Pinkerton: The Destructive Left-Wing Logic Behind Biden’s Embrace of $450K Reparations for Border Crossers

Sweet Money From Uncle Sugar?

Did you hear the one about the Biden administration’s plan to pay illegal aliens $450,000?  It’s not a joke, even if President Biden, on November 3, called it “garbage” and “not true.” And yet as we shall see, the plan was true, and it did come from his administration.  So while Biden might not like the payoff plan, at least not anymore, it was a real plan bubbling up from within his appointees.  And despite Biden’s blustery denial, it’s still possible, even probable, that big payouts could be forthcoming.  In fact, on November 4, White House deputy press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre mostly walked back her boss’s words from the day before, now asserting that the Biden administration was “perfectly comfortable” with payments.

The White House

So which it it?

Is the Biden administration for or against the $450,000 per person deal?  All we know for sure is that back on October 28, The Wall Street Journal had the scoop on the Biden administration’s plan for the half-million-dollar deal.  The headline read: “U.S. in Talks to Pay Hundreds of Millions to Families Separated at Border: Government is considering payments of $450,000 per person affected by Trump administration’s zero-tolerance policy in 2018.”

As the article detailed, the Departments of Justice, Homeland Security, and Health and Human Services are confronted with some 940 formal legal claims for damages from individuals and families—all of them foreign nationals—that were separated at the border that they tried to cross.  This litigation stems from policies pursued by the Trump administration in 2018.  (These policies, by the way, were the same as Obama administration policies, but that’s a tale for another time.)   

The litigants’ claims are being brokered by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), and are bolstered by entrepreneurial tort lawyers, sniffing the prospect of huge contingency fees for these cases.  According to the Journal, there could be another 4,600 or so claims, and the claims filed so far are demanding about $3.4 million per family.  Thus the federal government’s potential liability could run into the many billions of dollars.

Okay, so that’s how the Biden administration was seeing it, and maybe still does: It’s a good idea to settle, as opposed to go to trial.  And besides, if the Bidenites do settle, they figure that  they can heap all blame on the dreaded Donald Trump and his even more dreaded top immigration adviser, Stephen Miller. 

Fortunately, Republican saw this money-transfer matter much differently.  For instance, House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) tweeted almost immediately: 

Pure insanity.  The Biden administration is reportedly looking to pay $450,000 to illegal immigrants who knowingly broke the law.  It’s a slap in the face to our law-abiding citizens who wake up, go to work, and pay their taxes.

And Rep. Jim Jordan (R-OH) added, “The Biden Administration is considering a plan to pay illegal immigrants nearly $450,000 a person.  American citizens?  Enjoy the high gas prices!”

The Biden Administration is considering a plan to pay illegal immigrants nearly $450,000 a person.

American citizens? Enjoy the high gas prices!

— Rep. Jim Jordan (@Jim_Jordan) October 29, 2021

Other Republicans and conservatives argued that such a payment program would only incentivize more people from around the world to come here.  They have also pointed out that $450,000 is more money than is paid to the families of those Americans who die in military service.  In other words, Americans Last.

Furthermore, that $450,000 payout is about 13 times the median personal income in the U.S., and about 100 times the per capita income in Guatemala, where many of the plaintiffs come from. 

Indeed, the prospect of this Biden boondoggle is so outlandish that it’s a challenge even to get one’s head around it.  Sharing everyone else’s amazement, former president Trump said on October 29, “It’s not even believable what they’re doing.”  

Yes, that is a question: Was this story about the $450,000 payout to trespassers even believable?  Was it somehow fake news?  

In fact, the Journal was correct in its reporting.  And that same day it was confirmed by The New York Times, which quoted Lee Gelernt, the ACLU official leading the payoff negotiations, saying, approvingly, “There is no question that the Biden administration is doing the right thing by providing meaningful monetary compensation, given that the U.S. government deliberately brutalized these families.”  At that point, Gelernt and other lawyers thought they had a deal–a deal which would, by the way, include healthy contingency fees for lawyers involved.   

Still more establishment support for the payments came from The Washington Post, which explained the Bidenites’ thinking this way: “The simple answer is that the administration views it as being the right thing to do, given the cruelty and inhumanity of the policy.”  In that sentence we see a nice big fat planted assumption, namely that the Trump policy was an instance of “cruelty and inhumanity.” And on November 5, University of Alabama law professor Joyce White Vance, a frequent guest on MSNBC, chimed in, to the Washington Post, with the same liberal message: “By negotiating settlements, our government can take steps toward reclaiming its moral authority to speak on human rights issues and can restore families that have been damaged by past U.S. policy.” So in this progressive reckoning, of course victims should get nearly half a million dollars.  

