53percenter's Blog

It was big news earlier this year when 23-year-old Juan Manuel Montes-Bojorquez filed a lawsuit against U.S. Customs and Border Protection claiming he had been deported to Mexico even though he was a protected DACA recipient. Monday, Bojorque was arrested after coming across the border illegally again. From the Wall Street Journal:

The U.S. Border Patrol said Mr. Montes was found about a mile north of the U.S.-Mexico border in a scrub-covered stretch of desert. The arresting agent wrote that Mr. Montes told officials he was planning to go to Sacramento.

Mr. Montes sued the Trump administration in April, alleging that Border Patrol agents in Calexico arrested and deported him in February even though he had been protected from deportation under the Obama era Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program…

Mr. Montes was thought to be the first DACA recipient deported by the Trump administration.

Montes-Bojorquez came to the U.S. at age nine and applied and was granted DACA status. He claimed that on February 18th of this year he was rounded up by a CBP officer on a bike and deported to Mexico later that same night after no one bothered to check his DACA status. He then admits he jumped a fence into the U.S. the following day and was arrested. He was deported Feb. 20th for what he claims was the second time.

CBP initially claimed Bojorquez was deported because his DACA status had lapsed in 2015. However, a records search revealed he had renewed it and was protected from deportation until 2018. But in a statement released in April, the agency claimed it had never encountered Bojorquez on February 18th, meaning he wasn’t deported but had returned to Mexico on his own. Doing so, CBP pointed out, voided his DACA status:

The U.S. Border Patrol has no record of encountering Mr. Montes-Bojorquez in the days before his detention and subsequent arrest for immigration violations on February 19, 2017.  There are no records or evidence to support Montes-Bojorquez’s claim that he was detained or taken to the Calexico Port of Entry on February 18, 2017…

During Mr. Montes-Bojorquez’s detention and arrest by the United States Border Patrol on February 19, he admitted to agents that he had illegally entered the United States and was arrested.  He later admitted the same under oath.  All of the arrest documents from February 19, 2017, bear Montes-Bojorquez’s signature.  During his arrest interview, he never mentioned that he had received DACA status.  However, even if Montes-Bojorquez had informed agents of his DACA status, he had violated the conditions of his status by breaking continuous residency in the United States by leaving and then reentering the U.S. illegally.

So according to CBP, that first arrest that Bojorquez claims took place on Feb. 18th never happened. Bojorquez’ lawsuit claimed it did and was a violation of his DACA status. The judge in his case decided to expedite the trial and DHS agreed in September to let him return to the U.S. so he could testify. Then in October, he dropped the lawsuit. From the San Diego Union-Tribune:

According to a motion for dismissal filed late Wednesday, the government resolved the records request by producing supplemental documents on Oct. 5, and Montes decided not to pursue his additional claims. A judge approved the motion on Thursday.

“Like all litigation, this case has been a taxing experience for Juan Manuel,” one of his attorneys, Nora Preciado of the National Immigration Law Center, said in a statement. “He has now asked us to dismiss his case. As his attorneys, we respect his wishes and have filed the papers on his behalf.”…

The Calexico Border Patrol chief said in a sworn affidavit there were other problems with Montes’ claims. The chief said there have been no repatriations after 10 p.m. this year, and that there were no agents working bicycle patrol the night in question.

So not only was there no evidence the Feb. 18th encounter ever happened, there was also testimony that it couldn’t have happened the way Bojorquez claimed it did. Now he has apparently come across the border again and could face up to 2 years in jail as well as another deportation.

Does the leadership of this party have actual, diagnosable brain damage? Of all the places in the tax code they could try to find some extra revenue, the supposedly pro-life GOP decides to squeeze … middle-class adoptive families?

While funding Planned Parenthood in their budget?

While our billionaire president is grumbling privately to Democrats that they should repeal the estate tax, which only bites the mega-rich?

We’re past the point of wondering whether the GOP wants to lose. The question now is whether they deserve to lose. Judging from this account by Haley Byrd of the IJR, all signs point to yes:

A GOP lawmaker told me ystrday he was surprised leadership didn’t think ending it would anger pro-lifers. But not seeing much of a fuss.

— Haley Byrd (@byrdinator) November 8, 2017

The adoption tax credit only costs $300 million per year. It’s not even pocket change for Uncle Sam. For the GOP, allegedly the party of social conservatives, to nuke it over a pittance of savings feels like almost deliberate sabotage of adoptive families. What the hell are they thinking?

But it gets worse. As John McCormack points out, in the long run the adoption tax credit pays for itself, in both tangible and intangible terms:

“What they don’t factor in is the total cost to society with a child in foster care,” Johnson tells THE WEEKLY STANDARD. The costs to taxpayers of keeping a child in foster care—health care, food, housing, social workers, and administrators—are far greater than the one-time tax credit adoptive families may receive.

“Comparing the per-child cost of subsidized adoption from foster care with the cost of maintaining a child in foster care, one concludes that the child adopted from foster care costs the public only 40 percent as much as the child who remains in foster care,” according to a report from the National Council for Adoption. “The difference in cost per child per year amounts to $15,480.”

Paul Ryan had the balls earlier today to shrug off complaints about repealing the adoption tax credit by noting that it primarily benefits the upper class. Meanwhile, notes McCormack, the GOP bill would reduce revenue from the estate tax — which only benefits the very uppermost of the upper class — by $172 billion over the next 10 years. Eliminating the adoption tax credit, by comparison, would save the government just $3.8 billion. Ryan’s willing to lose 50 times the amount of revenue that would be lost by saving the adoption tax credit in the name of letting mega-millionaires pass more money on to their kids. Bananas.

Even his point about the credit mainly benefiting higher-income individuals is misleading. It’s true that upper-middle-class families tend to claim the credit but that’s because adoption is so fantastically expensive that only upper-middle-class families can afford to do it. Forget the day-to-day costs of caring for an adopted infant; the adoption process itself can cost $35,000 or more. This Twitter thread by a Google engineer laying out the hardships of adoption went viral a few days ago because of how shocking the sums were. He claims to have spent $50,000 on adopting his first child, which includes fees for the adoption agency, lawyers, travel, hotels, medical care, and other miscellaneous expenses. The only reason he was able to afford it, he notes, was because he had Google stock to sell and even then he was stretched. Some adoptive families take out second mortgages, borrow from relatives, and so on. The tax credit gives them back $13,000 to help defray that. And even that comes with strings: David French, an adoptive dad himself, notes that the IRS audited nearly 70 percent of the families that received the credit recently to check for fraud. It found none.

The only principled argument for ending the adoption tax credit is if you believe the government shouldn’t redistribute taxpayer money via credits of any sort. That’s a fine libertarian view but it ain’t the GOP’s view; in fact, their tax reform plan proposes expanding the child tax credit modestly. If you’re going to have credits in the code, a robust one for adoptive families is a no-brainer. If anything, the mismatch between the current value of the credit and the reality of much more exorbitant adoption fees means Republicans should seize the opportunity to expand the credit. Shave $50 billion off those estate-tax cuts for the mega-rich and apply it to adoption so that more than just Google engineers and lawyers can afford to adopt. If you’re going to be a “pro-family” party, be pro-family.