Let's recap. Last week, the Wall Street Journal reported that the Biden administration was in negotiations to offer large taxpayer-funded payouts to illegal immigrants impacted by the Trump administration's short-lived (plus wrong and counter-productive, in my view) family/child separation immigration policy. The dollar figures being discussed were in the area of up to $450,000 per affected illegal immigrant. These reports touched off outraged pushback, as even many critics of the jettisoned policy argued that it would be insane to offer rich settlements for hardship endured by people who knowingly put their children at risk and entered the country unlawfully. Hasn't the Biden administration done enough to encourage and incentivize illegal immigration? Points like this quickly entered the public debate:
Biden wants to pay illegal immigrants $450,000 for their hardship while breaking our laws.
— Dan Crenshaw (@DanCrenshawTX) October 28, 2021
For perspective, if a service member is killed in action, their next of kin gets an insurance payment of $400,000.
Let that sink in. https://t.co/J3kuhDhyD5
Asked about these alleged settlement negotiations by Fox's Peter Doocy, President Biden offered a petulant denial -- sneering at Doocy, calling the reports "garbage," and insisting that such payments would not happen:
Peter Doocy asked Biden if a report claiming his administration will pay families separated at the border will "incentivize" people to illegally enter the country.
— Mediaite (@Mediaite) November 3, 2021
Biden: "If you guys keep sending that garbage out, yea..."
Doocy: "So this is a garbage report?"
Biden: "Yea!" pic.twitter.com/b32MkV5TiO
An aggressive denial, perhaps borne of an instinctual understanding that such an arrangement would be deeply alienating to many Americans who already see the Biden administration as a failing, left-wing science experiment. But evidently, the denial did not reflect the actual policy pursuits of the Biden administration. The left-wing ACLU (increasingly just a Democratic front group that has walked away from its civil liberties mission when it conflicts with wokeism) called out Biden's response:
President Biden “may not have been fully briefed about the actions of his very own Justice Department,” the ACLU charged Wednesday, after he labeled as “garbage” a news report that his administration is considering $450,000-per-person payouts to families separated after illegally crossing the US-Mexico border. In a statement, ACLU executive director Anthony Romero warned Biden that he risked “abandoning a core campaign promise to do justice for the thousands of separated families. “We respectfully remind President Biden that he called these actions ‘criminal’ in a debate with then-President Trump, and campaigned on remedying and rectifying the lawlessness of the Trump administration,” Romero said. “We call on President Biden to right the wrongs of this national tragedy.”
Other reports suggest that after Biden publicly rejected the huge payments under discussion, administration lawyers scrambled to change their offers:
Lawyers negotiating payments for migrant families who were separated by the Trump administration when they crossed the U.S. border say President Joe Biden’s remarks at a press conference on Wednesday may have hurt prospects for their clients receiving large payouts...Shortly after Biden’s comments, lawyers from the Justice Department reached out to lawyers representing the families, including those from the American Civil Liberties Union...In a statement on Thursday, ACLU Executive Director Anthony Romero said, “The president’s comments and congressional pushback do appear to have affected settlement negotiations, which were admittedly in flux.”
In an about-face, a spokesman for Biden said yesterday that on second thought, the president is actually fully comfortable with the sort of settlement payments he'd just dismissed in his cranky answer to Doocy's question:
.@KJP46 cleans up Biden’s comments yesterday re: the potential $450,000 settlements for immigrants affected by the family separation policies of the Trump admin. Karine says Biden is “perfectly comfortable” w settlements if it comes to that (Biden had said it’s not gonna happen)
— Seung Min Kim (@seungminkim) November 4, 2021
We’ve gone from “that’s garbage” to “perfectly comfortable” in 24 hours https://t.co/ogagACeZPE
— Scott Jennings (@ScottJenningsKY) November 4, 2021
I suspect they way they'll try to wriggle out of this is by claiming Biden denied the high dollar amounts, not the payments themselves. But the report cited above suggests that the "garbage" reports were correct, then Biden's reaction (was he ignorant of what was happening on this front, from his own team?) impacted the ongoing conversations. The question now becomes: What is the new range under discussion?
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