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Granted, and given ideal circumstances I agree with all of that.
What can’t and doesn’t work is having hundreds of thousands of people arrive every year and then having to follow an expensive multi-month process for every single migrant to get rid of them.
In short, how do you propose to square truly mass migration with giving each migrant due process, given real-world legal and financial constraints?
The government can hire more immigration judges. There are extremely few of them.
But you're missing the point. You can deport people without paying to have them imprisoned.
~700, which is roughly the same number as US district judges.
Taking the number of illegal immigrants as 8 million (no clue if this is accurate, but I've seen it tossed around a lot recently so just using it for ballpark math), assuming a one-hour hearing for each (longer than I think they usually get but let's be generous with "due process"), standard 8 hour work days, to process them in a single year would take 3000-3500 additional immigration judges, making them the largest group of federal judges by a huge margin if I'm reading the other numbers right.
Annual salary averages somewhere north of 150K, but using that for this lazy math would put this Immigration Judge Year at $450M in salaries. Not a crazy amount looking at DOJ's budget and other program expenses.
Obviously lots of other expenses, hiring them for a single year is a bit absurd, etc etc. Just thought it would be interesting to put some numbers to what a useful increase would look like.
If some country will take them for free. We don't have extra Australias laying around anymore.
Paying other countries to take them without strict imprisonment is also an option that seems to work somewhat for, ha, Australia.
That seems like an extremely low number to me. Why aren't there ten times that number? That's about one immigration judge for every 500,000 people. As you point out, it's not nearly enough to handle the number of cases in a timely manner.
Canada has more judges than this, and we have 1/8 the population of the US.
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Well, for example, you could minimize damage by not sending deportees to foreign prisons. Just fly them out and let them off at the airport and don't let them back in again. Whether the country to which they've been returned wants them locked up is its problem and they'll have to arrest them by their own means and prove a case against them within the local justice system to do that.
Well - do we know, actually, that this isn't what happened here? I think it's pretty likely they did in fact fly to an airport and not directly to a prison, and that it's pretty likely they did in fact turn them over to El Salvadoran custody at that point. Or are you making the stronger demand that we not deport anyone who is likely to be imprisoned in their home country? Unfortunately this amounts to a demand that we provide sanctuary and extra privileges to the world's criminals, which is outrageous.
Trump actively liaised with El Salvador, and apparently paid it to imprison these people. This isn't a case where we flew the deportees to El Salvador, and El Salvador separately decided to indict them upon their arrival. It's not clear to me that Garcia has been formally charged with anything specific in El Salvador, and I would be astounded if he had gotten a fair trial there. Had America taken the handcuffs off him at the airport and let him go where he pleased from there, it's not clear to me that El Salvador would have any desire, let alone just cause, to arrest him unless he started committing crimes there. This is what I propose we do; it seems like a pretty clear middle ground between "refuse to deport anyone who might be imprisoned by their home country" and "actively ask for and facilitate their imprisonment once they're returned".
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Sure, I’m fine with that. I suspect the prison is an El Salvador requirement - one problem with deporting people (especially criminals) is that lots of countries don’t actually want these guys back. This gives El Salvador an excuse to demand payment and guarantees that the returnees won’t be a nuisance.
Unfortunately it doesn’t deal with the main problem though.
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