> After a local activist uploaded a license-plate search tool
on Fly.io, a developer-focused public cloud platform, to an
infiltrated Signal chat, HSI agents reviewed website DNS
queries and Stripe data along with data purchased from a
commercial broker. This gave HSI access to SSH session
logs, outbound connection records, the Fly.io account’s
signup IP, and a Stripe card fingerprint on an account that
had never completed a payment. Agents fused that with
Minnesota DVS records and commercial data from the Thomson-
Reuters CLEAR platform to produce a driver's license
nummber, Social Security number summary, years of address
history, phone numbers, property records, and jointly
registered vehicles.
Fair, but he’s the most prominent person here who’s been on both sides of this so I’d genuinely like his take.
Two concrete questions. Did Fly challenge this request, or just comply? And does he still think server-side trust is a non-issue when the identity in this case was built entirely from provider-side records (signup IP, SSH audit logs, a Stripe fingerprint)?
When I said in 2023 that the infrastructure around E2EE matters, he called it misinformation (rather aggressively).
This case looks a lot like the infrastructure mattering.
Tech companies used to demand warrants/subpoenas for these kinds of things. Now it seems they just gladly hand it over with a wide smile on their face. Am I the only one to notice this shift?
They used to operate in a legally consistent Western Democracy. They no longer do. OpSec for most involved in basic social activism needs to now be at the level of 'Journalist in a Dictatorship' or stricter.
At this point there's a non-zero chance you and your employees are detained on spurious national security grounds, or simply end up in an ICE internment centre - accidently or otherwise.
> Tech companies used to demand warrants/subpoenas for these kinds of things.
Two things are true
1) Tech has become more financial people and "techbros" than principled nerds.
2) The powers of the USG have become a lot stronger and far reaching- quite literally to the level where talking about complying with an order is itself a crime.
I want to reunite with my 'principled nerds' so badly. Things weren't perfect, not by a long shot, back then, but there was a sense of hope and excitement about using technology to make the world a better place.
Agreed. One of the reasons I'm seeing myself becoming more of a luddite looking forward to retiring offline with minimal technology is precisley because online discourse is largely comprised of unserious people confidently incorrect and technology companies have largely stopped trying to make peoples' lives better and are more focused on quarterly earnings.
Hackerspaces still exist - and seem to be booming again since the tech layoffs. Dropped by Noisebridge while I was visiting SF and as the kids say, the vibes were immaculate.
"Authoritarian capitalism is a system in which corporations ally themselves with repressive or anti-democratic political regimes, benefiting from protection and impunity."
There's a shorter phrase for corporations and other large organizations colluding with or controlling an authoritarian government for the organizations' own ends at the expense of at least some subset of the people. It's actually only one word, and there are three options. Mussolini had corporatism on the mind. You probably know the other two, and one is a proper noun.
Yes. Jan 6th seemed to be a breaking point. Every company bought the idea that people walking into the capitol was an insurrection, and turned over everything on everyone who might have been involved, with no legal pushback.
Now that the precident has been set, there is no going back. Team-D sees these companies as their servants. Team-R knows the companies will turn on them the second team-D has any power, and understands that failing to use power when they have it is suicide.
95% of the population is on team-D or team-R, meaning there is no hope of fixing this without an explicit truce. Any member of either team who offers that truce would be eaten alive by their own team's rabid base.
Ah yes, one side went after people who broke windows and assaulted people trying getting into sensitive areas of the senate trying to disrupt the confirmation of a legally decided election.
The other side wants to take pictures of and track the masked men taking their neighbors.
Cloud equals not your computer, folks. Any cloud company can be legally subpoenaed and required to hand over any data they have, and they can also be legally gagged from telling anyone about it. Doesn't matter if they support it or not, they are a corporation subject to the laws of their jurisdiction and disobeying can expose the directors personally to civil or criminal penalties. Every corp will comply with a legal subpoena, and those are often easier to get than warrants.
For you they at least require a warrant. Usually. Unless you're crossing the border or are undocumented or something.
Well, and what are you concretely suggesting here? Having my own door kicked down and my dog shot so they can get at my personal home server? Buying hardware and colocating it then getting permanently blacklisted from every datacenter when they get raided?
The problem here is the cops not where the computer sits.
Your own property/server has 4th amendment protections, especially if it's in your house. Your use of someone else's machine doesn't, especially when they voluntarily give up your info.
You can also use proxys and/or tor to create external accounts/upload stuff.
> your own property/server has 4th amendment protections, especially if it's in your house.
Yeah that’s gonna be super helpful, try to keep chanting “fourth amendment!” while pinned to the ground and the heavily armed swat team that just blew your door away is searching through the house.
>Well, and what are you concretely suggesting here?
Having your own server and infra, at least in part.
>Having my own door kicked down and my dog shot so they can get at my personal home server?
The government doesn't have infinite resources, nor is it immune to political considerations (obviously, that's the problem here!). There is an enormous, qualitative and quantitative difference between:
1) we must get an actual warrant in a lot of different physical jurisdictions across the country all with different judges and then spend the money and availability to send physical meat agents to said locations, often rural and remote, across the country to an unknown physical situation with at least some areas where people might shoot at us, and all equipment needed for that, and will by definition have to disclose everything to our targets
vs
2) an agent can comfortably from their central office chair use a preexisting automated system to a central cloud portal to demand info secretly from companies that will just comply without any question
Scale is inherent in the topic here. It's not just "why", "HOW" is "ICE running one of the largest anti-left surveillance ops"? Well, in part because they can do so so cheaply, efficiently, and stealthily via purely electronic means. They aren't kicking down ten million doors and shooting ten million dogs, and indeed they CAN'T do that, not because they wouldn't like to but because it's physically impossible with their resources and would provoke furious (undoubtedly including some lethal) pushback.
And again, even if absolutely nothing else, it means something to know they're after you. Nothing stops you from immediately surrendering your server when asked, but you can then also instantly get a lawyer/support and push back right then and there. You can't adapt to what you either never even realize happened or only realized too late.
Yeah these are pretty good points I can't really dispute.
I think it is a threat model thing primarily, which I should have been more clear about. I'm more worried about being lawfully murdered in front of my family than I am going to jail because my ssh sessions were read. But the ssh thing is a totally valid concern for someone doing different activities than I am and I shouldn't have dismissed it.
For those with the resources to do so, perhaps. But those well-resourced people fleeing the country are then leaving those who are not well-resourced to fend for themselves, and letting it further devolve.
The US is currently, probably, still a Democracy with a semi-functioning independent Judiciary and public pressure can still have an impact.
Although it may still be possible that some jurisdictions will emerge, even within the US, that have the capacity to preserve basic civil liberties for their residents, whether via tacit agreement or overt paramilitary enforcement.
I wouldn't bet my kids' childhoods on that happening, though.
It's a realistic goal, for now. There's probably still time, a year or two. If things go really bad, there may be a sudden outflux of refugees or whatever you want to call and it could get really difficult to get a job and a visa abroad.
History suggests this is a short-term solution, not even a medium-term solution.
A critical mass of people pushing back against fascism leave a country, and that country tends to devolve into the kind of place that starts wars with its neighbors.
This is why I always turn my head and squint at Americans fleeing to Canada, as if an America that fully embraced everything they see it doing wouldn't come right after Canada next.
Look at Trump and even Vance “joking” about Canada being a state. They wouldn’t hesitate to take Canada by force if America ever got to the point where fleeing to Canada was forcibly prevented.
"technical and network-activity records from fly.io included:
SSH session logs (CSV format) listing multiple "New SSH session" entries for <redacted> with verified=true between approximately 2026-03-26 and 2026-04-01, timestamped in UTC.
outbound-connection records (CSV format) reflecting numerous TCP port 443 connections originating from internal fly.io addresses <redacted> to external IP addresses attributed to AMAZON-02 (Amazon Web Services) in the US and Cloudflarenet (Cloudflare)".
Yea, I thought the whole Lavabit episode made it clear that privacy oriented solutions based in the US were going to have a hard time. Most Proton’s whole selling point is their location.
However on page 8 the document states that these "session logs" don't record commands, they're just audit logs of when, where, by whom the sessions were initiated.
All of your comments are coming up as [dead]. I vouched and upvoted your first one shortly after you posted it, I think that's probably why you couldn't edit it anymore.
the most annoying part is that i got no indication that i was suddenly shadowbanned. if someone didn't tell me, it would have probably been a day or two at least of wondering why i had no engagement on my comments.
no notification, no appeal system outside of email and pray. very cool system.
Informing the subject they are shadowbanned would kind of defeat the purpose of the shadowban. Might as well just issue a regular ban then.
It's nice that this place maintains an email endpoint that's actually staffed by humans who can intervene if needed. That's more than can be said about most places these days.
