As we have seen last season and continuing this season, DSC weaves its themes through most if not all of the episodes of the season. Last year I couldn’t peace it all together until long after the season was over. This year, I’m going to try to keep track of how the thematic elements are laid out in each episode.
There are two themes that are evident from the first episode “Brother,” and each have been described beforehand by the show runners. One is about family, and how the Discovery crew is gelling into a family. Pike will help with undo some of Lorca’s damage and help them become a more functional family. There is also the storyline of Sarek and Amanda’s family, and we see Spock meeting Michael for the first time, with hints of some family disfunction they will have to overcome. It’s not entirely clear yet what the ultimate theme will be.
The other major theme has to do with religious/spiritual faith and secular scientific thought. Burnham’s opening monologue lay’s the predicate: “We have always looked to the stars to discover who we are. A thousand centuries ago in Africa the Kahama Abathua tribe gathered to share a story: the tale of a girl who dug her hands in the wooded ash and threw it into the sky to create the Milky Way. And hidden there, a secret, buried among the eternal stars was a message, an enormous message in a bottle made of space and time, visible only to those whose hearts were open enough to receive it. When I first heard the story of the girl who made the stars, I was not ready to understand. I still don’t know if I am.”
The last idea there–about her not being ready to understand–promises that the season will be about her journey to that understanding. Also by starting with the African myth, the season hints that it is going to be about religion in a universal sense of the word, not limited to the Judeo-Christian sense, which the Abrahamic look of the Red Angels might imply.
Another quote is from Tilly to Stamets after he confessed that the ship feels haunted to him after the death of Culber: “I understand that this place may be haunted for you. But maybe it’s good haunted. Maybe living with ghosts and energies that are bigger than we are is why you love science.”
What is interesting to me is that both of these quotes imply religious faith but also invoke that faith as a motivation follow the ways of science. Burnham says the spiritual, mythic “message” is written in the scientific concepts of space and time. Tilly makes it explicit that spiritual forces reminds us there are forces “bigger than we are” is the same thing that motivates Stamets to be a scientist.
Is religion and science two sides of the same coin, both equally valid means of answering the big questions? Time will tell how far DSC will push this theme.
The Shutdown continued into this week, making it the longest in history.
Pelosi canceled the State of the Union today saying that she does not want to put the security and secret service through the work to prepare for one when they are not getting paid due to the shutdown.
Trump and his White House was quiet for about 24 hours. Then they released a letter to Pelosi saying the he was canceling a congressional trip to Afghanistan she was planning on taking Thursday afternoon.
Coppins reports on Friday that the mood in Congress is bleak, that the only thing that will force Trump and/or Pelosi to deal is a national disaster that results from the shutdown.
The Democrats offered an extra billion dollars for border security. Saturday afternoon, Trump announced his offer: three years of protections from deportation for Dreamers in exchange for $5.7 billion for the wall.
In Russia News
There continues to be debate over whether is it appropriate for the FBI to open a counterintelligence investigation against the president. Jack Goldsmith admits that we don’t have all the facts that the FBI did, but it is troubling if FBI agents chose to investigate a president for adopting a foreign policy they disagree with. David French writes a good counter argument, that Executive Order 12333 delegates to the FBI the responsibility of investigating “espionage, other intelligence activities, sabotage, or assassinations conducted for or on behalf of foreign powers.” He writes: “If Russia has engaged in “espionage” or “other intelligence activities” to induce the president (knowingly or unknowingly) to act on its behalf, then those actions (and their effects) are within the scope of the FBI’s mission. It’s black-letter law under a currently operative presidential order.”
The Senate voted on whether to allow sanctions to continue against Deripaska’s aluminum companies. 11 Republicans joined the Democrats but the 60 vote threshold was not met, so the sanctions will end.
Bob Barr had his two day confirmation hearing this week. He promised to protect the Mueller investigation and allow it to conclude.
At 10:11pm Thursday night Buzzfeed (Anthony Cormier and Jason Leopold) dropped a story that says they have two federal law enforcement officials who say there is documentary evidence that Trump directed Cohen to lie to Congress about Trump Tower Moscow.
Friday evening the Special Counsel Office released a statement about the Buzzfeed story: “BuzzFeed’s description of specific statements to the special counsel’s office, and characterization of documents and testimony obtained by this office, regarding Michael Cohen’s congressional testimony are not accurate.”
