As President Joe Biden is expected to announce an executive action that will mark the most aggressive plan to crackdown immigration through the southern border and Texas border mayors travel to DC to show their support, Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights (RFK) has released a statement against the current administration's immigration plans. The statement, available on the organization's website, begins as follows:
"Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights is profoundly disappointed by the Biden administration's plans to increase federal criminal prosecutions of migrants accused of nothing more than crossing a border. Decades of data on prosecutions for border crossing make it clear: mass incarceration does not deter people fleeing persecution"
The data the statement references is from a 2021 study from the American Immigration Council which looked into figures from as far back as 2004 to conclude that "criminalizing migrants is not an effective deterrent" for migration," adding that "rather, migration to the United States is driven primarily by factors such as the security situation and economic conditions in a migrant's home country and whether or not a migrant has family in the United States."
The RFK statement goes on to recount some of the negative consequences of these prosecutions in recent US history:
"The United States has a dark history of using border crossing prosecutions to criminalize asylum-seeking families, including when the Trump administration sundered children from their criminally prosecuted parents. And prosecutions for border crossing are racially discriminatory, targeting Hispanic people at a rate of 99 percent, vastly disproportionate to their share of the immigrant population"
The statement concludes that "massive expenditure of taxpayer dollars wasted on border prosecutions" would be better spend elsewhere, enhancing more efficient asylum applications "like a right to counsel in immigration court."
Even though many Democrats have pushed for a tougher approach on immigration as of late, Axios reported that some in battleground states have declined the Biden Administration's invitation to join the president on Tuesday as they are currently polling better than him. Among the senators who won't be attending the event on Tuesday are Tammy Baldwin, from Wisconsin, Jacky Rosen, from Nevada and Bob Casey, from Pennsylvania.
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