>Informing the subject they are shadowbanned would kind of defeat the purpose of the shadowban. Might as well just issue a regular ban then.
shadow bans here have no purpose. i would have found out in a couple days even if no one told me. so yes, it might as well just be a regular ban, correct. at least that way i would know what rule i broke.
Of course not, but that's a separate problem that I didn't treat. It was about the ability to make that choice, I don't think that that my choice should be respected is a controversial statement worth debating.
Especially the idea that somehow Fly.io wouldn't keep track of which IP is signing up for service - kind of important, constantly, for CSAM investigations and the like.
CSAM investigation is used as the rationale for all sorts of unrelated searches, see the grapheneOS duress password case where they took a protestors phone because they made up that they were investigating CP
If you're doing anything in the freedom fighter vein of activity, why would you be connecting directly to anything from your IP? Why are you not bouncing around through VPNs, TOR exit nodes, and the like? I know not everyone is a skilled freedom fighter, and even skilled freedom fighters make mistakes, but isn't this like step one to not connect directly from your IP?
Define letting? The political system has de-criminalized vote buying by re-branding the bribers as 'lobbyists' and protecting it as a 1st Amendment right. Even Guilfoyle's controversy was asking for 100k to her Amex account from a "lobbyist". In most countries it's a jailable offense.
This lobbying means that the politicians might be elected by "us" but they work for "them" - the "lobbyists."
Even worse the Supreme Court has actively made it quite difficult to pursue bribery cases recently basically requiring the parties to be stupid enough to put in writing "I will pay you X to vote Y on Z" and then "This is the payment for your vote that would not have happened if you had not voted Y on Z".
And the Supreme Court did this because the Republican Justices were caught accepting bribes. It's become just another corrupt Republican institution, the same as the Presidency and Congress.
Because "private good public bad" brainwashing has been so effective that most Americans see this structure as a good thing, even though the consequences are very obvious and very bad.
That and a nice slight of hand. When they coupled that with a clear removal of corporate ethics, "a business' ONLY responsibility is to its shareholders" and then removed the barriers between the private and public sector (mostly via Citizen's United)... private sector effectively just became the public sector without any accountability.
Now they can just chip away at whatever regulation is left, and create mistrust in oversight bodies and the rigging of the game is complete.
Better than communism, the government hardly even has to pretend to work for the benefit of the people, because the wealth imbalance has a closed circuit of money between private entities and elections. They can bring suitcases of cash, walk in the front door literally holding a chainsaw and prune off every olive branch extended toward the citizens.
These election "investments" are clearly paying off at high multiples now. Why spend your money in a capitalist competition when you can more efficiently spend it in public elections to eliminate competition, divert tax revenue directly into your businesses and eliminate any responsibility you should have? Do a Nazi salute for the whole world to see, and watch the propagandized twist themselves into whatever shape pretzel you ask them to.
I’m getting unsolicited texts all the time about how the “billionaire tax” in California is the worst thing ever. No matter if you think the tax is misguided, it’ll probably work at preventing the billionaire tax from passing, but it’s a good firsthand demonstration at how power accumulating to billionaires tends to accumulate even further. Only billionaires have the resources to fight back so aggressively against any encroachment on their power.
That gets into an idea I've been pretty adamant about. People say that capitalism is the worst system except for all the others, but its actual property is that it's inevitable. Money (power) can be used to gain more power. If even a few people choose to do so, if not countered intentionally by some outside force, wealth and power will accumulate.
Whether you see that as good or bad or something which needs to be checked and controlled is a separate discussion, but it's an obvious and expected result.
Don't you get it?! What if a restaurant had a QR code and I had to ask the waiter what to eat? Or what if I had to pay more for a TV? Or WORSE -- not watch TV? I have to be comfortable and and everything must be convenient ALL THE TIME. I love the 4th amendment, but the MOMENT I suffer even the most minor inconvenience I MUST throw the 4th amendment out the window. Don't you see I have no choice?
This is maybe half correct (or fully correct for some people). It's not that simple though. We're talking about a web service the fascists didn't like. How do you host that anonymously other than Tor (which no one will use)? As someone who doesn't partake in any sort of MSM in the US and actively tries to avoid fascism, I would genuinely like to know what the solution is here.
Also re: AI, how do we not fall behind those who are willing/on the same team as Anthropic, OpenAI, X... SOTA models are currently fully captured by ideologies I would consider to be willfully and gleefully violating nearly all human rights.
How are we gonna get them to do that? We have a choice between two parties each propped up by trillions of dollars in donations that are both cool with selling our data.
This isn’t “both sides” stuff. We, the constituents, seem to have very little input on what values our parties represent anymore. We just get to pick the one we like best. This has gotten worse in my lifetime, esp after Citizen’s United.
I’m voting against the face eating leopard party every time. I’m not voting for someone. I would like very much to be voting for someone instead of against someone.
The internet era has brought about the rise of small dollar donors making an outsized impact (for better or worse - it's not always a good thing)
This has given rise to more forms of populism (left and right, benign and toxic)
In any case, it does provide some counter weight to large donor class.
Money tends to have diminishing returns past a certain point, when it comes to elections.
And I think people underestimate what dopes many large donors are - that just get milked by the party people pumping them full of sweet talk and don't really get much in return
>And I think people underestimate what dopes many large donors are - that just get milked by the party people pumping them full of sweet talk and don't really get much in return
They also see it like an insurance payment. Kick some amount to both sides in the hope that they leave you alone.
Trump famously won without having the largest donors. He only had 1 big backer (Robert Mercer) in 2016 before the Republican primaries, he was assumed to be a joke candidate. After he won the primaries, he finally got some recognition from the establishment, but even then, they were tepid on investing in him because he was assumed to lose the election.
He’s basically proof of the power of the common man’s vote in the US.
Trump was a billionaire, able to fund his own campaign, that hardly proves the power of the common man. Now, back to 2026, the richest person in the world has spent almost $500 million on helping Republicans in the midterms. Clearly him and Trump don't believe too much in the power of the common man's vote.
I guess you can pretend Liz Warren, Ron Wyden, Patty Murray, dozens of house reps and thousands of Democratic legisltators in statehouses and towns around the country don't exist and just vote for the "party that lowered my taxes" again , right?
I’m not saying that there aren’t people who care in our government, it’s just that the political machines themselves — the political parties — are beholden to big corporate donors until such time that Citizen’s United is struck down.
You aren't wrong, but that doesn't mean that ranking candidates and then choosing the one that is more aligned with your ideas isn't a valid strategy. This system is deeply broken but pointing that out and then putting a period on the end helps ensure it stays that way.
Warren? Come on. She is a TEXTBOOK example of someone who was a real person who arguably had morals who sold her soul to the party for a fancy title. Obama should have made her head of the CFPB since that was her pet project and career specialty. But no, everything "worked out better" for the machine if she just became an unremarkable senator.
There's no "selling" of data. These are just connection logs kept as part of routine auditing/anti-spam/anti-abuse practice by the ISP (something we all agree here is a good thing). And ICE appears to have gotten a warrant for them, which showed them the personal IPs of their targets.
You can argue the warrant was poorly justified (and I'd agree!), but I don't see a plausible world where "ISPs aren't allowed to do connection analysis on their own networks" is going to help anyone. Well, anyone except spammers. They'd love that.
But why is ICE, specifically, investigating that? The Federal government has multiple criminal divisions - why are ICE now a US Citizen criminal investigatory branch too? Seems far outside of their remit.
Almost all the cabinet level departments has their own Inspector General office since the 70s and 80s.
Homeland Security finally got one in 2003.
The Homeland Security Act of 2002 also let those offices start having their own statutory powers and carry firearms without needing to be deputized by the US Marshals Service.
(1) protest is protected by the first amendment
(2) American law enforcement isn't supposed to have access to this kind of information about citizens absent a warrant
Yes - the question has always been whether that is a good reason for a new, big federal organization to expand its surveillance capabilities, budget, and prosecution powers.
As a MN'n, I have my own opinions about the escalatory tactics of protestors (the marches were awesome, but many of the follow/callout patrols seemed designed to get people killed), and the predictable response of ICE. All while I strongly oppose gov surveillance and tracking like this.
What operation? Did they go around hacking into servers and invade their privacy?
> Headline makes it seem like ICE just did this in a vacuum.
Would they not do it in a vacuum? There’s been a a vagrant disregard for laws on their side. Why are they getting the benefit of the doubt here? It’s very clear they have been targeting certain demographics and political leaning from its institution.
The article is talking about a license plate scanner website that was being used to track the movements of ICE vehicles, follow them and harass agents.
If people started doing that to UPS delivery trucks I would expect UPS to do everything in their power to protect their staff.
UPS could do this, yes, but ICE isn’t allowed to. All of what you described is, by itself, perfectly legal for US citizens, and ICE has even more restrictions about targeting US citizens than the government as a whole. So why is it okay for ICE to do this?
