You seem to be indifferent to the resources consumes by the 60%. To me it is an outrage.

I'm not. I absolutely think that we should be bolstering the immigration review system so that these folks aren't waiting 4.5 years for a court date. Even if you forget that this is an unconscionable way to treat people who generally have a decent claim that they're being persecuted by their home governments, it's foolish not to devote resources to speeding that up given how many resources are consumed by the excessive wait times.

What I'm pushing back on is the idea that you can just have a random Border Patrol officer make these decisions. They can't. It's the old Law and Order intro: you two separate but equally important groups, the Border Patrol (who monitor the border and apprehend crossers) and the immigration judges and lawyers (who decide the merits of asylum claims). A Border Patrol officer isn't a lawyer or judge, and they're neither trained for or tasked with making final determinations on the status of asylum claims as part of detention review.

If you don't like the amount of resources consumed by the 60%, there's an easy fix. Once they've lost their asylum cases, they can be deported. It's only because we refuse to properly fund the immigration judicial process sufficient to requirements that they end up hanging around for so long. It would be so much cheaper and less disruptive to everyone involved to get that time frame down to months rather than years. But you'd never get that through Congress.

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