Dem
47
GOP
53
And here is the companion to the above item, one that illustrates: (1) the importance of an independent judiciary, (2) that the federal judges ARE NOT backing down and (3) that the Trump administration tends to make rash, knee-jerk decisions.
At the start of this month, the Trump administration deleted the records of a whole bunch of international students from a key federal immigration database, because these folks had an "encounter" of some sort with law enforcement (almost invariably NOT resulting in a conviction, usually not even resulting in an arrest). This act, which was certainly illegal, was clearly intended to convert these individuals' status into "illegal." After all, if you're not in the database, you're not documented, and if you're not documented, you are not supposed to be in the country.
We have absolutely no doubt that whoever was behind this (Stephen Miller?) saw a two-fer: lash out at those mamby-pamby pinko-commie universities, and lash out at those brown-skinned immigrants. In some cases, it was a three-fer, since many of the foreign students are also Muslim. You can practically see Miller, or someone like him, calling up Elon Musk to brag about being so efficient.
The problem is that foreign-born students were an unbelievably stupid target, for a number of reasons. First, as Harvard is demonstrating right now, universities have access to lots of money and lots of lawyers. And faculty and students both would rebel if their administrations did not rise to the defense of those students who had been targeted. Second, as we have pointed out a few times, it is generally very expensive to come to the U.S. for grad school. That means that many (perhaps most) students who do it also have money—enough to hire a lawyer, certainly. Third, as you might have noticed, the best universities in the country are not all located in areas covered by the Fifth Circuit. They are located in many, many federal judicial circuits, and disproportionately in the circuits that lean left. For example, the Ninth Circuit alone covers Stanford, CalTech, UCLA, Berkeley, USC, UCSD, UC Davis, UC Irvine, UCSB and the University of Washington, all of them ranked in the top 50 schools in the nation by US News (and in the order they are listed here). That meant that the ensuing lawsuits were going to end up before many, many different federal judges, with few or none who were going to be friendly to the administration's position.
As a result of all of these factors, the lawsuits came fast and furious, and by the bushel. It's not entirely clear when the Trump administration updated the database, but April 2 is a good guess, since universities began to discover the problem on April 3 and 4. Within 3 weeks of that (i.e., by April 23), there were over 100 lawsuits while multiple dozens of judges issued more than 50 restraining orders between them. And so yesterday, faced with this disastrous wall of resistance, the administration surrendered, and said it would reverse the new policy and would restore the affected students to the new database.
Why did Team Trump decide to change course like this? It is certainly possible that they looked at the situation, and the inevitable string of losses, and decided to cut bait. That said, this administration is often happy to fight Quixotic battles on Uncle Sam's dime, because even a loss "owns the libs," as far as much of the base is concerned.
A better—or, at least, more precise—answer is suggested by some new polling this week, particularly the latest from AP-NORC. Their numbers make clear that Republican voters are overwhelmingly happy as clams with the administration's approach to immigration, with 84% approving and 15% disapproving. However, Democrats are livid, with 16% approving and 82% disapproving and, critically, independent voters are not far behind the Democrats, with 37% approving and 64% disapproving. As a result of this, overall approval for the Trump administration's immigration policy, across all political stripes, is just 46% approval, with 53% disapproval. And this is the White House's strongest issue, with Trump doing much better on it than on, say, the economy (36% approval).
Anyhow, Polling 101 teaches that if the numbers say you've gone too far, then you probably need to go less far. And so, in the context of the polling, it is not too surprising that the White House would dial back an anti-immigration initiative that is particularly extreme, and particularly likely to generate lots and lots of bad headlines. (Z)