> The article is talking about a license plate scanner website that was being used to track the movements of ICE vehicles, follow them and harass agents.
I fail to understand why this is a problem when they do the exact same thing to civilians? On top of that there are companies like Flock who monitor civilians when ICE isn’t there.
I don’t get why you love ICE so much and want to protect them like they’re doing you some big service and not going around instilling fear in others. Have you been living under a rock?
The framing applied here in this comment is very odd. People are allowed to organize and assemble.
One might even go a step further and say people are obligated to do so when the government repeatedly abuses its power to intimidate and violently affect the lives of people without due process or cause.
> Headline makes it seem like ICE just did this in a vacuum.
The headline makes it look like they run "One of the Largest Anti-Left Surveillance Ops in US History". The only way the trigger matters is if the response to that trigger is justified. These justifications, once you consider them valid, just start a vicious cycle. Most of the people are being put under surveillance by this "massive anti US citizen campaign" with no reasonable suspicion, no judicial supervision, by an agency which should have no business doing any of this. Just another flavor of authoritarianism. Is it justified for them to escalate? If not then your argument is bunk. The title says what it really is and justifying the extremist actions of one side only betrays a bias.
DNS, too. I imagine they weren't using their ISP's DNS server, as that could cut out needing a bunch of this data, but then I wonder what data they did get from whatever DNS provider...
Also SSH isn't a perfectly opaque protocol. There's stuff you can use to fingerprint e.g. client/server versions and often narrow it to architecture, OS, even OS version. That helps.
Someone is using paid service to surveil actual LEO agency and they are surprised LEOs can compel paid service to produce records? And all that while playing with license plate searches ( and heavens know what else ) that would normally suggest some basic levels of competence?
You play with a bull. You get he horns. Sometimes even if you know what you are doing.
edit:
Kids these days: Wah, the government is not playing faaaair.
They would do that as part of their journalistic investigations. Just like a private eye would also track people. The difference is motive.
But it's a big grey zone between some clear cut "black" and "white" cases. I don't know if prosecutors are using or will use the fact of surveilling law enforcement as a crime itself or as evidence for intent to commit other crimes.
In any reasonable way non totalitarian state you expect law enforcement to be limited in their capabilities tho not be a beehive retaliating against accountability
It is a fascinating question. I was going to give you a canned response, but.. I think..as a society we may be coming to an interesting moment, when we kinda have to decide, which part of the equation is more important.
I agree, we are going to have to make some choices because it’s clear that we now have technology where anyone can track anyone else in public with some cheap hardware (e.g. ESP cams) and a Claude subscription.
I’d actually be OK with a symmetric response to this, in fact, I WOULD LOVE a symmetric response: law enforcement can’t use AI to track citizens and we can’t use AI to track them.
… but there is a lot of 1st and 4th amendment shenanigans going on with all of this and I can’t even guess where it will land.
I agree something will have to give. Current situation is a clear indicator of a major change in power balance. I know it was discussed on HN before, but just being able to generate actual online profiles with a dose of confidence based on known various personal fingerprints is enough to make most of us hesitate ( just the other day I put the method to the test on persona HN analyzer thing -- it gets crazy fast; I stopped, but I suspect a lot of people have built an equivalent that just happens to run behind various closer doors ).
Perhaps it's a problem that our supposed public servants can aptly be compared to a dangerous swarm of bees?
Like, in a non-dystopian world, they'd not be hiding their activities and not be attacking people who observe them, but would instead be behaving legally and ethically and therefor not be concerned.
I get the angle you're coming from, but I feel like it's missing the point.
The problem is we have a beehive full of ICE/HSI agents that are going around in plain clothes, yelling "trust me bro" in place of warrants/badges/names, and demanding full obedience to anyone they approach.
The same people will injure, sometimes gravely, and refuse medical treatment while holding them in terrible conditions. The party line is that anyone who is arrested by these people are "criminals", which is just a direct contradiction to the bill of rights.
At the end of the day, your comments are saying "I don't care about the bill of rights, all that matters is authority regardless of the legitimacy."
Appreciate the response. The characterization is purposefully blunt. IMO we don't have the time or luxury to play around with debates over how people act towards agents of the state, when agents of the state ultimately answer to the constitution.
“they are surprised LEOs can compel paid service to produce records”
I’m not surprised, but this is not how it’s supposed to be in the US.
The fourth amendment is supposed to force a high bar for collecting evidence in this way but we’ve been slowly eroding those rights away over the last 50 years.
Well the issue is private corporations selling data willingly is not bound by the fourth amendment. So just assume whatever any US corporation knows about you is also known by the US government because they will sell your data for a penny.
What is good for the goose and whatnot. What I am saying is that when you do things that are bound to get attention is not to assume that you won't get attention.
You may think you have nothing to hide but See NSPM-7. National Security Presidential Memorandum 7 that directs the federal government to disrupt groups “before” they result in violent political acts. In other words, pre-crime.
The DOJ/FBI etc. can now investigate and unilaterally DECIDE if you have something to hide if they believe you hold views "anti-Americanism, anti-capitalism, anti-Christianity, government overthrow, race/gender/migration extremism, and hostility toward traditional views on family, religion, or morality"
The DOJ/FBI can DECIDE this for any reason they want -- the shoes you bought yesterday, a Reddit comment from 5 years ago, a rainbow sticker on your water bottle. I have everything to fear just opening my Mac or stepping out my door.
Your stance of LEO being an antagonistic force belies a deeper moral corruption that I find gross and incompatible with a liberal (free) society. Wilhoit’s Law and all that.
Allowing law enforcement to maintain a default stance of antagonism - “us vs them” - can only lead to law enforcement being leveraged by those in power (political or capital power) to define who the “them” is.
I’d much rather have law enforcement have a default cooperative stance with their communities and society at large. You know, if “protect and serve” wasn’t just a marketing gimmick but an actual principle applied during process and procedures.
In essence: thin blue line is an illiberal aesthetic that has 19th century American leaders rolling in their graves - at least the ones who weren’t chasing down slaves to return to the South.
Hmm. Interesting. Function may be an emergent quality of the organization itself ( as human I have two hands, as octopus I have more appendages to play with ). In other words, the question is not really on what you personally would rather have, but what a given body type bestows upon a given organizational type.
Your body determines your function oversimplification for the purposes of this argument.
It has always been obvious since ICE’s budget was raised over 10x what it used to be, even though ICE was already struggling to find enough people with criminal records to deport, that ICE was intended to be far more than an immigration enforcement agency.
Immigration in the US has always been more complicated than "no papers? gotta go." Moving north to do some seasonal work then moving back south is a very old thing, and was enshrined into law by the "Bracero program" in the post ww2 era. In the 60s, however, it was ended abruptly, giving migratory workers no choice but to stay illegally. ... and business owners no choice but to keep hiring them.
The idea that illegal immigrants need to be deported (and not have a path to legal residency) comes from a view that those jobs should go to American citizens (which will bring economic pain that is intolerable) or from a view that browns don't belong in the USA.
Undocumented immigrants are a useful scapegoat politically, because it allows those in power to point the finger at them for all the country's problems, but those immigrants have no political power themselves since they can't vote.
Additionally, it gives business owners a bunch of workers they can exploit, since those workers can't go to the police or report them to the labor board.
> The idea that illegal immigrants need to be deported (and not have a path to legal residency) comes from a view that those jobs should go to American citizens (which will bring economic pain that is intolerable) or from a view that browns don't belong in the USA.
Doesn't the qualification of them being illegal immigrants imply that they aren't going through the legal processes immigrants should go through to get work and residency?
If illegal immigrants gain the same rights as legal immigrants, why even bother following the rules?
As others have pointed out in the thread, those who slurp up the surplus value of the labor of these undocumented workers would hate to lose this leverage of "Oh you want the same rights American workers get? Don't want me making a phone call to my buddy over at the police department!"
That happens occasionally. But it mostly doesn't happen. Mostly, the people who end up with criminal charges are the illegal immigrants. If you dig into the numbers it tells the story of a vanishingly small number of companies (like hundreds per year out of millions) getting scrutiny. The industries which get the scrutiny are the ones where people could end up dead or injured (construction, meat packing, etc.). (According to Gemini - grain of salt)
Couldn't you just better fund the court system so the court date isn't years away? Or improve the citizenship process? Maybe some of that $100 billion we gave to ICE could have gone to the courts for faster processing of these specific cases. That would seem like the more civilized way to do it.
Instead, we spent the money setting up a heavily armored police organization to forcibly find, process, and detain people who "might" have broken a law. Putting everyone in a detention center doesn't really seem like a great way to speed up the processing time. In the meantime multiple actual US citizens have been killed, detained, and intimidated. Makes you wonder what the actual goal was in the first place.
