “The appropriations process belongs within Congress according to the Constitution”
Cathy McMorris Rodgers (R-Washington, voted “yes” three times): said “Article I of the Constitution gives the legislative branch the exclusive power to make laws and set funding priorities”
Francis Rooney (R-Florida, voted “yes” three times): said “My vote to override a veto of the resolution to rescind the national emergency declaration was based on the U.S. Constitution and had nothing to do with President Trump.” Recently made headlines by saying he is “open” to impeaching Trump
Jim Sensenbrenner (R-Wisconsin, voted “yes” three times): said “It is imperative that no administration, Republican or Democratic, circumvent the will of Congress”
Elise Stefanik (R-New York, voted “yes” three times): said “No matter what Party is represented in the White House, I will stand up against executive action that circumvents Congress”
Fred Upton (R-Michigan, voted “yes” three times): said “declaring a national emergency and reprogramming already appropriated funds without the approval of Congress is a violation of the Constitution”
Greg Walden (R-Oregon, voted “yes” three times): said the “Constitution grants Congress the power of the purse, not the President”
I can only rarely attend congressional hearings, and during a week like this one, when several hearings are happening at the same time, I can’t view them on video either. And anyway, who has the time to sit through hours of videos, which require you to stop what you’re doing to both watch and listen?
Still, hearings are a critical way to get information about U.S. policy toward Latin America. You learn a lot from officials’ responses to questions (some of which we’ve suggested). And you learn a lot about what legislators’ priorities are, and what it might be worth following up with their offices about.
So for the past couple of years, I’ve saved mp3 audio of every congressional hearing I’ve found relevant (thanks, youtube-dl, for making that easy). I can listen to an mp3 while doing something else that doesn’t require a lot of concentration, like driving, exercising, or doing the dishes.
At this point, I have quite an archive: 54 hearing audios since 2017, all of them with metadata following the same format. Here they are in one Google Drive folder, going up to last Friday.
They’re all mp3 files—just drop them on iTunes, Overcast, or your preferred audio player. (Tell iTunes that they’re “audiobooks” and it’ll remember your place.) I try to keep this folder reasonably up to date.
I suspect that if you’re geeky enough to find this useful, you may already have a similar system for keeping up with this information. Still, I hope it’s helpful to someone else out there.
I wrote this yesterday while watching the House-Senate Conference Committee meet to discuss a border spending package that might keep the government open after February 15 (and avoid a disastrous presidential “national emergency” declaration to build a border wall).
The gist: border security isn’t “solved,” but what’s needed now is adjustments, not a sweeping, pharaonic project like a border wall. If Congress is going to send a bill to the president with $5.7 billion in new border-security spending, there are so many things that the money could be better spent on. I list some in this commentary that WOLA posted today.
And what about a wall? I think this is one of the clearest ways I’ve put it so far:
Trump is pushing for a “border wall,” or at least steel fencing—354 miles of which already exists along the border. Fences have a purpose: they slow down border-crossers for a few minutes. That doesn’t matter if the border-crosser is an asylum seeker who simply wants to climb over and get apprehended by U.S. authorities (perhaps after being turned away from an overwhelmed port of entry). It also doesn’t matter in rural areas, where a few-minute head start makes little difference since populated areas and main roads are hours’ walk away. Meanwhile, most densely populated areas along the border now have high pedestrian fencing.
In a normal presidential administration, we’d have a rational conversation about areas along the border where law enforcement professionals might say “some more barrier there would make my job easier.” Then, there would be orderly discussions with border communities, in which all stakeholders (property owners, Native American communities, local government, businesses, environmental organizations, migrant rights advocates) work out the design and placement.
But we’re not in a normal administration. Instead, this president’s rhetoric has made “the wall,” in the words of New York Times columnist Jamelle Bouie, “a lasting reminder of the white racial hostility surging through this moment in American history.” We cannot support building even a mile of new barrier under these circumstances—denying a voice to border communities and characterizing the “wall” as a means to keep out “rapists” and “animals” from Latin America.
In advance of the February 15 shutdown deadline, as an alternative to Trump’s border wall, here’s what the House Democrats are proposing. This is as summarized by Rep. Lucille Roybal-Allard (D-California) in today’s House-Senate conference committee meeting:
As the government shutdown drags on, the White House sent a mass mailing to Congress today making its case for a border wall and a crackdown on asylum seekers.
A letter and a slideshow PDF present a lot of data and statistics. But nearly all of them tell only part of the story, leaving out important context.
I quickly threw together this annotated version of the White House’s main slides, and shared it as widely as possible. This was a rush job—such is “rapid response”—but I think it came out OK.
January 16, 2021 update to everyone who’s been asking: I do plan to make a 117th Congress spreadsheet. My guess is by mid-February. First, I want contact information for the three brand-new senators (Warnock, Ossoff, and Padilla), and I’m hoping DailyKos produces a 117th Congress Candidate & Politician Guide spreadsheet, which if they do will be linked from here. Thankfully, the unitedstates/congress-legislators database on GitHub remains actively updated.
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