The budget bill just passed by the Senate provides more than $170 billion in new funding for immigration enforcement and detention. Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, who worked on an analysis published by the American Immigration Council, says the new budget would make ICE “the single largest federal law enforcement agency in the history of the nation.”
I think one of the most concise ways to conceptualize the current conservative project is that they looked at the French Revolution and the collapse of the Ancien Regime and drew the wrong conclusions.
Rather than seeing it as the inevitable result of the systemstic oppression of the majority for the obscene privilege of a select few, they see it as a failure of the select few to sufficiently protect their privilege. And their goal is to recreate the conditions of the Ancien Regime, but this time around to prevent the peasants from successfully rebelling.