Marcy Wheeler was skeptical of the story even before the SCO’s press release.
Immigration News
A federal judge blocked Trump’s move to add a citizenship question to the 202 census.
The Inspector General for DHHS released a report on child separation that claims and unknown number–but as many as “thousands”–of children were separated from their parents at the border prior to Trump and Session’s Zero Tolerance Policy:
“Because of the federal government’s failure to keep records about which children in its care had been separated from their parents, the public will never know the full scope of the Trump administration’s use of family separation against border crossers in Trump’s first year and a half in office.”
“Sabraw’s order [to tally and reunify] only applied to children who were in HHS custody on June 26. It didn’t apply to children who had already been released.”
“In both years [2017-18], parents and close relatives made up about 90 percent of sponsors.But it is possible that a disproportionate number of separated children were placed with unrelated sponsors as foster children — or released because they chose to be returned to their home country (perhaps to reunite with their parents). We don’t know. We’ll never know.”
My initial throughs on Discovery’s second season premier, “Brother.” New and old characters on a new adventure.
I also share some musings about where I think the season is headed thematically: the clash between secular society and religious faith. It may prove to be more controversial than a new Spock or the colors of the uniforms. If you are interested in this question below are some pre-readings on the subject. They just a small starting point to the concept of what we mean when we talk about secular society, and what it means to have faith in another way of perceiving the universe. Best to read them in the order listed below.
Some in the Trump Administration appear to be walking back the Syria pullout decision. First Trump said troops would be out in 30 days, then it was six months, and then the administration said there is no end date set. Now Bolton is saying “American forces would remain in Syria until the last remnants of the Islamic State were defeated and Turkey provided guarantees that it would not strike Kurdish forces allied with the United States.”
However, by Friday the military announced that the Syria pullout had begun, though they would not declare any timeline for security reasons. Then DOD officials walked back the withdraw walk back by saying only equipment was being withdrawn.
Shutdown News
The Trump Administration made an offer to democrats on Sunday night that included $5.7 billion for the wall and $800 million in humanitarian aid for migrants being held at the border. It is unclear if this is the start of serious negotiations. According to the proposal the wall money would buy 234 miles of border barriers “steel bollards instead of any concrete wall.”
Trump made an Oval Office address Tuesday night in an apparent attempt to move public opinion to support his case for ending the government shutdown by funding his wall. According to Trump-Immigration watcher Dara Lind: “he gave the exact same speech he always gives: that immigrants are coming across the border to kill you.”
Another shutdown meeting at the White House went badly on Wednesday: “Stunned Democrats emerged from the meeting in the White House Situation Room declaring that the president had thrown a “temper tantrum” and slammed his hands on the table before leaving with an abrupt “bye-bye.” Republicans disputed the hand slam and blamed Democratic intransigence for prolonging the standoff.”
According to Wall Street Journal reporting, the White House sees an emergency declaration as a face-saving way out of the shutdown standoff: “As a possible way out of the shutdown, Mr. Trump’s advisers in recent weeks have suggested that the president could declare a national emergency to fund the border wall and agree to sign a spending bill without such a provision. While the declaration likely would get tied up in litigation, Mr. Trump would be able to tell supporters he did everything he could to build the wall, one of his top campaign pledges in the 2016 presidential campaign.”
Dara Lind uses this to point out something she has noticed reporting on Trump immigration policy: there is a sense of legal fatalism among White House staff that any policy they enact will be held up in courts. Lind points out how the emergency law works: “He has to declare which of the 100-plus emergency powers given to the president he’s invoking — not just because that’s how the law works, but because he has to identify which pools of emergency money he wants to raid to pay for the wall. (Not that it’s clear there’s even enough money in any of the applicable funds to get to $5.7 billion.)”
Trump had directed the Army Corps of Engineers to see if he can pull money from a $13 fund for disaster relief in Puerto Rico, Florida, Texas and California.
By Friday Trump appeared to be backing off of his threat to declare a national emergency “under pressure from congressional Republicans, his own lawyers and advisers, who say using it as a way out of the government shutdown does not justify the precedent it would set and the legal questions it could raise.”
Ezra Klein sums up why this stalemate is proving so heard to break: “[Trump’s] sense of negotiations is fundamentally zero-sum: One side has to lose and one side has to win. If Trump gives Democrats anything they can present as a win, he will look like a loser. As such, he can’t give them the concessions that might get him the wall because what he’d be giving up — his image as a winner — is more important to him than the policy he’d be gaining.”
