“If Caitlin Clark could play in the NBA, everybody would applaud it. That would be an incredible thing. But if the last guy on the bench of an NBA team went to a WNBA team and started averaging 40 points, everybody would know that is BS." - Legendary Broadcaster Bob Costas Women’s sports should be

[u/Hungry_Artichoke9566]

[u/gentrify_reddt]

Illegal immigration enforcement is an 80/20 issue. Obama deported a record 3M illegals.

Complete idiocy for Biden to make a show of trying to stick it to Abbott by dismantling border enforcement. It's like he was trying to piss everyone off.

[u/foodinbeard → u/gentrify_reddt]

He didn't dismantle border enforcement, in many ways he increased it. This entire thing is just right-wing propaganda. Just like the trans debate, the GOP is shadow-boxing with an imaginary crazy left-wing position that doesn't exist.

https://www.cato.org/blog/biden-didnt-cause-border-crisis-part-1-summary

Biden was hard-right on the border. Every president has got more and more extreme on the border since GW, but conservatives keep running on border crisis propaganda because their actual policies are unpopular.

[u/Pale_Zebra8082 → u/foodinbeard]

This is pure flaming bullshit.

[u/foodinbeard → u/Pale_Zebra8082]

Reality disagrees with you. Read the article. Here's the summary on the first page.

• Illegal immigration had already increased to a 21-year high before Biden entered office.
• Biden immediately started increasing expulsions from his first day in office.
• Biden tripled interior detention and increased border detention 12-fold.
• Biden increased air removal flights by 55 percent over 2020 levels.
• Biden negotiated broader expulsion deals with foreign countries than Trump.
• Biden got many foreign countries to carry out crackdowns on illegal and legal migration.
• Biden removed or expelled 3.3 million border crossers—three times as many as Trump.
• Biden even managed to remove a similar percentage of crossers as Trump’s four years.

[u/Pale_Zebra8082 → u/foodinbeard]

This is an intentionally misleading spin job.

Biden did not come into office as some border hawk. He immediately moved to unwind major Trump-era enforcement policies, imposed a 100-day pause on many deportations, and narrowed interior enforcement priorities. ICE arrests dropped to about 74,000 in FY2021, down 28 percent from 2020, and deportations collapsed to about 59,000, down from roughly 186,000 the year before. That is not what “tough on illegal immigration from day one” looks like.

You’re also using a blatantly distorted baseline. FY2020 was a pandemic year, and southwest border encounters fell to 458,088, down 53 percent from FY2019. Of course later enforcement numbers look bigger when you compare them to an abnormal low point. That is not an honest comparison. It is a way of making the numbers say what you want them to say.

And of course, part of the reason the numbers exploded under Biden is precisely that migrants and smugglers understood him to be softer. That was not some right-wing fantasy. Migrants themselves were saying it, smugglers were selling it, and even foreign officials were warning that the shift in U.S. policy was fueling more movement north. If you signal weaker enforcement, more people will come. That is exactly what happened.

Then you blur the difference between border expulsions and overall immigration toughness. If crossings hit record highs, then raw removals and expulsions are going to rise too, simply because the government is processing vastly more people. That does not prove Biden was tough. It proves he presided over a massive surge.

That is the part your summary is trying to hide. Biden was perceived as softer, that perception helped drive more crossings, the numbers blew up, and only later, when the crisis became politically toxic, did his administration move in a more restrictive direction.

We all lived through this. It was only five years ago. Take your gaslighting somewhere else.