Or, given the fact that normal folks come here and live normal lives contributing to their communities, the US could just make easier paths to citizenship.
You have to prove you are actually verifying these things and our government has done a pretty bad job at it. We have at this point hundreds of incidents of legal residents and citizens caught in this fascist net.
>> The idea that illegal immigrants need to be deported (and not have a path to legal residency) comes from a view that those jobs should go to American citizens
Isn't that obvious? I mean I can't imagine why this would be even remotely controversial.
At the risk of a committing a "No True Scotsman" here... it isn't a properly left wing position. Or at least it hasn't been for most of the history of the left.
I agree, we should revise the laws to reflect what the people actually want- a reasonable path towards citizenship for immigrants working, paying taxes and not causing problems.
But that isn’t what the right wants; a modern coalition of racists who want no immigrants, and opportunists who want a underclass of labor that can’t organize, vote or otherwise fight back currently is in power.
And that coalition is in power after successfully scapegoating immigrants to average Americans who have no idea what the Byzantine legal citizenship process looks like now when they repeat that they want “legal immigrants”.
Because the business that sponsors politics loves the cheap labour, and there is no cheaper worker than one who will always fall in line out of fear of losing everything.
This is a bipartisan issue: as evidenced by farmers crying uncle in Arizona and Florida, resulting their respective Republican governments scaling back on enforcement after crops started to rot in the fields. The same thing happened with meatpackers in some ruby-red midwestern town after an immigration raid on a meatpacking plant. Unsurprisingly, Republican voters are down for "mass deportation now", but not in their backyards, or place of business.
I don’t know how you can say this. Obama deported so many people he was known as the “Deporter-in-chief”. Biden deported more people in his term than Trump did in his first term. He also was ready to sign a comprehensive bipartisan immigrant bill before Trump told his party to tank it.
By what metric does the Democratic party want “as many illegal immigrants as possible” and why would they be deporting so many people if that were the case?
That response article (whether intentional or not, I can't say) horribly misunderstands and misrepresents the POSIWID axiom.
It's not about the outcomes of something taken in isolation, it's about the actions taken in order to achieve it, and when those actions continually run counter to achieving the stated goal.
So the response article examples are missing half the context needed to make it's claim:
* The hospital only curing 2/3 of cancer patients being simply a failure to achieve it's true mission of 3/3 cures would rely on knowing it is taking action in earnest to actually cure all patients.
While we can assume that for an obvious hypothetical, if for instance a whistleblower leaked evidence showing that 1/3 patients were being intentionally withheld care, the hospital responded it was an accident, but then evidence came out proving they still did this, then POSIWID would apply.
In a real-world, non-hypothetical example:
ICE keeps deporting American citizens. Every time this gets reported on, they insist it's a mistake. They keep doing it.
Insisting that adverse behavior is an accident/mistake/incidental, but then continuing to do the bad thing yourself, is the purpose of the axiom.
Lol, in your example you're conflating a side effect with the main purpose of a system (double fallacy I guess - cherry picking AND hasty generalization)
"Insisting that adverse behavior is an accident/mistake/incidental, but then continuing to do the bad thing yourself, is the purpose of the axiom."
So, in your (faulty) interpretation, the axiom applies perfectly to the fact that cars kill pedestrians
We have lots of laws that aren't meant to be followed 100% of the time. We don't ticket everyone who speeds. Even those who get caught are often let go with a verbal warning. Speed cameras that automatically send tickets are illegal in some places. Weed is still illegal at the federal level and in many states, but people aren't always prosecuted for small amounts for personal use, even when they get caught.
At some level, this is because the optics still matter. Most of us don't want to see brown families rounded up and tossed over the nearest southern border.
The president is an actual felon / insurrectionist / adjudicated rapist who ran a fraudulent charity, and you want to know why people might feel immigration law doesn’t really matter?
I really don't think anyone is taking Trump's misdeeds and poor character into account when making the decision to cross the border illegally or overstay a visa. I'm quite sure they are thinking more about economic opportunities, getting out of a bad situation in their home country, reuniting with family, or other things along those lines.
Should the consequence of speeding be forfeiture of your car and license?
The fact is, the huge majority of undocumented folks came into the country legally. Most overstayed their visas, had the laws changed out from under them, lost their employment, etc. In other words, they’re virtually all tax-paying, productive members of society who want to be here. It’s a win-win for them to remain.
This obsession with “the law!” only ever really seems related to immigration law. Wonder why…
You've connected to very unrelated things unjustifiably - Immigrants and criminals
This is why advocates have always tried to reframe things from "illegal" to "undocumented"
It's actually not a crime to overstay a visa or to be here without one. It's nothing.
The act of crossing the border "illegally" is a misdemeanor (the first time) on the level of something like a speeding ticket - but its still not illegal to be here even if you crossed "illegally"
> If you want more people to immigrate you should make the legal pathways more accessible, not tolerate the illegal ones.
How do you do this in a way that preserves the leverage that business owners have over undocumented workers? Those people form a pretty strong coalition with the people who think all immigration is bad for ... other reasons, so this is pretty much a non-starter politically.
Real life isn’t so neat and tidy. Your comfort with treating your fellow humans with such cruelty if their situations aren’t in alignment with our existing clusterfuck of immigration laws speaks volumes about you. Be better.
But isn't the enforcement of every law indifferent to the sufferings of the one who is breaking the law when it tries to set things straight? Why is immigration special?
Don’t imagine you’d get much pushback from the people you see as your political opponents if you supported going after businesses for hiring undocumented immigrants. You face pushback when the solution is punching down.
IF better immigration laws are not possible because people want to exploit illegal migrants THEN why would it be considered cruel for someone to oppose illegal migration?
Opposing illegal migration is not cruel on its own. The methods currently being employed to resolve it are extremely cruel and idiotic (e.g., forfeiting due process)
You're comfort with ignoring our laws, promoting policies that drain other countries of their most ambitious and productive citizens, encourage exploitative labor practices, and make it more difficult for immigrants to enter the country via legal means, speaks volumes about you. Be better.
P.S. When has anyone ever responded to the the sanctimonious phrase "be better" by actually "being better". You don't want them to "be better", you just want to try and shame them into adopting your ideological views.
Yea! Laws must be enforced! Let’s arrest all those illegal oral sex havers in Maryland. And those criminal face-makers-at-dogs in Oklahoma? Lock them up! Those horrible people singing while wearing swim suits in Florida? Straight to jail. Those deviants eating apple pie with ice cream in Kansas surely need to be put away. Women driving cars without their husbands waving flags in front need to be locked up, too! Laws are laws, after all. Better enforce them, lest you be a scofflaw.
How does, e.g., deporting a person who was illegally brought to this country at the age of 2, back to their “home” help their home country? What about the Haitian who came here legally under TPS, then, after Trump ended TPS, is now “illegal”? The Dept of State’s own website currently says of Haiti: “Do not travel to Haiti due to the risk of crime, kidnapping, terrorism, unrest, and limited health care.” How is deporting people back there helpful?
It's a civil infraction, like a speeding ticket or a heavy equipment rebuilder that makes the mistake of painting a bunch of stuff with paint that doesn't meat whatever this years EPA VOC rules are.
If you're not rich enough to lawyer up, spend five figures fighting through the kangaroo administrative process and then another five sticking it to them in real court a civil infraction is actually worse in a lot of ways because those pesky 4th through 8th amendments don't really protect you all that much. There's a lot of judicial precedent from the past 100yr that basically waters down your rights when a bureaucrat is after you rather than the cops.
It's a pretty important legal difference. The administration is now trying to treat it as a criminal offense, trying to enforce it as a criminal offense, using that to justify calling huge swathes of immigrants 'criminals', etc.
Consider this scenario. A friend of yours walks up to you and says "man, I got a ticket yesterday." You will have a general idea of the level of enforcement involved, how that's looked at by the government and others, etc. You probably do not see your friend as a criminal.
Now, suppose the same friend walked up and says "man, I got arrested yesterday, I just got bailed out." You will have different ideas of the enforcement model and perceptions of that. There is now a greater probability that you see your friend as a criminal.
gestures at the numerous overcrowded ICE detention facilities, the rotten food, the denied healthcare / resulting deaths, the separation of children from parents, the shuffling to frustrate habeas petitions and other legal interventions, the constant rhetoric spewed by admin officials
Because when Trump said “we are going to deport the worst of the worst” people took that to mean criminal gangbangers. Then all of a sudden he’s deporting hairdressers, students, and abuelas and people are understandably surprised Pikachu, saying that’s not what they voted for.
It’s a sleight of hand, they say “the worst of the worst” and what they mean is “all illegal immigrants are the worst of the worst”
This is why they’re going to lose their majorities next week.
