JD Vance also says stuff like the backlog of cases is so great that it would take many many years to work through it if we had to give hearing to all of them, so doing that “isn’t practical”. What they all neglect to say is that the bipartisan Lankford Act would have provided the funds and the process to hire and staff 100 to 200 more immigration judges and courts to help speed processing those backlogged cases (combined with, I think, hiring more border patrol officers and building more detention centers…inside the US). That bill was tanked by Trump threatening the GOP members of Congress to not vote for it.

At the time, everyone thought Trump opposed passage of the Lankford Act because he wanted to do it, if he got elected, so he could take credit for it. Now it appears what he really wanted was NOT to increase the number of immigration judges, courts, border patrol officers and detention centers so that he and his administration could use the backlog as an excuse to deport people to El Salvador without any kind of hearing at all. I’m sure this plan could be found expressly spelled out somewhere in the bowels of the 900 pages of Project 2025 if anyone took the time to dig around in that sewer. Reducing the NIH grant “indirect costs” to 15% is spelled out in the P2025 chapter on the Dept of Education. So that shouldn’t have surprised anyone, and I guess this shouldn’t have been a surprise either.