We've Tried Nothing and We're All Out of Ideas

Illegal immigration is a crisis.

Save your protests. The border has been a porous and ill-managed nightmare for years. The Biden administration's unwillingness to properly resource, staff, and support the institutions necessary to maintain a secure border is one of many stains on a flaccid, ineffectual presidency. Illegal immigration was a crisis, it is a crisis, and the only reason I think a reasonable person might refuse to call it that is the fear, not entirely unfounded, that American presidents often use "crisis" as a code word to empower them to establish oppressive policies.

As a people I think we often misapprehend such oppressive crisis policies as the expressions of iron-fisted tyrants looking for any excuse to impose their will. Far more often they are the result of timid administrators without imagination who see a vast problem and quail at the work involved in pursuing its real and often difficult solution. As a rule, oppressive crisis policies are highly visible policies designed to convey the appearance of bold action. When the government does things like mandating universal vaccinations, passing sweeping 'hate crime' laws, creating a dubiously constitutional surveillance state apparatus, and summarily shipping off anyone with a Chicago Bulls cap and a tattoo that makes a boomer uncomfortable to a concentration camp in El Salvador, it isn't a sign of strength and conviction. It's the universal signal that we've tried nothing and we're all out of ideas!

Just like the mirror image policies to give up and do nothing, this kind of policy is usually evidence of learned helplessness. Jaded public officials think about all the work that goes into constitutional amendments, passing controversial bills, and letting the public peer into the sausage-making process and despair. They think about all the times in the past where that work ended up being for naught and begin to imagine easier ways to achieve what they want. That usually means executive orders. Or not even bothering and just doing whatever they want. Even so, it is an odd strategy for the current administration to pursue, considering that our latest defender-in-chief of kneejerk crisis policies, Vice President JD Vance, literally wrote the book on learned helplessness. Yes, Hillbilly Elegy is a book about a lot of things, but almost all of them boil down to the ways that ease breeds dependency. And yet, if you have been following Vance's public statements on the administration's immigration enforcement policy over the past few weeks, he has done little to suggest that any US political figure is more infected by this malady than he is. If you argued that the US media deserve to be in the conversation for their unwillingness to tackle the question of former President Biden's plainly evident physical and mental decline, of course, I wouldn't argue too much. But when it comes to explaining that we have to do some extreme thing because the alternative seems like such hard work, Vance has no rival and no peer.

But there's more to this recipe. You see, every leader or institution that promotes a crisis policy born of learned helplessness inevitably realizes that they must attach to it a powerful organizing symbol, a narrative to make the easy but extreme policy seem like the right choice over the logical but difficult one. To explain why they're choosing the only moral path, not just doing what's easiest. In this case, there can be no question what the chosen powerful organizing symbol is:

This is what we voted for!

I have no idea if Kilmer Abrego Garcia is a good guy or bad guy.

Truly, I mean that both seriously and literally. If it turns out this is really is an MS-13 guy who slipped through ICE's grip by claiming with credible enough evidence that other gangs were after him and his family, I will have no reason to be surprised. Likewise, if it turns out he really is a guy from a rough place who fled very real dangers, came here illegally, and was later granted a special status by immigration courts as he led a peaceful and law-abiding life, I'd have no reason to doubt it. In short, we know basically nothing.

By way of background, Garcia is the man who was recently sent by the current administration to a prison in El Salvador, despite being in the states legally under a withholding of removal status. You can think of this as a narrow sort of asylum granted to a person which places specific restrictions on their deportation to a particular country, usually granted after they have entered the United States illegally (which Garcia did around 2011). The short story is that Garcia was picked up for loitering as a day laborer outside a Home Depot back in 2019. He had a bunch of cash on him, wore a Bulls hat and sweatshirt an ICE agent said had a print that MS-13 guys liked, and was fingered by an informant as an associate of an MS-13 cell in a city there's no evidence he'd ever even visited. The immigration judge thought ICE's case was flimsy but also didn't see cause for extending full asylum. He did, however, consider the evidence of fear of violence and danger in El Salvador which Garcia presented to be credible. As a result, the judge ruled that he could not be deported to the country from which he purportedly fled gang violence - El Salvador - and the Department of Homeland Security granted him a work permit while he remained. ICE did not appeal. By all accounts, except for a temporary restraining order filed against him by his wife that seems to be resolved now, Garcia seemed to be living a normal life with his family in Maryland, regularly checking in with ICE and building a career as a tradesman.

On March 12, Garcia was detained by ICE and sent on a plane to be imprisoned at the Centro de Confinamiento del Terrorismo (CECOT) in El Salvador. It is a prison for terrorists.

Because he entered the country illegally and was neither granted full asylum nor permanent residency, Garcia could have been deported at any time - just not to El Salvador. There is some question as to whether the existing 2019 hearings were adequate to satisfy requirements for due process around such a deportation, or whether a more recent immigration hearing would have been necessary. For my part, if they picked the guy up and put him on a plane to Mexico, Guatemala, Honduras, France, or basically anywhere else, I don't see the problem.

But he wasn't deported. America sent him to a prison for terrorists in a country that a court forbade. There can be no defense for the action taken by the US government. It was absolutely, unequivocally, 100% unconstitutional. It was absolutely, unequivocally, 100% in violation of a valid court order.