These semantic tricks are so tiresome. If you broke a law to enter the country, I'm sorry, but you're here illegally. No amount of redefining of terms is ever going to change that.
The Bracero program was ended, but the H-2A visa program for seasonal farm labor remains active, with no numeric cap and hundreds of thousands of visas issued each year. I don't blame workers for making a living, but is there some reason why these business owners requiring seasonal labor could not obtain the proper visa for it?
> They can pay them less, treat them worse, then if there are any issues, deport them. It's very gross.
Yeah, it boils down to the same reasons why many corporations want an incredibly broken H-1B system at the higher end: it provides an exploitable pool of workers.
And currently in both cases you can find a lot of consternation from the people who benefitted from how things worked prior to Trump because the administration is making significant changes to the status quo. The business owners loved the rhetoric about fixing immigration, but assumed the broken systems that gave them the benefits of exploiting those worker pools would largely be maintained as they had been.
And to be explicitly clear with my opinion, neither side of this conflict (businesses that want to maintain the broken-but-works-for-us system, or the Trump administration) are the good guys here. The businesses want to keep exploiting migrant workers unimpeded and the administration wants to be maximally racist more than it wants to help businesses keep exploiting.
Friction of paperwork. Not saying it's right, but it's a reason.
Also, you are shifting the blame for immigrants getting arrested to the owners. That means the employees are actually blameless: they are caught between seldom-enforced laws and a need to thrive and feed their families.
Yes, again, I don't personally blame the employees. I think the vast majority of people who unlawfully immigrate to the US mean well. There's actually pretty broad agreement on that, despite the psychopaths running enforcement right now; CBP is still paying bonuses for voluntary departure.
It's actually better in many cases for businesses to hire undocumented workers, since it makes the workers position much more tenuous. They are much less like to unionize, demand higher pay, etc. if the threat of deportation is hanging over their head
Could they not just have fruit picking farms in the south and export it here? I think that will be a win win for everyone. The big losers will be the US farms I guess.
That's pretty interesting, what sort of people have you discussed this with? I'd imagine that many people in the center and leftward would at least try to inject some nuance into such blunt statements.
> The idea that illegal immigrants need to be deported comes from a view that those jobs should go to American citizens or from a view that browns don't belong in the USA.
Or, you know, from the idea that they are doing something illegal and the job of law enforcement is to enforce laws.
I'd encourage you to read the entire last sentence of my comment and not focus on the racism part if it bothers you so much; there is a non-racist argument for deporting all illegal immigrants as well.
"The idea that illegal immigrants need to be deported comes from a view that those jobs should go to American citizens or from a view that browns don't belong in the USA"
Calling everybody a racist who wants laws enforced is weak. Immigration laws are made necessary by a welfare state I happen to not support. The conversation has literally nothing to with race or racism. We're talking about the laws that govern the country and whether we should enforce or ignore them.
What do you think? Do you have any profound insight or ideas to share?
Laws aren't moral. These laws are bad, and shouldn't be enforced. They should be changed, but we don't have the political will to do so, so "rounding up all the brown people and shipping them to Mexico" is not the second-best option.
Sure, but when 1 party blocks that continually due to racism (and kills programs put in place like DACA that help the situation), then funnels money to "law enforcement" specifically for the thing they helped make illegal, then it's fair to criticize the "law enforcement" as a tool of racist politics (and make no mistake, before anyone comes claiming racism isn't the reason for it, Stephen Miller has plenty of choice quotes stating that's exactly why he is pushing for ICE deportations).
Don't know why you think I don't understand that, I'm just pointing out that a law being a law doesn't shield racist people who support racist laws from being called racist.
(And the people who sign onto an organization like ICE knowing exactly what they do and why.)
> Funny how democrats always care so much about "the law" and "due process" until it relates to immigration.
Funny how often the very problems republicans are so adamant about are caused by their own policies. Before the change the population flowed seasonally and had little reason to stay long term. Suddenly it's an issue but by shutting off the flow without a way to do it legally it screwed both parties. Farms still need the crops picked and the work is difficult and the pay is only good relative to the opportunities in other countries so there's no replacement domestic workforce.
>Farms still need the crops picked and the work is difficult and the pay is only good relative to the opportunities in other countries so there's no replacement domestic workforce.
Somewhat, the other side of the coin is if they can even find labor at a price that has a chance of competing with growers who have local access to cheaper labor because they're in poorer countries. The price they'd have to pay to get legal pickers is more likely to fully drive those farms out of business or at least out of those crops into more machine harvestable crops.
The main point though is that the "problem" of seasonal farm workers staying in the US illegally is to some extent artificially created by attempting to strictly enforce the border. Before that they were able to come work freely and would happily return to their home country because the process of getting into the US for the harvesting seasons was (relative to the modern process) easy, safe and cheap so there was no reason to stay in the US. Why would they, their wages would go farther in their home countries and that's where their families were and they would be able to cross back for the next major harvest they wanted to participate in.
We're not talking about slaves here... and someone does need to pick the food from the vine, big ag has tried for decades to automate picking of various fruits to little success. It turns out recognizing and handling ripe fruit is a difficult task for both vision and effectors.
What are you talking about? Can we avoid the Reddit/twitter style of comment? If you have an argument or a point to make just make it.
Is this one of these stupid "yeah 300 years ago this used to be on that land!!!" argument? Buddy, if so, stop living in the past. Territories are conquered all the time everywhere throughout the entirety of History.
Plus, this has nothing to do with current immigration laws.
The point is that families didn't just evacuate when it turned into US territory. There are very strong ties to Mexico in the southwest that will never go away.
And what does it have to do with foreigners illegally coming to do these seasonal jobs? People who were here when it became US territory just became citizens.
How does it apply to the specific case mentioned in the parent? How does it relate to illegal workers who somehow are now "trapped" in the US because some weird fringe program was stopped?
That’s an extreme take. What other laws do you think should be ignored? Traffic laws? Building codes? Tax laws?
A nation is literally defined as an entity that has control over its borders. If it permits just anyone to enter or exit, it is technically not a nation anymore.
I’m all for changing immigration laws, giving more people a legal route to becoming temporary workers, students, residents, and citizens. But being choosy about who gets in and who does not. Attract the best and brightest to lift your country up, not freeloaders and criminals that tear it down. Look at the riots in Europe right now - and learn from their mistakes. Immigration is good but there have to be limits, laws, and control over borders.
A nation-state, technically. A state is an organization with a monopoly on the legitimate use of physical violence. There have been historical states (eg. European kingdoms of the high middle ages) that meet the definition of a state while still having very fuzzy borders.
That's a definition you just made up, which has no precedent and is clearly untrue.
I can cross a dozen borders in the EU without so much as slowing down. I can sell my house in one US State and move to another without asking for permission.
It wasn't until World War 1 that passports for international travel became common in Europe.
Don't let the xenophobic posts on social media trick you. Immigrants in the US are factually less likely to commit crimes than born Americans, look it up. They've just repeated the lie so many times that people have accepted it.
> If it permits just anyone to enter or exit, it is technically not a nation anymore.
You cannot "permit" something you do not control, so this is a contradiction in terms. If you mean that the constraints put on the US by itself to not police immigration in overly violent or cruel ways mean that it does not control immigration, then by the same logic the 4th amendment implies that there is no rule of law in the US (since certain criminals can't be convicted due to bad actions by the state).
> But being choosy about who gets in and who does not.
Nobody really denies this. The question is how violent or cruel you can be in the exercise of this choosiness.
> Look at the riots in Europe right now
The riots in Europe are not primarily about immigration. Get off twitter.
Deranged. Someone said that allowing bright minds to immigrate over freeloaders and criminals is preferable and you denigrate them as a fascist who can't even be spoken to. Absolutely and utterly deranged.
Statistically this is false. No amount of hand picked undocumented drunk drivers will change this. A large majority of undocumented immigrants follow the law closer, aside from the obvious immigration laws.
So yes, if it quacks like a fascist duck, it's a fascist duck.
Statistically what is false? Nobody made any quantifiable statement. Clearly you just get off on calling people fascists. You probably think it makes you a better person when it actually makes you look like an unthinking drone.
Its too much work, we did violent rounding up of brown people to have images to re use for campaigns and now we can use the paramilitary force for chasing political dissidents like any normal democratic goverment would do.
Lets ignore that the richest man on the planet has a credible record of being n immigrant who stayed in the US illegaly, and has open criminal record probes in at least 2 countries. But I guess a 350 million donation to the standing goverment in campaign donations might make it difficult for ICE to find him
When it was irish, they were white. And when it was poles in the UK, likewise.
Perhaps resistance to mass immigration, which correlates with race, isn't based in race. Perhaps almost everywhere, almost always, people resist the mass movement of new and unfamiliar people into their territory. Perhaps that has been the overwhelming democratic consensus of every western democracy since mass immigration was a thing, and it was only ever enabled by an anti-democratic elite consensus.
