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.