Vance has offered meager defenses for this action, shying away from the actual issue in question (i.e. was it legal to imprison someone in a country forbidden by a valid withholding of removal order) so that he could conflate it in the minds of his social media followers with a much more palatable alternative proposition (i.e. that Garcia probably had received adequate due process to deport but not imprison him to a country other than El Salvador). This is textbook use of the Motte-and-Bailey technique.

Call me crazy but if you got two hearings and a valid deportation order then you shouldn't be in the United States.

Vice President JD Vance, via x.com

The more important reason why Vance offers such a weak defense of the existing due process provided to Mr. Garcia as a justification for imprisonment, however, is the fact that he doesn't think the administration should have to do this at all, whether it's nuanced cases like Garcia's or others where men and women will be deported without so much as a 5-minute hearing to determine if they are, in fact, in this country illegally or reasonably suspected of some crime or action that warrants deportation. Every argument from the vice president over the past three weeks has been in support of a contention in three parts:

1. That the Biden administration created a crisis by allowing tens of millions of illegal immigrants into the country;
2. That providing valid immigration hearings to individuals prior to their deportation to ascertain the legality of their presence is not reasonable because of the scale of the problem the Biden administration created and the resources needed to resolve it; and
3. That because America voted for Trump. who proposed to solve this issue, any interpretation of the due process required which might slow down the resolution of the illegal immigration crisis is a de facto nullification of election results.

I know that may seem like paraphrasing if you haven't been following closely along, but this is literally what Vance has been saying to anyone who will listen.

To say the administration must observe "due process" is to beg the question: what process is due is a function of our resources, the public interest, the status of the accused, the proposed punishment, and so many other factors.

Vice President JD Vance, via x.com

You say immigration courts adjudicate in minutes. Sometimes. How many minutes? And how much background work is necessary before an immigration hearing? And add the times for appeals, first administratively and then judicially. Add asylum claimants, TPS revocations, and any number of other ways the left has used to game the immigration system over the last decade. Are you aware that years before Biden’s migrant wave, this system was already overwhelmed? Now, you cavalierly assume that they can “rocket docket” themselves into a solution despite all actual evidence to the contrary, because sometimes a deportation order can be handled in “minutes.”

Vice President JD Vance, via x.com

Probably the most common strategy of those afflicted with learned helplessness is to equate strict barriers with surmountable challenges. When making a list of reasons we can't run a 7-minute mile, we sagely note that it is impossible to defy the laws of gravity and that both air resistance and friction between our shoes and the road surface cannot be defeated, then equate these with observations that advances in human technology have made couches impossibly comfortable and fast food hamburgers impossibly delicious.

None of these people can articulate a deportation standard that: 1) would satisfy left-wing critics of the administration's immigration policy; 2) would satisfy their intuitions about what "due process" is required; 3) would be workable given resource constraints; and 4) would permit deportation of most of the illegal immigrants allowed under Joe Biden's administration. They want to nullify the results of a democratic election. It's that simple.

Vice President JD Vance, via x.com

From a narrative perspective, what Vance is doing at the end of his statement is entirely necessary. Because the due process requirements of the US Constitution are very specific, highly adjudicated, and not at all in doubt in this case, Vance must create the perception among his supporters that his opponents are attacking something just as important and fundamental. Almost nothing would qualify short of the assertion that opponents of his policy oppose our entire system of democracy. And what do you know - that's precisely the symbol he went with. This strategy of defending egregious policies with "I voted for this" memes has no parallel in modern US politics. In narrative space, it's a 7 standard deviation event.

Density of Language Defending Extreme Policies on "I Voted for this" Grounds

Look, Vance is no dummy. He knows as well as any of us that the "election nullification" argument is absolute horseshit. I mean, no kidding, James. If you run on promises of unicorns in every backyard and rainbows on every horizon, you're going to run into some people and laws who tell you it can't be done the way you want it to. That does not mean that any of those people or laws are anti-democratic. What it does mean is either that you lied during the campaign to get elected or you're too lazy or daunted by the challenges of leadership to solve the problem in any way other than the helpless way Biden chose (give up and do nothing) or the helpless way the Trump administration is choosing (ignoring the constitution and courts and just doing what you want). But there's an alternative, a way out of this illegal immigration crisis if you're willing to stop loving the ease on which you have become dependent:

You can pass a law, JD.

Remember that you have The Biggest Mandate in History. So lug that big ol' mandate over to the Capitol and get them to pass a bill. Five billion. Ten billion. Hell, fifty billion dollars. Fund the immigration courts to give due process to those being held for deportation on suspicion of being in this country illegally. Is that too hard? Too much work? Surely you won't tell me that's too much money. In the time it took to read this, surely Elon has already saved us enough to pay for it many times over by shutting down $43 quadrillion in LGBT and DEI programs.

I get that you're mad about "the mass invasion of the country [your] ancestors built with their bare hands," as you put it. I mean, it's a dumb flex, because what makes America Great is that the guy who just finished saying the oath is every bit as much an American as you or me. But let's have it your way. My ancestors built this country, too - my dad's family since the 1720s and my mom's family since the 1680s. Know what the best thing they took part in building was? The single greatest political document and limit on the power of the state ever conceived: the US Constitution. So while you extinguish the flaming bag of dog crap Biden left on your doorstep, do you have the courage and will to save this from those who would trample it, too?

Or are you going to be content to look back helplessly on these four years, knowing that you've tried nothing and are all out of ideas?