652: ICE Capades
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I had a weird conversation with the congressman this week. This was Mark Pocan, Democrat of Wisconsin, the main sponsor of a bill to do this thing that protesters have been calling for the last few months, abolish ICE, the Immigration and Customs Enforcement Agency. His bill would terminate the agency. Immigration enforcement would continue, but a bipartisan commission would hand off the stuff that ICE does to other federal agencies and eliminate anything it deems inhumane, cruel, or a violation of international agreements. The one year the agency would not exist, it would be abolished, but the politics of this are so peculiar that in our half-hour conversation the congressman could not bring himself to say the actual words that he would abolish ICE. Do you want to abolish the agency? I think I've answered that question a few times, I rough. Just yes or no, do you want to abolish the agency? I rough for a half hour I've given you a conversation on this and I think I've explained what I'm trying to do. Do you have the bill because you need me to shoot you the words? I'm not sure if you have it in front of you. I have it in front of me. It says to establish a commission that would terminate immigration and customs enforcement. It's establish a commission to reassign the essential duties they're created by ICE to other agencies and to get rid of the unnecessary duties. That's the essential thrust of the bill and that's what we're trying to accomplish. Right, so you do want to terminate the agency, you do want to abolish the agency? I want to make sure the essential duties the agency has. To understand why he was talking this way, let me tell you the story of his last two weeks in Congress. It began when he proposed his bill to abolish ICE. Mainly, he and his co-sponsors were objecting to the way the President Trump has the agency going after undocumented immigrants these days. One of his co-sponsors, Congresswoman Primella Jayapal, told me they had no illusions about this ever making it to the floor of the house. No, no, no, because no immigration bills on our side get brought to the floor. I mean, we're not even ones that have significant co-sponsorship, including Republican co-sponsorship like the Dream Act. So it was very clear to us that this was just a messaging bill for us to be able to really talk about how outrageous the agency is. So they introduced their bill and it got some Democratic support, but you don't really love it, Republicans. They have really jumped the sharks on the left. This is the Speaker of the House, Paul Ryan. It's an amazing, it's the craziest position I've ever seen and they are just, they just keep, they're tripping over themselves to move to the far to the left. They're out of the mainstream of America. For months now, actually, conservative media have loved any hint that the Democrats want to abolish ICE, consider their whole narrative that the Democrats are soft on immigration and adds a kind of wingnut extremist edge to it, like people who call for the abolition of the internal revenue service. In that way, abolish ICE is the build the wall of the left, well, I don't like a punch to the jaw.
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