In Russia News
We learned on Tuesday that Natalia Veselnitskaya, of the famous Trump Tower meeting, was indicted back in December on charges of obstructing justice in a federal money laundering investigation. Here is a good Lawfare piece on the Veselnitskya obstruction case, explaining what she did to get charged.
Also this week, When Manafort’s lawyers offered a rebuttal to Muller’s sentencing memo, they did not properly set the redactions so we learned among other things that Manafort met with Kilimnik while he was Trump’s campaign chair and shared 2016 polling data.
Rod Rosenstein will leave the Justice Department after Barr is confirmed as the new AG.
The White House has hired 17 new lawyers to help White House Counsel protect executive privilege in the face of House investigations, and the potential of Mueller’s report being sent to the Congress.
Then the big news (which warranted a Wittes “Boom!”). Friday night the New York Times reported that in the period between Comey’s firing and Meuller’s appointment the FBI opened a counterintelligence investigation against Trump: They worried Trump was: “working on behalf of Russia against American interests… president’s own actions constituted a possible threat to national security… knowingly working for Russia or had unwittingly fallen under Moscow’s influence.” The FBI was already suspicious of Trump’s behavior toward Russia but three events motivated them to open the investigation: firing Comey; admitting in a letter that he wanted the public to know he was not under investigation for ties to Russia; admitting on air that he fired Comey because of the Russia investigation.
This reporting came to light because someone (probably from Congress) leaked testimony of FBI general counsel James Baker, who did not disclose the investigation but said this: “Not only would it be an issue of obstructing an investigation, but the obstruction itself would hurt our ability to figure out what the Russians had done, and that is what would be the threat to national security.”
Ben Wittes published his thoughts on this, which included a quote from one of Baker’s Lawfare essays: “A lot of the criticism seems to be driven by the notion that the FBI’s investigation was, and is, an effort to undermine or discredit President Trump. That assumption is wrong. The FBI’s investigation must be viewed in the context of the bureau’s decades-long effort to detect, disrupt and defeat the intelligence activities of the governments of the Soviet Union and later the Russian Federation that are contrary to the fundamental and long-term interests of the United States. The FBI’s counterintelligence investigation regarding the 2016 campaign fundamentally was not about Donald Trump but was about Russia. Full stop. It was always about Russia. It was about what Russia was, and is, doing and planning. Of course, if that investigation revealed that anyone—Russian or American—committed crimes in connection with Russian intelligence activities or unlawfully interfered with the investigation, the FBI has an obligation under the law to investigate such crimes and to seek to bring those responsible to justice. The FBI’s enduring counterintelligence mission is the reason the Russia investigation will, and should, continue—no matter who is fired, pardoned or impeached (emphasis added).”
Wittes believes that this new reporting means that the obstruction investigation into Trump’s actions is tightly linked to the collusion/Russian interference investigation: “The reporting Schmidt shared with me about Baker’s testimony suggests rather strongly that the FBI did not think of the Comey firing simply as a possible obstruction of justice. Officials thought of it, rather, in the context of the underlying counterintelligence purpose of the Russia investigation. At one point, Baker was asked whether firing Director Comey added to the threat to national security the FBI was confronting. ‘Yes,’ Baker responds.”
Then the Washington Post reported on Saturday evening that Trump went to unusual lengths to keep secret the content of his meetings with Putin, including that he took possession of his interpreter’s notes after a 2017 meeting in Hamburg: “U.S. officials said there is no detailed record, even in classified files, of Trump’s face-to-face interactions with the Russian leader at five locations over the past two years.”
Trump is now in the 13th sustained job approval decline of his presidency. If it were to end now the dip would receive a rank of 5 on the 10 point scale relative to all of his other dips. The last dip was a 6 and lasted from August to September. His numbers improved from that point and bobbed around 42% until the week of December 9. That was the week Cohen was sentenced to three years in prison, and there was also some Flynn and Manafort news swirling around.
These dips almost always result from a confluence of negative new coverage. So what happened after news of Trump’s legal troubles? Jim Mattis resigned in protest, and then the government shut down. The shutdown will continue to be a negative news story that looks to continue hurting Trump’s approval, and this weekend there was some new major developments in the Russia investigation which may drag him down even further. Stay tuned.
