Thread by @rdevro

Greetings from Tucson. A few points about this piece — it’s long so I’ll try to summarize.

There’s a lot happening on the border. What all of this will look like by the end of the summer remains to be seen, but the upshot is this: the future looks grim theintercept.com/2018/06/12/bor…

The government is currently breaking apart families by the hundreds on a weekly basis.

Kids who came to the US with their parents are being turned “unaccompanied” in the eyes of the state.

There’s talk of sending these kids, thousands of them, to camps on US military bases.

While blanket family separation is new, the underlying logic here has been the foundation of US border enforcement strategy for more than two decades.

And it has never been shown to have any demonstrable effect on migration flows.

The Border Patrol has never really shifted from the Clinton-era strategy of Prevention Through Deterrence, which funnels migrants away from cities into harsher terrain, like the desert.

Born out of an assumption that enforcement strategies inform the decision-making process of individual migrants, PTD has fueled an explosion in migrant deaths in the desert.

For more on that, go buy @jason_p_deleon's book.

What’s happening now is, in part, as an extension of the PTD logic.

In recent years, the government has come up with a suite of so-called Consequence Delivery Systems that expand on PTD by adding criminal punishments for migrants.

One of those, Operation Streamline, is a core component of the Trump administration’s border strategy, and it’s a mess.

Through group proceedings, Streamline funnels people charged with crossing the border illegally first through the criminal justice system before passing them off to immigration authorities.

In the past, there was prosecutorial discretion for some groups — asylum seekers, parents with kids, etc.

Not so anymore. Now everyone gets prosecuted.

A public defender here told me that in terms of family separations, most of the cases she’s seen have involved first time offenders. That’s a federal misdemeanor. People are losing their kids over misdemeanors.

At Streamline hearing yesterday, I saw a woman weeping, essentially asking that she and her son, who she was separated from, just be deported. That’s common here. People are begging that the government just deport them together. That’s not happening though.

As @adam_wola noted in this excellent analysis last month, we are nowhere near 100 percent enforcement of zero tolerance. If we were, we would see a collapse in the courts, ports and prisons. wola.org/analysis/jaili…

The administration says ramped-up enforcement is necessary because there’s a surge in illegal crossings, but as the experts at @MigrationPolicy noted last week, that’s a misrepresentation of facts on the ground. migrationpolicy.org/news/crisis-bo…

To the extent there is an important uptick to note, it’s in women, children and families showing up to the border.

One veteran Border Patrol chief calls this group “non-impactable traffic” — meaning people who are going to come no matter the government’s enforcement posture.

For more on that, read this @DebbieNathan2 piece from 2015. sacurrent.com/the-daily/arch…

The relationship between border enforcement strategies and deterrence has been the subject of years of academic research. Time and again, this research has uncovered no demonstrable relationship between enforcement strategies and migration levels.

In a 2015 survey of 1,100 recent deportees in Mexico, the Journal on Migration and Human Security found that 55 percent of those interviewed intended to return to the US, even after experiencing enforcement firsthand. jmhs.cmsny.org/index.php/jmhs…

Last week, @verainstitute published a study looking specifically Streamline, which again found no demonstrable impact between Streamline and deterrence.

The report did, however, find that Streamline has created chaos in the federal court system and done considerable damage to due process on an enormous scale. Here's a link. vera.org/publications/o…

So why would multiple administrations, including this one, double down on such a disastrous program? Vera points to an embrace of “deterrence theater.”

Quoting from the report: “The mass criminal prosecution and incarceration of immigrants provides the illusion of reducing unauthorized immigration, but statistical analysis provides no evidence of any deterrent effect.”

All of this is particularly concerning for asylum seekers. The administration claims asylum seekers who present themselves at ports of entry have nothing to worry about.

But, as @DLind lays out here, that claim should not be accepted at face value. vox.com/policy-and-pol…

As for the tens of thousands of asylum seekers who present themselves between ports of entry, zero tolerance mandates that these individuals be arrested, prosecuted and sentenced before they can begin their immigration cases.

If these asylum seekers come with kids, those kids are taken and become unaccompanied minors in a catastrophically broken bureaucracy.

One might argue that is the consequence of parents not applying for asylum “the right way.”

A couple points about that.

First, as Isacson notes, if tens of thousands of asylum seekers started showing up at the nation’s 45 understaffed ports, those ports would quickly be overwhelmed.

Second, this argument assumes a level of control in the process of migration that is unrealistic. By some counts, as many as 120,000 Central American migrants have disappeared trying to reach the US through Mexico in recent years.

In response to PTD, a vast smuggling economy has taken hold in Mexico that migrants have to rely on in order to get across the border. Exactly when, where and how those crossings take place is almost never a decision an individual migrant gets to make.

.@leegelernt, of the @ACLU, says the government’s efforts reflect a critical misunderstanding of the calculus of asylum seekers.

The administration’s enforcement posture won’t stop them from coming, he says, it will just create new layers of misery.

Again, where this goes remains to be seen.

As of right now, the government appears content to rely on dubious and institutionally destructive strategies as a response to a purported surge in illegal crossings, along the way creating a crisis of unaccompanied kids

For more on the nuts and bolts of how zero tolerance is playing out in the courts, particularly in California, read this great piece by @MaxRivlinNadler theappeal.org/chaos-in-the-c…

Fin.