Combing through the recent torrent of reports about the high-stakes “border deal” being debated on Capitol Hill, one would hardly know that the “dealmaking” involved concerns the lives and fates of actual flesh-and-blood human beings. Instead, euphemism reigns as both Republicans and Democrats execute the kind of rhetorical magic trick that takes a humanitarian crisis and disappears all traces of humanity from it. Both parties agree that “something must be done” about the so-called “border crisis,” and that something, per usual, is more law enforcement, punishment, incarceration, asylum denials, and violence to deter humans from attempting to cross into the United States.
The worst place on Earth for any vulnerable group to be is on the business end of a bipartisan Washington consensus, and the consensus in Washington now regarding the US-Mexico border is that there’s an “invasion” that must be repelled with force and deliberate cruelty. Even the nominally liberal party in the United States, the Democratic Party, is increasingly abandoning the pretense of taking a humanitarian approach to the state-enforced violence at the border. For 30 years, the bipartisan consensus on “border security” has amounted to a perpetual policy commitment to “deterrence” through violence, mass expulsions, and incarcerations, but Democrats and the White House outright embracing what is, by their own admission, a far-right border bill is an escalation heretofore unseen. Yes, in one sense, it is an unmasking of what was already present in the longstanding bipartisan regime of US border and immigration policy enforcement, but there is something different here, too. This is new political territory.
The worst place on Earth for any vulnerable group to be is on the business end of a bipartisan Washington consensus.
And this abstract, dehumanizing partisan back-and-forth is largely how this high-stakes issue of “border security” is being framed by US media. A “deal” that could entail decades of widespread suffering for hundreds of thousands of current and future immigrants is being presented to the public as an anodyne policy dispute with only rare—if any—mention of the actual human stakes of said policies.
Taking the lead on this new harsh approach is the Biden White House, which has lurched to the right on “border security,” attempting to “call the GOP’s bluff,” adopting many of the cruelest, most carceral policies of the Republicans and Trump in an effort to score some type of hypocrisy gotcha in what they are selling as a bold attempt to secure an electoral victory in the 2024 presidential election. By adopting all of the Republicans’ “border security” bill language, they insist, they can neutralize the “soft on immigration” attack against Biden 2024 and turn the tables on Republicans as the party dedicated to “border chaos.”
Immigration advocates are sounding the alarm on the proposed Senate plan shaped by the White House that, among other brutal measures, more than doubles ICE’s enforcement budget against immigrants. The National Immigrant Law Center released a statement Sunday admonishing Biden, writing that the president “campaigned three years ago on the promise of restoring America’s historic status as a safe haven for refugees and asylum seekers. Now near the end of his presidential term, he is threatening to close the southern border and shepherd legislation which would violate humanitarian norms and international refugee law.” United We Dream, a youth-led immigration rights group, said in a statement, “This deal guts our asylum system, closes our borders to the most vulnerable, increases detention and deportations.” The ACLU has condemned the bill’s framework, writing that the deal “would destroy longstanding protections for people seeking asylum and does nothing to fix our immigration system.” The human stakes of tripling down on the US’s already severe, punitive approach to “securing the border” are not academic. According to the International Organization for Migration, the US-Mexico border is the world’s deadliest land route. The organization documented 686 deaths and disappearances of migrants on the US-Mexico border in 2022, which is almost certainly an undercount.
But one would not learn any of this from recent mainline media reporting on the “border” plan or the subsequent partisan back-and-forth.
Take this CNN report on the “border deal” and the broader debate around funding military supplies for Israel and Ukraine. The human stakes are entirely omitted and the cruel and violent policies are presented as sterile and generalized policy preferences. We are given the normal euphemisms: “tighter border security,” “significantly restrict,” and “tough” (used 4 times). Indeed, Biden is stripped of all moral agency, as readers are informed by CNN that circumstances have “forced [Biden] to take a tougher stance.” One is given the deliberate impression that Biden has no choice but to adopt many of the far right’s border policies for both practical law enforcement reasons and to fend off attacks in the upcoming presidential race.
The human stakes of tripling down on the US’s already severe, punitive approach to “securing the border” are not academic. According to the International Organization for Migration, the US-Mexico border is the world’s deadliest land route.
Likewise, the New York Times offers no substantive criticism of the “deal” on humanitarian grounds. The only pushback we get is one throwaway line from ‘influential left-wing Democrat” Sen. Alex Padilla, who offers a polite and vague critique that the deal “misses the mark” and “includes a new version of a failed Trump-era immigration policy that will cause more chaos at the border, not less.” The rest of the article treats the deal as a sensible, reasonable compromise between two bickering parties.
The Washington Post report ignores any immigrant voices or immigrant rights groups entirely, seeking affirming quotes from the “Bipartisan Policy Center,” a conservative think tank funded by Walmart and a consortium of banking interests, whose previous claim to fame was defending worker regulations in sweatshops. We also hear from the centrist Migration Policy Institute, which offers some process feedback, but no criticism. Like with the New York Times article, the only token criticism is from a “handful of Democratic defections” in Congress—in this case, Sens. Alex Padilla and Robert Menendez—but no actual immigrants or immigrant rights groups are heard from.
The Associated Press ran the same script, using sanitizing cliches like “strict,” “tough,” and “overhaul the asylum system” without offering any voice to migrants or their advocates or detail any of the human stakes of the “deal.” Financial Times called the violent and cruel new laws a potential “showdown” over a “border crackdown.” FT did not mention any opposition to the “crackdown” at all—in Congress or otherwise—insisting that “Biden’s allies in Congress have been making increasingly impassioned pleas for fellow lawmakers to support the plan.” Reading the FT report on the debate, not only would one be totally ignorant of the actual human stakes being debated, they wouldn’t even know there is opposition at all.
These reports in CNN, the New York Times, the Washington Post, Associated Press, and Financial Times on the proposed “border deal” did not print comments from any immigrants or any immigrant rights group. Immigrants and their advocates are simply a nonfactor in the ongoing political “debate” over the “border crackdown.”
Most sociopathic of all the coverage was in Politico, whose Jan. 29 roundup of the negotiations was headlined “Can Dems flip the border script?” In this piece, the Democrats calling the GOP’s bluff on immigration is entirely framed as a clever election year strategy with absolutely no mention that these policies could potentially harm and deport tens of thousands of people. “Democrats believe they can make the case to voters that despite years of shouting about the crisis at the border, Republicans are the ones sitting on their hands as the migrant influx strains law enforcement and social services — all because they are beholden to Trump.” Politico’s Rachael Bade, Eugene Daniels, and Ryan Lizza write like gossipy middle schoolers. “We’re about to find out whether this turn-the-tables strategy will work. Text of the months-in-the-making Senate deal is expected to finally be released in the coming days, with full details on its overhaul of asylum policies, new powers to expel migrants and beefed up federal resources.”
“Expel migrants” seems bad—perhaps Bade, Daniels, and Lizza thought it prudent to ask one of these thousands of migrants who could be “expelled” how they feel about the legislation? Obviously not, Instead we are simply given multiple quotes from dead-eyed political consultants about how this will all play out in the polls and the 2024 election.
And this is how the brutality, violence, and dehumanization of our border surveillance and punishment system is sanitized and packaged to the public: Not as a strategy of systemic dehydration, violence incarceration, and breaking up of families, but a vague system of “strict” “enforcement” of “tougher laws.” If these right-wing policies are going to become bipartisan consensus and soon—it seems—law, perhaps American media outlets can stop framing them as mere partisan horse race gotcha issues and instead try, at least for one token paragraph, talking to those actually impacted by them.
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