ICE Kidnaps 5-Year-Old As Bait, House Dems Will Vote To Send Firm Message To Please Stop That
Maybe Chuck Schumer and Senate Dems will hold ICE accountable. That could happen.
On Tuesday, ICE thugs in the Minneapolis suburb of Columbia Heights abducted a five-year-old boy and his father as they arrived home from the boy’s pre-K class. The goons then made the little boy go knock on his own front door and ask to be let in, “in order to see if anyone else was home — essentially using a five-year-old as bait,” according to a statement by the school superintendent, Zena Stenvik, who rushed to the home when she learned that little Liam Ramos and his father had been grabbed. The ploy doesn’t appear to have resulted in any additional arrests, but Liam and his father were spirited away to an ICE prison in Texas. When Liam’s older brother got home from middle school 20 minutes later, his father and brother were gone, but he was helped by school personnel who stayed there to meet him.
An attorney for the family pointed out that the family has an active asylum case and was admitted to the US at a port of entry, legally, back before Trump decided that not even people admitted legally are actually here legally. The photo taken by Superintendent Stenvik, released to the media, reminded a lot of people of a line from Anne Frank’s diary:
That’s your context for this story about what congressional Democrats, who are in the minority in Congress but not altogether powerless, are doing to stop it. There are very real, infuriating limits to what a party that’s out of power can do. But goddamn it, Democrats haven’t yet come close to doing everything they could be doing within those limits.
Case in point. (And this, dear reader, is where I started this piece in preparation of today’s vote on DHS funding.) Nearly all Democrats in the House of Representatives are expected to vote against a bill to fund the Department of Homeland Security today because it does virtually nothing to rein in the brutal goons carrying out Donald Trump’s deportation/ethnic cleansing agenda.
In a closed-door caucus meeting Wednesday, Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries and other members of leadership urged members to vote against the bill, which is among the final spending bills that need to pass to avoid a partial government shutdown at the end of January.
But here’s the other shoe going thud: Jeffries is “recommending” that Dems vote against the DHS appropriation, but isn’t going to whip votes to pressure all members of the caucus to vote no. That gives permission to a handful of Democrats in swing districts to vote for the bill, as if that would protect Republicans running against them this fall from calling them soft on crime or immigration anyway.
Worse, even if the DHS funding bill were blocked, Trump’s deportation army already has $175 billion in funding from the Big Godawful Bill, and nothing in the DHS appropriation changes that. Our best hope in the short term may remain a meteor hitting the White House during a Cabinet meeting.
In the run-up to today’s vote, Democratic negotiators from the House and Senate managed to get a few minor “guardrails” into the DHS funding bill, but as David Dayen points out at The American Prospect, the bill does nearly nothing to actually make ICE accountable:
It “flat-funds” ICE at current levels for the fiscal year, although in real terms it’s an increase to the budget, because the previous year included a one-time “anomaly” of additional spending. It restricts spending on detention that could theoretically lower capacity to 41,500 beds from a proposed 50,000. And there are some limitations on what DHS can shift from other agencies into ICE. But because the bill includes no penalties or enforcing mechanisms to ensure that its funding directives are actually adhered to, these funding boundaries are not terribly meaningful.
The bill also includes a bit of extra funding for monitoring safety at detention facilities, mandatory body cameras for deportation goons, and additional training for agents, in the wan hope that they might be capable of learning how not to completely ignore the Constitution — and since ignoring the Constitution is confirmed, out-loud DHS policy anyway, we don’t know why “training” would help. There’s nothing in the bill to ensure funds are used for those purposes, and Trump has already made clear that his administration will move money around and ignore congressional spending priorities anyway.
That’s why Jeffries and other House Dems oppose the bill: It does little more than gesture at asking ICE to be a little less thuggish. But again, by not whipping today’s vote, Jeffries stopped well short of doing everything that can be done, even within the constraints of what’s possible.
For instance, yes, even if Jeffries whipped votes and got every last Democrat to oppose it, the DHS funding bill is likely to pass with full GOP support anyway, because math. But there would have been at least some question of whether Republicans could actually get all their members to show up: They’re down to a two-vote majority in the House, and attendance has been a problem for Rs already this year. With a handful of Democrats voting to allegedly cover their asses in November, more than two Republicans can feel free to nope out, and probably will.
And then there’s the next fight, in the Senate, where, as Dayen notes, “a large show of support against [the bill] from House Democrats could make it a heavier lift in the Senate, where Democrats would be needed for final passage to avert a filibuster.” The typical way to maximize opposition to the bill is to whip the House vote, not simply “recommend” a no vote. But Jeffries has already sent a signal.
The analogous situation is when Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer pronounced himself a no on the legislation that ended the shutdown in November, while doing nothing to stop several Senate Democrats from providing the votes necessary to pass that legislation. In general, the job of a caucus leader is to unify the caucus, rather than take idiosyncratic personal votes.
That unity isn’t forthcoming, and there’s little reason to think Schumer will find his spine this time. Instead, as one source on Capitol Hill told Dayen, there are just enough Democrats who are “terrified of being labeled anti–law enforcement. […] They want this to go away so they can talk about the cost of living more. Problem is, it’s not going away.”
Yes, Americans are mad about high prices. But we’re fucking furious about our cities being invaded, armed thugs shooting at us, and the relentless brutality every goddamned day. “At least we got funding for body cameras” won’t answer, particularly when there’s little likelihood ICE will wear the fucking things or release the footage.
Leading up to today’s vote, a few Democrats have introduced bills like one supported by the House Progressive Caucus, which would have stripped the Big Ugly Bill’s ICE funding and redirected it to fund affordable housing. A lovely idea that went nowhere, because outside the hundred or so members of the Progressive Caucus, there’s not enough desire to tell ICE to get fucked. Not even after the murder of Renee Good. Maybe the kidnapping of a little boy — and of at least three other minors from the same district, all of them citizens — will light a fire under Democrats. Maybe it’ll take more murders of civilians? The murder of a child by ICE, caught on camera in high definition by a bystander or a school principal? That feels like the course we may be on at this rate.
[Guardian / American Prospect / Politico / WaPo (gift link)]
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Middle-school pupil comes home...house is empty, no little brother nor father, school officials trying to act in loco parentis...altogether now, folks: THE FUCKING CRUELTY IS THE POINT!
Thank you for your attention to this matter,
If the DNC had one iota of strategic sense they would charter a few planes and fly every senator and rep to Minneapolis and hold a protest on the same street where Rene Good was murdered. It’s politics 101. Instead they just hide behind the dais and bloviate.