Politics & Power Quote by John Doolittle

“Absurd” does the heavy lifting here: it’s a shortcut that turns a bureaucratic practice into a punchline, then invites the audience to laugh and fume in the same breath. Doolittle isn’t describing immigration procedure so much as staging a morality play in miniature, with the government cast as a gullible hall monitor and unauthorized migrants as rule-breakers handed “tickets” and waved through.

The phrase “catch and release” is borrowed from policing and fishing, and that’s the point. It converts a complex legal pipeline - detention capacity, asylum screening, court backlogs, due process requirements - into a simple, visceral image of capture and immediate surrender. “Giving tickets, essentially” adds a sneer: citations become a symbol of weakness, as if the state has downgraded sovereignty to a parking enforcement problem. The adverb “essentially” signals rhetorical license; precision would complicate the indictment.

Then comes the clincher: “show up of their own volition.” It’s framed as naive trust in strangers, a wager any reasonable person would reject. The subtext is not just that the system fails, but that it fails because elites choose softness, substituting paperwork for force. Mentioning he “introduced a bill” wraps the performance in proof of action, positioning him as the adult in the room.

Contextually, this is late-20th/early-2000s border politics: a period when “catch and release” became a conservative shorthand for institutional incompetence. The intent is mobilization: simplify, moralize, and make enforcement feel like common sense rather than policy.