When faced with fear of people or faith in people, chose faith
Fear makes it easy to justify immoral behavior and reject core principles based on temporary circumstances
David Milch (of NYPD Blue and Deadwood fame) says there are only two basic emotions that motivate behavior: faith or fear. He (and his TV shows) advocate always striving to act from a position of faith not fear, by which he means it is wiser to believe in the core goodness of people and that the universe bends toward justice rather than believe everyone is out to get you and failure is inevitable. It’s not that bad things won’t happen, but living in a state of fear darkens your perception of reality and closes you off to human connection.
Milch credits the contemporary poet Hubert Selby Jr. for the idea, though it is one of those universal themes of literature, especially of the Judeo-Christian variety.
Selby described it this way:
As I understand it, there are only two emotions a human being can experience—love or fear. And when you’re in a state of love, you can’t think of trying to get anything. You’re incapable of thinking that way. You just seem to experience the perfection of creation… So if I’m coming from anyplace else I’m coming from fear, and fear takes many, many, many forms to be effective. All kinds of forms. So, if I’m facing the demon of fear, love is always available, but what I have to do is be willing to surrender to it. Surrender … all those dreadful judgments that keep us in turmoil and ignorance and misery.
Sarek sums up this idea with a poetic logic: “For what greater source of peace exists than our ability to love our enemy. ”
DSC’s overarching theme in Season 1 is that we must resist the fear mindset and chose faith–faith in people, in our principles, even in our enemies.
The first iteration of this theme is Burnham’s decision to fire first on the Klingons at the Binary Stars. This decision was driven by fear. She had just been nearly killed by the Torchbearer, which provoked flashbacks to her childhood traumas, which all began when the Klingons murdered her parents. Her repeated justification for mutinying to bring about the attack shows that she was convinced they were all in mortal danger: ”I’m trying to save you… all of you.” Whether she was right or not–and it is debatable–is besides the point. Her actions were driven by fear alone, and she only used the pretense of logic (ie the Vulcan Hello) to make her actions seem reasonable. Georgiou on the other hand was more level headed. She was prepared to fight, but she was not going to make any rash decisions based on fear. It is debatable whether Georgiou’s approach would have avoided a wider war, but that debate does not mean Burnham’s approach was right. By the end of the season Burnham came to openly admit that she was wrong.
In the Ripper arc, we see fear causing not only poor judgment but immoral decisions. We have already discussed in Theme 1 how Landry saw Ripper as a killing machine. She was not physically afraid of the Tardigrade but she did see it through the lens of its most terrifying actions. Unlike Burnham, she was incapable of having faith (or Selby’s definition of love) that Ripper might be more than that. Landry was acting on orders of Lorca who is motivated by fear in his core, as we will see. Saru made his immoral decision regarding the Tardigrade out of actual fear when he ordered Stamets to use the weakened Ripper to make spore jumps. It was not a physical fear, but fear of losing his place in his society: fear of being a bad captain, of not measuring up, of damaging his reputation and future career in Starfleet. Fear of failure in the face of judgment from your peers, superiors and yourself can be even more debilitating than a physical threat. As with the Burnham’s decisions at the Binary Stars, it is debatable whether risking the life of the Tardigrade to save the captain was the right command decision, but there is no doubt he made it for the wrong reasons. And just as Burnham eventually realizes she was wrong, so does Saru when he admits to himself, “I know what I did.” He realizes that his mission aims may have been achieved, but by making the decision he did, he has not measuring up to the decorated captains he was hoping to emulate.
The third iteration of the theme of fear is Lorca and the Terrans. Once in the Mirror Universe, Burnham is quick to sniff out their true nature and she narrates it for the rest of us. She describes the all-pervasive sense of fear: “I can’t rest here, not really. My eyes open and it’s like waking from the worst nightmare I can imagine. Even the light is different. The cosmos has lost its brilliance, and everywhere I turn is fear.”
She is not saying that she is afraid. She is describing an environment where fear and its corollary hate is the predominate mindset. The Mirror Universe is less about fear as an emotion that causes hairs to stand on end and threat ganglia to sprout, but how fear affects decision-making and how it is used as a weapon by people in power. It would be hard to argue life is a picnic for even the Humans living in the Terran empire, but they are kept in line by their leaders through a steady diet of fear of non-Humans. The Emperor can always say: you may quibble with my domestic policies, but what do you think the Klingons and Vulcans will do to you if I am gone? This is also why she tells Burnham “your people are dangerous.” The Emperor lives in fear of her own people, so ideas of equality and freedom are terrifying to her. And everyone else in the chain of command lives in fear of the knife in the back. For Terrans, fear is a way of life, a governing philosophy in the same way logic is for Vulcans. It is their chosen belief system that guides their actions.
