Not to make it out to be some paradise, but illegal immigration isn't a crime in Argentina or Brazil. Argentina doesn't enforce it, and in fact I have read court cases of people criminals arriving illegally with fake passport and granted citizenship.
If you are illegal, you can literally show up fresh off of jet and on day one in .ar, file a court case for citizenship, have a lawyer run down the clock for a few years (by constitution in argentina illegal residence and subsistence for a few years = citizenship), and all the meanwhile they are legally barred from deporting you.
It is still a crime even in Brazil and Argentina. Whether or not it's enforced and/or the degree of exceptions allowed, are another issue. For instance obviously illegal immigration was treated radically different during the previous administration, but the laws remain overwhelmingly the same. For instance the most controversial issue in contemporary times is deportation without trial. That's called expedited removal [1], and was passed under Bill Clinton's administration, 30 years ago.
One thing that I really don't like about the way the Democrat party is handling illegal immigration is that they know it's overwhelmingly unpopular, so they say one thing and do another. For instance part of the DNC 2024 platform was "Securing the Border" [2] which they tried to argue Biden had done, and that the only reason he hadn't doing more was because of Congress. Obviously that's overt gaslighting. If they want to run on a platform of defacto open borders, more power to them - laws can be changed, but they need to actually run on that platform instead of lying and gaslighting.
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Expedited_removal
[2] - https://democrats.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/08/FINAL-MASTE...
Obama and to a lesser extent Biden weren't soft on illegal immigration, but they did two things that differ from the current administration:
* They followed the law. Crackdowns like the one Trump is taking are only possible if you treat law as a fluid concept and ignore judges consistently. A democrat is never going to get around that, and yes, laws can be changed, but notice how Trump isn't even bothering to do that also (he just ignores them), the best he got from a Republican congress was extra funding for ICE (and remember, Bush was worse than Obama on illegal immigration).
* They just treated them with some dignity (which Trump sees as soft, dignity isn't really in his vocab).
Judges aren't powerless. If an administration genuinely ignores a judge's lawful ruling, they can charged with contempt, with penalties up to imprisonment. But there's a lot of judicial activism leading to 'creative' rulings. Like the Supreme Court, Federal judges are appointed with life terms. And they can be even more impactful on a day-to-day basis, especially when they intentionally step outside the bounds of their authority. One of the more extremist judges did try to charge this administration with contempt - it was tossed. So the admin tried to charge the judge with misconduct, which was also tossed. It's just a lot of back and forth nonsense with checks and balances generally still working okayish.
So for an example from the previous administration, they wanted race based admissions for colleges. That is obviously illegal and unconstitutional. After the Supreme Court predictably ruled against them, they worked to circumvent their ruling in various ways including in a 'Dear Colleagues' letter [1] offering guidance on ways universities could achieve a racial quota while remaining within the bounds of the law, effectively laying out a proposed blueprint for intentional Disparate Impact [2], which is *drum roll* also illegal.
The main difference you're seeing in contemporary times is the way the media is spinning everything, intentionally looking to foment conflict and radicalism. We live in amoral times and so working around the judges and legal systems is framed primarily in terms of who's doing it.
[1] - https://web.archive.org/web/20241127174625/https://www.ed.go...
[2] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disparate_impact
Judges aren’t powerless, they can always ask the executive to enforce their rulings (except when it’s the executive who’s disobeying their rulings…oops).
Yes, that poor justice lawyer who broke down when the judge berated her that they were just ignoring his rulings, the lawyer replied that being sent to jail for contempt would at least let her get some sleep!
So you shifted from immigration to DEI stuff? Yes, white people no longer get preferential admission like they once did and it’s somehow now racist, do you even realize how bad you guys sound? Anyways, yes, Obama looked for places in the law where he could do things, which I guess you will just claim is just as bad as ignoring laws and rulings straight up?
The main difference is that we literally elected a fascist with dementia as President. And you guys would claim media bias if the press simply played videos of Trump talking.