Which is why sadly the city of Boston is a hellhole and not one of the best cities to live in the USA.
> And when it was poles in the UK, likewise.
Funnily enough reform voters now want the poles back, because industries like construction have slowed down and the lack of EU priority means that the global south now dominates the entry visas into the country. Kurwa we didnt know how well we had it, they say on their way to get a Chinese takeaway on their german car while they check their south korean phone
> Perhaps resistance to mass immigration, which correlates with race, isn't based in race.
Well America has a pretty significant history with racial discrimination. I am even going to ignore history, you know little details like the first cops being slave catchers, and just focus on the present. Where brown neighbourhoods have way more police and despite no racial difference in use of drugs, the percentage of arrests for drug use is disproportionately brown. Something that isn't that weird considering chemically crack and coke are the same thing but crack cocaine originally had a 100 year sentence versus the 1 year in jail for coke, or the FBI starting the war on drugs by going after opium and mass rounding of asian workers and renaming weed as Marihuana to make it sound more Mexican and allow another round of mass arrests.
Those kind of things make ignoring the racial issue a bit more difficult. The constant references to eugenics, and "cleanliness" by the admin are also not particularly quiet dog whistles.
But lets pretend for a second that it has to do with mass immigration. Would the populations that "suffer" that immigration not be the ones up in arms because of the problems they cause? How come its rural villages with 0 immigrants that vote for Brexit and red states that are negative tax contributors and no one wants to live in the source of most of the complaints and not the multicultural cities that are the entire GDP of either country and are chalk full of those newly arrived immigrants?
Does it not make anyone think that the statue of liberty saying that immigrants are welcome and NYC being one of the richest cities in the world might be inextricably linked? While Alabama being the world incest capital and not making money once in 50 years might also have something to do with each other?
Deporting everyone who isn't in the country legally is their mission, executing people is not.
You can argue about how they should go about deporting people, but them deporting everyone even those without a criminal record is their intended purpose.
Only if they have a deportation order. There are scenarios where people are in an in between state or have the ability to challenge a deportation order
The law is assumed to be in line with "protect America", it isn't up for ICE to decide that. If you think current laws are not protecting America then vote to change them.
However what ICE gets to decide is what cases to prioritize, they don't get to decide who to exonerate but their limited resources means that they prioritize those who are bigger dangers. Still if they had infinite resources they would take everyone.
It’s also the federal government’s job to go around arresting everybody carrying or smoking weed, as it is still illegal no matter what any state says and every single person consuming it is a lawbreaker.
Every time the police gets to choose whether to apply a law or not you add more power to the police, I don't want the police to be more powerful.
Anyone who don't say yes just wants a police state, the reason your American police is so dangerous and powerful is because they have these choices and can arrest you for a lot of things that people don't normally get arrested for.
So yes, they should do that. That you think they shouldn't is exactly why the American police is so horrible.
You're mixing up cause and effect. The police in America aren't more dangerous and powerful because they have choices, they have choices because they are dangerous and powerful.
There was a post here about a year or so ago about a guy on Facebook being arrested for incredibly benign posts [1]. It's the clearest example of violating one of our foundational laws of this country. Yet the police get away with a slap on the wrist as taxpayers pay for their abuse of power. American police are powerful and are not subject to the same level of scrutiny or justice as average individuals. They can selectively ignore laws and constitutional rights as is.
I do actually think that we shouldn’t have laws we aren’t willing to enforce, so we agree more than you think. I’ve been against states unilaterally legalizing it for years because I worried what happens when states buck laws that I do agree with, such as voting rights or basic protections for all people.
The issue is we don’t run our country that way. We do apply it on a spectrum. So as long as that’s the status quo, I will expect them to back off on things that don’t need strict enforcement. You don’t need to eject every single undocumented person with impunity. It is not productive or ethical.
I outright think deporting every person here undocumented now is not ethical, or beneficial to society, given the history of immigration and enforcement in this country.
>Many of the discussions above are based on a central fact: Undocumented immigrants are here, now, in large numbers. In a world where America had zero undocumented residents, arguments could be made to be less tolerant of their presence, to discourage them from being here. It wouldn't be patently inhumane to deport someone if they have been here weeks, rather than years or decades.
A serious, ethical attempt to reduce illegal immigration would be to set a path to legal, documented residence for all current non-felon aliens, and begin "undocumented" enforcement with a clean slate.
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edit to reply to Izikiel43 since my participation in the thread has been throttled:
Is it incomprehensible that we could have a compromise solution not involving deportation of tens of millions of people, while at the same time implementing employment validation and other checks that begin actually doing immigration enforcement before families settle?
You assume that a path to legal citizenship for long-time residents here would 100% mean the situation would repeat itself, and I disagree.
I agree, but that is not for ICE to decide. Democrats should have fixed this a long time ago, USA isn't a one party state so if Democrats wanted to fix this they could have. But they too didn't want undocumented immigrants to gain full rights, it is very useful to have abusable second class citizens around for the upper classes.
So the problem here isn't ICE, it is Trump and his politics. ICE following the law and doing their job is the wrong target.
Of the half-dozen or so attempts at immigration reform in the past 25 years, every one of them has been blocked by Republicans.
IMO, Republicans like the status quo because the business class enjoys exploiting workers they can threaten with deportation, and they enjoy it as a rallying cry for their voting base.
The law dictates who can be deported, generally not who must be deported.
Who must be deported is mostly left up to discretion.
And since deportation is very expensive and drastic - an option of last resort - it's usually better for all involved to come up with other arrangements.
Most prior presidents had good sense enough to understand that mass deportation is a major foot-gun, politically and economically. And kind of morally monstrous.
For better or worse, the arrangement that's been informally agreed upon is to let most of the undocumented who have been here a long time, remain (dreamers, etc).
Sadly, that left them all vulnerable to the discretion of a capricious criminal wanna-be dictator like Trump.
> Most prior presidents had good sense enough to understand that mass deportation is a major foot-gun, politically and economically. And kind of morally monstrous.
If they recognized this is an issue just add a way for upstanding undocumented immigrants to become documented immigrants, problem solved.
Instead they preserved the status quo where they can use ICE to hammer their enemies, that is a very bad thing. ICE taking everyone is the only way, it robs it of its power.
Only Trump has really done this. ICE was created in the wake of 9/11 and didn't exist before then.
Before Trump we had Bush and Obama presiding over ICE - the 9/11 aftermath heavily influenced both of their administration policies on deportation (in both cases, pretty hardline).
Before ICE, deportation was mostly a matter for lawyers and judges, and not full of smashed car windows and gun fights, by chuds that make mall-cops look like Marines by comparison.
The weaponization of ICE against political enemies is new and dangerous
We can certainly blame congress for not doing reform, but also it's really hard. The immigration system is probably the most complex legal and bureaucratic regime in the country
That wasn't the campaign promise and isn't worth spending money on. Also they are deporting and detaining people who are here legally and even killing American citizens. Even if it isn't a official mission it's the inevitable side effect of funding a domestic law enforcement agency like a military and making them explicitly beholden to a political agenda.
Sure but keep in mind that most of these people pay taxes into a system that they don't actually benefit from (social security for one), so by doing so you're actually causing more economic damage than you think you're fixing.
So if someone lives here, works and pays taxes, and has not been convicted of any other crime... why would we want to deport them? By some measures migrants pay more taxes and commit less crime than natural born citizens. We should just get them paperwork and let them continue being good citizens while we also reform the process that resulted in them being here illegally in the first place.
Why should we spend billions of dollars on this problem that in many ways, on paper, is beneficial?
We have evidence now that they execute people without a criminal record.
See the execution of Renée Good. Remember how the ICE terrorist deliberately
stepped before her car, to try to make a defensive claim aka "had to shoot her to stop her". Meanwhile his other two terrorist buddies were standing NEXT to the car,
thus invalidating the lie quite logically. After all, how did two other ICE terrorists
manage to not get into that situation that the murderer chose to employ here? So there is a lack of consistency among ICE terrorists.
This should be obvious to anyone that has seen the videos from this incident. In any normal civilised country 10% of adult population would protest something like this next day in every city and town. Then those "agents" would be arrested and they would have a very public court case.
To be fair, this was obvious to many people who study domestic civil rights as early as the bill that originally created the DHS and ICE. For eg, this review from 2002:
>Americans’ liberties have been trammeled in a variety of different ways. Under the guise of stopping terrorism, law enforcement officials and government leaders have now been given the right to conduct searches of homes and offices without prior notice, use roving wiretaps to listen in on telephone conversations, and monitor computers and e-mail messages, even to the degree of eavesdropping on attorney/client conversations.