Not everyone in the Mirror Universe choses fear over faith. Mirror Voq is uncharacteristically magnanimous, even though Tyler tried to kill him. This is because the rebels have adopted a philosophy of faith and trust in opposition to the Terrans. This may seem counterintuitive but it is not. When facing an enemy there are two competing compulsions: to defeat them by being more like them, or to defeat them by being nothing like them–and more times than not the latter wins out. After mind-melding with Burnham, Mirror Sarek is amazed that a Human could have “a seemingly impossible depth of human compassion.” The rebels practice compassion because they know its value.
Burnham also makes a strong case the value of faith over fear as a leadership tool. When she bucks up Tilly who must pretend to be Captain Killy in the Mirror Universe, she says, “Terran strength is born out of pure necessity because they live in constant fear, always looking for the next knife aimed at their back. Their strength is painted rust. It’s a facade.” She tells Tilly that true strength and security is formed through trusting bonds with people: “You have the strength of an entire crew that believes in you. Fortify yourself with our faith in you. That’s what a real captain does.” In other words, you will have more success commanding through faith than fear.
This brings us to the season’s grand finale: the plot to blow up Kronos. From a thematic perspective, the point of spending so much of the season in the Mirror Universe, and of having Terran characters present for 13 out of 15 episodes, was to pose this question: What would happen if the Federation willfully chose to become the Terran Empire? When the Federation Council, acting on fear, chose to allow the Emperor to destroy Kronos they set in motion a history and culture-altering chain of events. Had the genocide happened, there would be no going back to “Federation principles” because all future leaders would know those principles are flexible. It might take a generation or two, but the moral decay and corruption would eventually assimilate the entire Federation more thoroughly than the Borg could dream of. This is what Burnham and the Discovery crew saved them from.
Two powerful but quiet climaxes dramatize this point. The first is when Burnham confronts Cornwell over the plan. When she calls it genocide Conrwell says, “Terms of atrocity are convenient after the fact. The Klingons are on the verge of wiping out the Federation.” When Burnham replies, “You know it’s not who we are,” Conrwell gives a quick and clear-eyed answer: “It very soon will be. We do not have the luxury of principle.” This Starfleet Admiral has made peace with the devil’s bargain I laid out above. She knows the cost but has accepted it for the sake of survival. Then Burnham gives her coup de grace: “That is all we have, Admiral. A year ago I stood alone. I believed that our survival was more important than our principles. I was wrong. Do we need a mutiny today to prove who we are?”
The second understated climax is the bomb handoff Burnham facilitates between the Emperor and L’Rell. She hands L’Rell the detonator saying, “Use the fate of Kronos to bend them to your will. Preserve your civilization rather than watch it be destroyed.” L’Rell is awed by the act. She can only respond, “But I am no one.” A happy ending ensues. There are a couple valid criticisms you could make at this point: that Burnham was empowering L’Rell and giving up Federation leverage without any guarantee of ending the war; that the solution was too simple and anti-climactic. Yes it could have ended with a big DS9-style bat’leth fight in that cave. Yes there are nagging real-politic questions about giving a super weapon to a nobody fanatic. I am only arguing that the resolution was consistent with the thematic arc of the season. It was the type of story the writers were trying to tell: the ultimate demonstration of faith over fear. Star Trek is full of pat resolutions meant to punctuate a theme. This is another entry, and a successful one.
At a panel discussion on DSC’s feminism, Mary Wiseman commented on how refreshing it was that the three powerful women in that cave–Burnham, L’Rell and the Emperor–did not break out into a nasty catfight. She described Burnham’s act as a reflection of her “huge generosity of spirit” that was “not easy.” The name of the episode sums up the theme well: Will you take my hand? The question mark implies risk and vulnerability, but also the promise of connection.
As they are saying goodbye, Tyler tells Burnham, “Your capacity to love literally saved my life.” Burnham’s capacity to chose love over fear also saved the Federation’s soul, and forged a bond with the Klingons that may lead to peace.
