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Notes -
The trouble with this claim...
((well, the broader trouble. Specifically for Abrego Garcia, the man had a 2019 hearing at which he had an opportunity to demonstrate that he was a US citizen or lawful resident; this specific case clearly can't happen to citizens.))
... is that there's a surfeit of lurkers with absolutely no history on the topic always pouring out of the walls, and a deficit of actual principled people. The punchline to this post is that Kelsey Piper suddenly became quite outspoken on immigration policy literally the day of the inauguration, after literally years of ducking it as someone else's field.
I can make the argument that playing stupid games with legal technicalities is bad because I've done so for years, and I've called balls and strikes whether on 'my' team or against it. It's important enough that even as I don't have much time to do online stuff in general right now, I'm writing this, here.
Do you? Fine, you're a brand new poster, you're probably not going to write a ton of top-level posts given this. Do you have any examples of Democratic-friendly
figureheadswriters who actually were horrified, during the actual Obama presidency, about those terrible conditions? Anyone who looked into the conditions encouraged by Biden-era rules and noticed what the results were, on your side?Okay, immigration is not a field everyone spends all way writing about. Do you have any examples of any Principled Worried Person who panicked that COVID gamesmanship about religious services or with visas would Possibly Hurt People Who Count? That a state governor said "just arrest everyone"? Anything?
There's a fun philosophical distinction between whether someone 'really' does something because of their internal state, or because of what they do. I don't particularly care. If I can't tell the difference from outside between Kelsey and The People Who Really Care, it's not something that can change how I have to model your behavior, if Really Caring doesn't modify your behavior.
Notable ones? Not really, no. Critical voices certainly did exist, but they didn't get much national spotlight. As I said, the borderline cult-of-personality around Obama was probably a bad thing; I have to imagine that the desire to maintain Democratic unity under Obama likely had a chilling effect on people who otherwise would've criticized him from the left.
On this, I can confidently say there were, in fact, people on the left who noticed the lack of improvements under Biden- indeed, I was one of them. Unfortunately, since the Biden administration spent most of its existence being attacked relentlessly from the right (and towards the end, even from the center and even from some leftists!) about the perceived border crisis, and calls for harsher crackdowns on immigrants polled pretty well, it was, unfortunately, a pretty foregone conclusion that the Biden administration wasn't going to try and improve those conditions, for fear of giving further ammunition about being 'soft' on the border issue- and that the kids who were still in cages at the time were just going to be SOL.
There were a few times that other left-leaning people I knew personally expressed worries that there would eventually be a backlash to the lockdowns, and there's certainly no shortage of people who've come to view it as a strategic error after the fact...
...But on a broader level, no.
Because there's still quite a lot of us on the left who fundamentally dispute the framing of
I very much do not grant this!
Especially since, frankly, conservative anti-lockdown hysterics at least as good as they got, if not more. Certainly, where I live, "lockdown measures" were a total joke due to Republican-lead efforts to fight the lockdowns.
We're simply not going to see eye-to-eye on this particular topic.
On this, I'm not sure that we're really disagreeing?
It is kinda interesting that the two examples you brought up don't actually mention the conditions that brought serious controversy (eg Kelsey's family separation, 'kids in cages' conditions) during the Obama presidency. Instead, the objection is just that he wasn't maximally dgaf about illegal immigration, or to an extent wasn't able to be maximally dgaf because of legal restriction.
A claim presented without evidence can be dismissed... well, I'm not going to say as readily, because I'd like higher standards of discourse, here, but I'll again point to all the people who didn't complain even as things got -- often dramatically! -- worse have names or at least nom de plumes present before this week.
'It wouldn't have worked' is not a good argument, any more than it would have been a reasonable cause for me to duck out here.
I was (and to a lesser extent remain) a COVID hawk, if a bit more libertarian-minded a one ('changing hearts and minds' rather than arresting people has a lot to commend it!). Whether COVID measures were or were not 'right' is an entirely different question than what you're running into here.
If we're supposed to care about process, it matter if the Biden administration paid attention to the process. It matters if the Biden admin told the Supreme Court, while trying to maintain a stay of a lower court decision holding a policy unlawful, said that they wouldn't extend the policy, and then just remade the same one with the serial numbers filed off. Left-leaning people here actually believed it (or at least pretended). It matters if Newsom gets to cancel Easter one year, get slapped down by SCOTUS for putting much heavier restrictions on religious organizations than bike shops, does the exact same thing a second year, gets slapped down a second time, and instead comes back with the same policy with the serial numbers filed off. In many other cases, state or federal regulations were pushed at length and then gamed through mootness so that they could not be challenged at all, either by revising the policy trivially faster than courts could react, or requiring behaviors in time periods that made judicial redreasability impossible.
Yeah, it'd suck if sometimes process leads to less-than-perfectly-ideal results! But that's what principles are; if they never cost you anything, they're just convenient slogans. Not least of all because no small number of your political opponents have different ideas of what those ideal results are!
It's not like COVID is alone, here; if you really want to draw some one-off exception to just that, I can give similar lists for (and, indeed, the "just arrest everyone" example above is unrelated to COVID!). The Saga of Defense Distributed likewise turns on 'oh, this settlement the federal government signed? Doesn't count, now'.
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