>Conceivably, these extensions of the definition of “terrorist” could bring within their sweep diverse domestic political groups, which have been accused of acts of intimidation or property damage such as Act Up, People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA), Operation Rescue, and the Vieques demonstrators.
It should have been stopped before it grew into the leviathan it is now but the general consensus by the politicos of the time was that this was just histrionic left/libertarian worry, and that something like that could never happen in the USA, we were too just, too democracy-loving.
While they both fall under DHS, you're confusing CBP with ICE.
CBP's job is to protect the border and stop drug and people trafficking entering, whereas ICE's original purpose was to enforce immigration law within the US.
While not "everything" ICE was tasked with was immigration, that was their bread and butter. Where the vast majority of their workforce and spend went.
Man, this is chilling. Between this and those "anti-ice" protestors that got a collective 450 years of jail time, it seems pretty close to police state levels of power, corruption and control.
Add to that the weaponization of the justice department. Former FBI director Comey charged 3 times as retaliation, Senator Mark Kelly and other senators, even lowly aides such as Cassidy Hutchinson, all facing retaliation.
David Hearn, the former Olympic canoeist was accused and indicted for damaging the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool, purely as a scapegoat.
All federal funds to the state of Colorado frozen to force them to release a convicted-and-imprisoned ally of the administration (see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DOE6DTMjPEc )
All of this happening out in the open, no checks, no balances. Yeah it isn't "pretty close", it is a police state.
They're not hard to find. It's happening; it's not as widespread as it could be if it's allowed to continue. Put this into google: "federal agents intimidating people for posting social media comments".
If you live in North Korea or pre-unified East Germany, you know the difference. You don't protest, you don't express your opinion, even in private because who knows who the government spies are or who will snitch on you for slightly better living conditions in the system.
ICE has murdered protestors but each case is a headline. Start worrying when it's not a headline anymore. Either because the media are suppressed or because it becomes so common that it's not newsworthy anymore. Wait until the army indiscriminately opens fire on crowds of people and the government isn't even trying to justify it. And when you hear stories of people just disappearing. Then you will be scared to post comments like this.
Sure, it's fine to complain, but calling it a "police state" just discredits you at this stage.
I feel like a big lesson of US politics over the past few years is if you hyperventilate and accuse your opponents of doing some type of drastic shit which they haven't yet done, that backfires by creating political cover and possibly even motivation to do the drastic bad thing. "Do not obey in advance" is a related concept. By helping to make the unthinkable thinkable, you might just be doing a favor for a potential tyrant.
Anyways, HN loves to glaze China, and they have much stiffer speech controls. I think these complaints are motivated more by anti-Trump sentiment than a genuine love for liberty.
This account (GP) often comes to these stories to make comments like this. Flag them and move on, avoid giving them the attention they crave like King Trump
> If you live in North Korea or pre-unified East Germany, you know the difference. You don't protest, you don't express your opinion, even in private because who knows who the government spies are or who will snitch on you for slightly better living conditions in the system.
This level of control is unnecessary when the population is mentally captive and the chilling effect of police violence prevents any actual action.
By your standards you should have started worrying a long, long time ago.
The problem is that I say things like that and folks respond "well, what do you mean". But of course, by your standards you -also- don't know what folks in general are complaining about because you don't pay attention.
If you've been paying attention to radical politics in the US, you will know that the state has been consistently infiltrating and destroying groups of folks who are legally organizing since the 19th C labor movements. You'd consider the genocide of indigenous folks, the assassination of Fred Hampton, the MOVE bombings and understand that the US does all the same repressive work, but the citizens in the US think that is a "good" thing.
Seems like you are constructing a very specific situation that should mark some sort of regime change to dictatorship. The reality is, complex things have their own momentum and US society is a big thing.
Btw I've lived in one of those regimes. Yes people often privately expressed their stark opinions against the system, sometimes in more vague forms also publicly. There is infinite amount of gray between those 2 extremes, and US is already somewhere there moving darker a bit each day.
"Start worrying when it's not a headline anymore."
Er. No? Start worrying before it is not a headline anymore. If you wait to worry (and take action) at the point you propose, it's become too late to do anything about it.
It's sad that this seems to be a prevalent attitude. "It hasn't gotten unbearable yet so there's no reason to take action now." Ideally we'd be pushing back on these things long long long before they're even a remote possibility.
We still have roving packs of ICE people abducting people across the country with almost no accountability. We're not far from "the army indiscriminately opens fire on crowds of people". I like to believe that if ICE were to go even farther and do something like this that it would trigger a mass pushback/reaction, but TBH I don't feel entirely confident that it would.
"Either because the media are suppressed" -- we're seeing media suppression now, from two angles: the head of the FCC is literally trying to intimidate media outlets regularly, the most recent (that I'm aware of) being telling media outlets not to run polls that show how unpopular Trump is. The other angle is allowing the buy-up/consolidation of media by right-wing oligarchs who then start tampering with news coverage.
An important characteristic of autocracy and fascism is there is no bottom: the government is targeting activists but you can still talk about it online; professors in Texas must submit their syllabus to AI censorship software to screen for discussions of sexuality, but they aren't being sent to the gulag; ...; people are free to go about their lives as long as they are "apolitical"; ...; Suharto's death squads have killed half a million "communists" but at least it's not 5 million, and it's mostly in the villages...
Another important concept is the Dual State; there will always be some people who remain within the Normative State even as it shrinks and shrinks, and while the horrors of the Prerogative State become more and more extreme.
I would urge you to attempt to define fascism in a way that does not reflect the behaviour of the current admin, and its a pretty fungible political theory so there are multiple valid definitions, and I would still think you would fail
Didn't they get 450 years of jail time (spread among nine people IIRC) for attacking a government building with explosives and committing attempted murder?[0] If the start of your pattern of "police state levels of power, corruption and control" is people engaging in organized terrorism, (i.e. using violence for political ends) being convicted of terrorism offenses, then I guess I don't see it. Looks to me like some folks wanted to LARP as revolutionaries but with real bullets & explosives and were surprised the government's tolerance for that was limited.
you're excusing a cold blooded murder. what is wrong with you? what has happened to your sense of humanity? they executed him while he was no danger to them. that's murder, not law enforcement. there is no legitimate excuse for it.
say it with me:
In the USA, government agents are not allowed to kill people for protesting. they're not allowed to kill people for being a mouthy lesbian. they're not allowed to kill people for provoking them, insulting them, or making them mad.
The way you frame the event is very misleading after reading the article.
I know that idiots will argue that "attacking a government building with explosives and committing attempted murder" is "technically correct", but it is stupidity to not understand that it leaves out important nuances.
I think in another universe where they just stood outside and shouted while holding signs and shooting up fireworks, then peaceably surrendered when when the cops came, they would get slaps on the wrist, maybe.
But instead a few of them had guns, and one of them decided to get into a shoot-off with the police.
You are unequivocally fucked if you have any degree of association with those people doing shit like that on federal property.
(the bodycams and security footage for this event are on youtube)
Small nitpick, but I believe this all happened on private, not federal, property. The ICE facility they were protesting at was a private company ICE was contracting with, not an actual federal building.
IIRC, people involved in this case made extremely telling comments about the political alignment of the protestors. They despise them either way, the guns are just used as pretext to elevate it to the next level, especially since the people among them who didn't have guns or do anything violent didn't escape the wrath. They almost certainly would not have gotten slaps on the wrist, those are reserved for 'our good boys'. They would have still gotten their lives ruined, just not in quite the same dramatic fashion with showy century-long sentences, but just the routine 'you're going away for a long time' treatment.
People are killed and maimed every year from Fourth of July fireworks. You're proving my point that these were LARPing revolutionaries who nevertheless engaged in real violence.
And please don't forget the attempted murder that the leader really did carry out with a firearm.
No, the fact that people occasionally get hurt by accident with fireworks does not make the violent subtext in "attacking a government building with explosives" a correct description of the situation.
So you admit that fireworks are known to cause death and severe bodily harm. What sort of prison sentence would be appropriate for attacking people with such devices?
And people who use water intentionally to cause death or serious harm should face harsh legal consequences.
In fact, let's use your argument. People drown accidentally in swimming pools regularly. So then if some "protester" decided to set up one of those portable pools and forcibly hold people down under water in one, wouldn't they be guilty of attempted murder?
Using things that are known to cause death and serious harm in a way that is intended to cause death and serious harm is in fact the thing I'm against.
His point, which you pretend to not understand, is that the bar needs to be higher. Both water and fireworks are fairly innocuous items, even though both can be used to inflict harm and even though fireworks can be more easily weaponized than water.
> Looks to me like some folks wanted to LARP as revolutionaries but with real bullets & explosives and were surprised the government's tolerance for that was limited.
Unless of course your guy ends up in power again and offers you pardons and reparations.