So we can see: the left-leaning legal establishment and the Main Stream Media were solidly on board with the Biden payout. No wonder it took five full days–from the Journal scoop on October 28 to Biden’s dismissal on November 3–for the administration to distance itself from the report. (Perhaps the results of the November 2 election helped clarify Biden’s mind.)

Importantly, that same Washington Post article quoted one legal expert, Heidi Li Feldman of Georgetown University, declaring that if the federal government did not settle for that $450,000, it could face much-larger payouts if the litigation were to move forward and end up before a judge and a jury: “If it goes to trial and one case wins an enormous verdict, that gives other families motivation not to settle.”  And in her op-ed, Vance made the same point. 

And that’s a keeper point: Biden can dismiss the story, and yet the looming payments are part of a legal process, and so even the president might not be able to stop them from being paid out–at least not without extraordinary effort, wrangling his own people.  And in the White House, is Biden known for extraordinary effort?  

Revealingly, on the same day that Biden said the $450,000 story was not true, the ACLU tweeted and said that it was true, or at least it had been true.  Moreover, the ACLU added that the story should be true; that is, that the payments should go forward.  As the ACLU put it, “We call upon President Biden to right the wrongs of this national tragedy.”  We can quickly see that the ACLU will go to court–and that lefty legal group has won plenty of costly cases. 

Indeed, if the ACLU goes to legal war with the Biden administration, that will put many Biden appointees, as well as other Democrats, in a quandary.  Why? Because most Democrats revere the ACLU.  So in a case of ACLU vs. Biden, many on Team Biden will really be, quietly, on Team ACLU.  And so that opens the question of whether or not the Biden Justice Department will really fight the lawsuit(s). It’s not hard for a  lawyer to wink at the other side and throw the case — especially if the judge is on the game, too.  And of course, if Jean-Pierre is correct, the Bidenites won’t fight at all.

After all, plenty of times in the past, the feds have been happy to be sued, and to lose, and to pay out big settlements, all in the name of some political purpose.  For instance, last month the Biden Justice Department agreed to pay $88 million to the families of those killed and wounded in the horrendous 2015 shooting at a Black church in Charleston, South Carolina.  That attack was an act of surpassing wickedness, and the killer is rightly now facing the death penalty.  Yet we have to ask ourselves: Isn’t $88 million too much money for just 14 families?  Should the federal government be paying out millions for each murder and assault?  (And of course, for other victims of crime, including angel families, nothing.)

So, policy of a costly kind is being made by federal executive branch lawyers operating far from the oversight of any legislature. And if it happened in South Carolina, it could happen along the Mexican border. So yes, Biden can say that the $450,000 figure is not true, and yet he might well lack the formal power–or the interest–to make sure that the payments don’t get made. Indeed, as those two law professors asserted the ultimate payouts could be larger.

So the watchfulness, if there is to be any, will have to come from Congress, outside lawyers, and the media.

The Roots of the Money Madness 

Perhaps it’s worth peeking inside the Biden bubble to see how they arrived at this decision: What were they thinking?  We can identify five reasons:

First, it’s what the Biden people really believe about immigration–they want more of it, the law be damned.  As the liberal Brookings Institution opined in February:

Mr. Biden’s immigration policies are among the most progressive of any president.  While everyone expected him to make a dramatic break from the hardline policies, inefficiently spent funds, and inhumane endeavors of his predecessor, Donald Trump, Mr. Biden is not just reversing Mr. Trump’s policies, but the policies designed and/or administered by previous presidents.

Let’s also not forget that in March, Mexico’s president, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, explained how Latin Americans assess Biden: “They see him as the migrant president.”  And it was just last month that Biden was trashing his own border patrol agents, for the “crime” of doing their jobs.  

Second, the Bidenites think that they can put a legal black mark next to the names of the two men they most love to hate: Trump and his aide Miller. In the liberal Democratic imagination, where lawyers and judges loom so large, the fond idea is that a giant court settlement—the more billions, the better—will permanently stamp the Trump administration as a pariah outlaw, and thereby scare away future presidents from trying similar policies. 

