But this is the thing, I don’t know if the idea is even evil so much as it is just procedurally stupid and revealing of their thought process.
From the perspective of asylum seekers, there is a better way to treat them than turning them loose on the streets of LA. That said, compared to the child separation policy and other horrific ways people have been treated, being turned loose in LA might be an upgrade. Plus, it’s almost certainly an upgrade over whatever place they fled. If you asked people who were ready to leave their country as refugees whether they’d like to just be dropped in LA, most of them would jump at the opportunity.
From the perspective of the sanctuary cities this might be overwhelming. If the administration took every single person crossing the border anywhere and brought them all to some small city that city would obviously become a tent city with all kinds of problems. But I just looked at some numbers. If you took all the immigrants apprehended at the Mexican border for one year and put them all in LA county, that would barely make the net migration flow in the county positive. That is, it wouldn’t overwhelm LA with new population (I’m not saying it wouldn’t create problems, but it’s not like the raw number of people would be staggering for southern California).
On the cruelty scale this barely even ranks next to child separation. It’s just a dumb/bad/illegal idea. And it’s logistically insane, but these are the people who think that 3 million people could vote illegally by taking buses to other counties. They have no idea how many people fit in a bus.
What the idea says to me, though (other than Trump and Miller just not having any grasp of logistics) is that Trump and Miller think “sanctuary city” is some kind of political posturing to get votes from brown people, not a policy enacted to make cities better places. They think that not only is it a bad policy, but that everyone agrees with them that it’s a bad policy, and anyone who doesn’t is just lying. They think this way because they themselves will lie an enact bad policies that hurt people to politically posture. They can’t imagine that other people are trying to make things better rather than trying to win.
Trump and Miller think that white people who support sanctuary cities hate brown people just as much as Trump and Miller do. They think that they can threaten people who are pro-immigration with immigration, as if they are calling a bluff.