When I began this theme series, I noted that the themes of DSC were harder to parse because they did not get neatly summarized in a captain’s speech at the end of each episode. But by the end of the season Burnham takes on the mantle of all past Trek leads. Her speech is in her own unique voice: it’s quieter, less confident, but no less principled. The final episode of the season is book ended with a closing monologue that is Burnham’s speech to Starfleet Command. It concludes: “how do I defeat fear? The general’s answer: the only way to defat fear is to tell it no. No. We will not take shortcuts on the path to righteousness. No. We will not break the rules that protect us from our basest instincts. No. We will not allow desperation to destroy moral authority. I am guilty of all these things. Some say that in life there are no second chances. Experience tells me that this is true. But we can only look forward. We have to be torchbearers, casting the light so that we can see our path to lasting peace. We will continue exploring, discovering new words, new civilizations. Yes. That is the United Federation of Planets. Yes. That is Starfleet. Yes. That is who we are and who we will always be.”
More than most Trek speeches like this, be they from Kirk or Picard or Sisko or Janeway, we know precisely where Burnham’s wisdom came from. We saw what it took for her to earn it. This is because DSC’s writers place theme at the top of their storytelling priorities. Hopefully this will continue in future seasons as Burnham and her crew continue to explore–and discover–the human condition.
Trump and Melania made his first visit to troops as President. They flew to Iraq the day after Christmas, and also visited troops in Germany. Some critics accused him of politicizing the military due to the fact there was some Trump paraphernalia among the troops and he spoke to them about political problems in Washington.
Mitt Romney wrote an op-ed the day before he was sworn in as the senator from Utah. The purpose was to stake a claim against Trump’s character, and lay out some ground rules for how he will deal with Trump as senator:
“his conduct over the past two years, particularly his actions last month, is evidence that the president has not risen to the mantle of the office.”
“To a great degree, a presidency shapes the public character of the nation. A president should unite us and inspire us to follow ‘our better angels.’ A president should demonstrate the essential qualities of honesty and integrity, and elevate the national discourse with comity and mutual respect. … With the nation so divided, resentful and angry, presidential leadership in qualities of character is indispensable. And it is in this province where the incumbent’s shortfall has been most glaring.”
“I do not intend to comment on every tweet or fault. But I will speak out against significant statements or actions that are divisive, racist, sexist, anti-immigrant, dishonest or destructive to democratic institutions.”
Trump held one of his performative cabinet meetings where he said some strange things. What got most attention was his claim that Russians were justified in invading Afghanistan in the 1980s. It had David Frum wondering: “Putin-style glorification of the Soviet regime is entering the mind of the president, inspiring his words and—who knows—perhaps shaping his actions. How that propaganda is reaching him—by which channels, via which persons—seems an important if not urgent question.” Jonathan Chait wonders the same, and notes that the Putin government will release a revised history of the invasion that mirrors what Trump said: “it raises the question of just where Trump is hearing this stuff. He’s not getting pro-Soviet revisionist history from Fox & Friends. He’s also probably not reading alternative histories of central Asia. So who planted this idea in Trump’s head, anyway?”
The government is still partially shut down due to an impasse over funding the border wall. Nancy Pelosi was sworn in as Speaker of the House Thursday January 3rd, and the Democrats passed the same funding bill that the Senate approved previously. McConnel said he will not take up anything that Trump won’t sign.
An 8 year old Guatemalan boy died in custody on Christmas day. He had been in custody for six days, which is against the Florres Decree. Border Patrol agents are revising policies in the wake of the death.
Here is a good New York Times summation of problems at the US-Mexico border: Overcrowding in shelters; More children are getting sick; mass drop offs on city streets; the build up in Tijuana. This is all “a result of a failed gamble on the part of the Trump administration that a succession of ever-harsher border policies would deter the flood of migrants coming from Central America.
It has not, and the failure to spend money on expanding border processing facilities, better transportation and broader networks of cooperation with private charities, they say, has led to the current problems with overcrowding, health threats and uncontrolled releases of migrants in cities along the border.”
Here is an explainer for why the mass drop offs are happening. Border Patrol is apprehending more migrants than ICE can take into custody due to shelter space limitations. For families, which is most cases, the hand off must happen with 72 hours. So ICE is releasing hundreds of migrants to clear space for detention, and Border Patrol is releasing hundreds who cannot be taken in by ICE.