Third, the administration hopes to build the argument that enforcement of immigration law, as the Trump administration practiced it, is simply too expensive, when factoring in court costs. That is, if the Bidenites can shell out a lot of money—all the while arguing that they had to do it—then hopefully future bean-counters will conclude that an open-borders policy is actually cheaper.  In fact, that was spokeswoman Karine Jean-Pierre’s ostensible argument on November 4: that payments through a negotiated settlement could be cheaper than payments after a defeat in court.  Of course, some might suspect that the we’re-saving-money argument is a tad convenient.

 (Unmentioned by the Bidenites, of course, is that the federal government enjoys sovereign immunity, which means that it can’t be sued unless it consents to be sued; to put that another way, a resolute border-enforcement president could simply tell the ACLU and associated legal greedheads to buzz off.) 

Fourth, the Biden people still believe in the theory of the Coalition of the Ascendant.  This theory has been a central part of Democratic thinking for two decades now; it was back in 2002 that lefty thinkers John Judis and Ruy Teixeira co-authored The Emerging Democratic Majority, which focused heavily on immigration as a source of new Democratic votes.  (Interestingly, the two authors, Judis and Teixeira, have both edged away from their own argument, and yet it lives on as a zombie-lefty ideology, despite abundant evidence that immigrants are not woke.) 

Fifth, and perhaps most profoundly, the Biden folks seem to have embraced an updated version of the Cloward-Piven Strategy.  That strategy can be summed up in four Leninist words: The worse the better.

The strategy dates from 1966, when co-authors Richard Cloward and Frances Fox Piven, two New York City academics, published an article in the far-left Nation magazine, entitled, “The Weight of the Poor.”  Their idea was that the poor should use their weight—their human numbers—to demand their full welfare benefits, thereby bankrupting local and state governments. Such bankruptcies, Cloward and Piven continued, would force a federal takeover of welfare, which the authors figured would be more generous: 

It is our purpose to advance a strategy which affords the basis for a convergence of civil rights organizations, militant anti-poverty groups and the poor.  If this strategy were implemented, a political crisis would result that could lead to legislation for a guaranteed annual income and thus an end to poverty.

The word “crisis” is central to Cloward-Piven thinking, as bad trouble is the key to any worse-the-better strategy.  In fact, their Nation article uses the word “crisis” a full 34 times.  And in that same year, 1966, Cloward co-founded the National Welfare Rights Organization, which argued for—you guessed it—both an increase in, and the federalization of, welfare benefits.  More than half a century later, the Cloward-Piven Strategy is well enough known as a radical lefty tactic that it even has its own Wikipedia page.  

The Cloward-Piven Strategy can also be applied to to other issues, including immigration.  In fact, in 2015, Breitbart News’ John Hayward cited it in regard to the Obama administration’s border polices: 

The Cloward-Piven objective of this manufactured crisis is to overwhelm the American immigration system, crushing it under a human wave so that Obama can “reform” it into something more to his liking, with an endgame of 12 million or more new Democrat voters.

Still, some might insist that the Cloward-Piven strategy is too radical for Democrats to embrace, even it today’s Democratic Party includes such open-borders believers as Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) and Ilhan Omar (D-MN).   

Yet if one measure of Cloward-Piven influence is a self-generated crisis, then without a doubt, the border is suffering a made-by-Biden crisis.  Just in the last year, illegal entries total some two million–and that was before the Biden offer of free money.  The total population of the world is about 7.9 billion, and for almost all of those people, $450,000 is a magnetizing sum.   So the mere fact that the headlines with that dollar total got floated will be enough to get people all over the world packing their bags. 

But wait!  There’s even more evidence that the administration was doing all this on purpose, as a matter of conscious policy: As Breitbart News’ John Binder has pointed out, the multi-trillion-dollar Build Back Better plan, currently being considered by Congress, includes $80 billion in benefits to illegal aliens. And Sen. John Cornyn (R-TX) adds that the Bidenites keep adding “more ‘pull factors’ encouraging illegal immigration,” such as Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas’ issuance of a memo repealing Trump’s “Remain in Mexico” policy.  As they say, If the strategy fits.

Oh, and speaking of Cloward-Piven levels of radicalism, did we mention that Biden pledged that his presidency would be an opportunity to “fundamentally transform the country”?  

So the rest of us, who might not be on board with fundamental transformation, have to stay on our guard, lest the Bidenites sneak things in, or out, at midnight.  By now we’ve learned that this administration is home to some genuine radicals; most immediately, we have to watch to see whether or not that settlement money gets paid out.  And we have to watch everything else, too.  Like hawks.