Editorial: Bad faith negotiations: No immigration restriction is enough for Trump & GOP

Senate talks on immigration reform have been misrepresented as either side negotiating over its policy preferences. In actuality, Republicans have held Ukraine aid hostage and demanded that the Democrats acquiesce to increasingly unhinged restrictions, rejecting offers that they themselves would have pushed just a few years ago.

There are no liberal or pro-immigrant policy prescriptions even on the table — not regularization for DACA recipients, not expansions of case management or other services for asylum seekers, not even reformulations of the work visa and residency processes, which are broadly popular among the large business interests that the GOP would typically give at least some import to.

The haggling is focused only on limiting immigration.

Details include significantly raising the initial standard for beginning an asylum process, expanding detention and deportation and heavy restrictions on the use of the discretionary parole program. The latter point especially highlights the extent to which Republicans’ ostensible preoccupation with order and procedure are secondary to the simple desire to turn people away, given how effective parole has been in keeping migrants from much more chaotic border arrivals.

Democrats — under political pressure from blue-state mayors and governors, no longer in the pro-immigrant lockstep that emerged in response to Donald Trump’s depravities and panicking over the weaponization of immigration in the coming elections — seem as willing as they have in years to give their Republican counterparts what they purport to want, with President Joe Biden promising to shut down the border if he gets the power.

Yet the Dems are finding that the GOP still won’t say yes. Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell all but axed the deal last week at the behest of Trump, the almost certain nominee for president. As bad as the negotiations were, we’d still take some sort of legislative dialogue over the crash and burn, yet again, of congressional efforts to do anything around immigration.

At the end of the day, Trump doesn’t want any deal here because that waters down one of his most reliable political weapons.

The warped idea is that the nation is being practically overrun by people who at minimum all have meritless claims and at worst are dangerous, and he’s the only one capable of handling it. He started with a version of this message on the very first day of his presidential campaign almost nine years ago and he wants it to be his closing argument now.

To some extent, this argument rests on the idea that he cannot be constrained by the law, and so even getting what he wants through legislation is not enough. Trump has been explicit about this position when it comes to immunity from prosecution, but in the end his goal is to be fully untethered from this country’s legal framework and act against his perceived enemies, which include those seeking asylum.

He’s not alone, joined by Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, who has declared that he will ignore federal authority and continue his operation to build a parallel immigration enforcement apparatus in his state. Every other Republican governor save for Vermont’s Phil Scott has now declared their support for Abbott, along with several other prominent Republican elected officials. The message is clear: they’ll do things their way, our system of laws be damned.

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