Subject: Re: We Don't Know Who We're Deporting
Then what purpose was served by having the 5,000 / day provisions in the bill at all?

Because the bill proposed changing the law to allow the complete suspension of the ability to request asylum when the trigger was hit.

Perhaps an analogy will help. A city is having a serious problem with crime and looters, so the city commission proposes giving a new power to the Mayor. They propose giving the Mayor the power to impose a curfew and confine everyone to their homes after dark. But they limit that new power to circumstances when there actually is a very high surge in crime. So they say that the Mayor has the power to impose the curfew and confine folks to their homes only if there have been X arrests over the preceding 48 hours.

This is clearly a bill that does nothing except help the Mayor fight crime....but the opposition party objects. Why is there a trigger? Why does this power to impose a curfew only kick in at X arrests? The right number of arrests is zero. Isn't this just codifying that there should be X crimes?

The answer, of course, is no. The X arrests is just the trigger for the emergency power. It's not codifying that X number of crimes is allowed - it's just describing the circumstances when the curfew can kick in.

That's what the trigger was for. People are allowed to apply for asylum - but if there were so many border encounters that the Border Patrol was being overwhelmed, we would categorically stop people from applying for asylum for a time.