Attacking a government building with explosives is a stretch. They had fireworks on July 4th to stage a noise protest outside of the detention facility which got out of hand. The issue is that the government's case for 'material support for terror' mostly hinged on them wearing black and all being members of a signal chat [1] and handed down extraordinarily harsh sentences.
The government's case explicitly tried to throw the book at all involved (including 30 years for someone not even at the protest; for moving a box of anti-fascist literature) in line with new executive direction including NSPM-7[1][2].
The BBC article you linked takes many of the procecutor's statements at face value. Looking into this case more may illuminate how wide this survailance and punnishment net will be cast against the administration's political enemies.
It definitely was not and there is boatloads of readily-accessible evidence to prove it. And dozens of juries of your peers looked at this evidence and convicted the perpetrators.
If you are too lazy for that, just read the Brooks Brothers Riot wiki page and square that with your recollection of Jan 6.
In terms of absolute number of incarcerated persons, though, the US is ahead of everyone else by a country mile. Depending on which inmate pools you include or exclude, the US holds 20-25% of all incarcerated persons in the world.
Go watch the body cam footage of the peaceful protest. Looks a lot like people with guns hid in the woods and shot a cop who responded to what looked like a terrorist attack.
Just remember that there is a child somewhere who saw their mum for the last time happily dropping them for school only to be shot by an ICE agent seconds after he called her a fucking bitch - and the agent faced no consequences for this. Every time I think about that kid my heart breaks. Every time I think about the cruelty of the system unwilling to at least put this one wrong right and prosecute the agent properly my heart breaks. What a unbelievably cruel world we live in.
What do you mean? For what I know, she was at the wrong place at the wrong time, did not do anything voluntarily illegal, and was in a situation where everyone should agree would never have had to degenerate into a life-threatening situation.
I'm pretty sure that 5 minutes before the incident, everyone involved would agree this was not a life-threatening situation. The only reason there was a death was due to huge failure of ICE.
It's so easy to take any incident where a cop shoot a citizen and says "well, cops have guns, so the onus is on the citizen to be extra careful around cops".
This is the wrong framing. This was a premeditated (first degree) murder. The killer, Jonathan Ross, had previously tried cowboy heroics with a moving vehicle and had ended up being dragged a few hundred feet - surely a traumatic experience. In the run-up to the murder of Renee Good, he went out of his way to approach her vehicle using the positioning of his own body to box it in - in direct violation of written ICE policies of how to interact with motor vehicles (for obvious reasons).
The reasonable inference is that this was setting up a pretext to use his gun if the vehicle started to move, while leaving enough room to jump out of the way - so as to be able to attack a driver who might disobey him, while not ending up getting dragged again. And when Good started to reverse the vehicle, he acted according to that plan.
The involvement of ICE itself is that they are protecting this violent criminal from seeing justice. Not merely as an immediate reaction of waiting until the dust settles, but as long term policy. This indicates the organization itself is a criminal conspiracy, rather than an institution of civil society governed by the rule of law. Of course this is merely one among many other such indications.
It's a progression of logical inference based on the facts of the case.
What is a baseless "narrative" is your repeated implication that it's somehow within the scope of law enforcement officers - in a civil society governed by the rule of law - to summarily execute people for disobeying them.
As if asserting "I am just right" isn't being righteous...
It seems like you're trying to hang some moral authority on what is, even after having spent most of your time on what ought. But what ought - an abstract model of ideals - is exactly what defines us as thinking beings above the level of animals. Twisting your estimation of what ought based on what [presently] is drags us down to that lower level.
As for what is? That is easy! It's always easy, which is why it's so fucking appealing. Would I have started moving my car after I was being assaulted by ICE agents? Probably not. Would I have engaged in the type of protest she did now that I have a kid? Fuck no. There are plenty of things Renee Good could have done differently to avoid being murdered that day! And I'm sure if she could have gone back and changed her actions after seeing the consequences they ended up having, she would have.
But still, none of this has any bearing on what ought to be in a society based around individual liberty and a government subservient to the People! And what ought to be, what we should be aiming for if we want to have a just society, is that murderers end up behind bars regardless if they happen to be employed by the government.
Your example fails, has Prudence has a limit in Justice - you do what you have to do.
I am not familiar with the case under discussion, but surely there is no legitimate advancing that one should be tame in front of danger (as in "bending as they are armed").
In other words, to disambiguate: an example about prudence proportionate to danger cannot be simply exported to social life.
You fail to understand the point. Whatever the specific case is, your argument is that "it's her fault because she did not exercised prudence", and the counter-argument is "in Justice, what you say is simply not true".
And again, your argument is illogical: you can say exactly the same about the ICE agent (they did not acted carefully enough). Why is the victim guilty of not have considered the aggressor as unhinged, and the aggressor not guilty of avoiding the situation that they use to justify their behavior.
<< Why is the victim guilty of not have considered the aggressor as unhinged, and the aggressor not guilty of avoiding the situation that they use to justify their behavior.
Because the 'aggressor' is not aggressor, but a governmental employee mandated to be violent when necessary AND we do have a verb ( and corresponding crime ) for people who choose to stand in the way of such an employee: obstruction of justice ( edit: replaced duty -- other thread was on my mind ).
Your whole world is mildly warped, because you think you can simply apply victim/perpetrator filter to make the whole concept somehow flip. But reality does not work that way.
obstruction of duty is a minor offence, so she was doing an action that put her at risk of a level 3 fine.
You were saying that the onus is on her for putting herself in a situation where she should expect to be shoot. But by your own admission, even if we accept that what she has done properly constitute obstruction of duty (which I doubt is the case, and at best is highly arguable) she was putting herself in a situation where she should never be in any real danger.
But again, you did not answer: she was at the wrong time at the wrong place, she did not go out of her way to be in this situation. Pretending that she "looked for it" is just twisting the facts.
> Your whole world is mildly warped, because you think you can simply apply victim/perpetrator filter to make the whole concept somehow flip. But reality does not work that way.
No, your "whole concept" is just highly subjective. You decided that "the onus is on her" because you decided that when she has responsibility over the fact that the ICE agent was unhinged, while the ICE agent had zero responsibility on the fact that she might be unhinged.
<< so she was doing an action that put her at risk of a level 3 fine.
Ok. I think we got to stop for one simple reason. You have no idea what you are talking about.
Just a short overview for you and the -- apparent -- audience:
While it is possible for obstruction to be small enough that it will not matter, it can easily move to felony with actual punishment also highly dependent on specifics of a given case. Therefore, your assertion is, at best, your opinion.
That said, my point stands. Had she not been in US illegally none of this would have transpired including this ridiculous conversation.
> it can easily move to felony with actual punishment also highly dependent on specifics of a given case
When it involves weapons, evidence tampering or higher crime, which is clearly not the case here.
> Had she not been in US illegally none of this would have transpired including this ridiculous conversation.
What are you talking about? Who was illegally in US? I thought we were talking about Renee Good, who was a US citizen, was never a migrant (even legal), and dropped her son 7 minutes ago and was on her way home.
I'm like 99% it's a bot. I said Renee Good in another comment and he started talking about a guy(???) even though no "guy" was mentioned anywhere. Now he makes up nonsense about Renee Good being an illegal immigrant?Reading this entire thread his comments read like an LLM set to "be as argumentative as possible, avoid stating any facts or bringing up any evidence behind your statements".
I'll be even more literal: can you give information about the case? (Which "videos"?)
> at least few videos
Sure, but I objected to the general principle: prudence has a limit - the value of one's life has limits. Justice comes before life, Dignity comes before life, etc.
<< can you give information about the case? (Which "videos"?)
No. Most of the stuff out there. I am already wasting time on HN. I won't also google this stuff for you ( or w/e equivalent you use ).
<< Sure, but I objected to the general principle:
That is reasonable objection, but absolutely not how actual cases work. Minute details matter in how they contribute to a given defense. And it seems you know this.
<< the value of one's life has limits
Sadly, it seems in US it is even quantified.
<< Justice comes before life,
Justice. I hate to go all HS on you, but.. what does justice mean to you.
First, you did not answer the main point. The main point is that she did not put herself voluntary in a dangerous situation. The fact that some ICE agents were unhinged and dangerous is not something that a normal citizen should expect. And as far as I know, she was just at the wrong place at the wrong time.
But second, your example is moving the goal post. You started by saying "the onus on her". Then you say "when I'm next to my family member that has a gun, I'm almost automatically more careful". But the onus is on your family member. Are you seriously saying that if your family member would shoot you, you will agree that the main responsibility is on you?
And where do you put the bar? Does it mean that if I carry a gun, people should be extra careful next to me and please all of my requests, because it is "on them" if somehow I get angry and shoot them?
This line of reasoning is just so bad. It is "unfalsifiable": you can use this argument anyway you want to blame any people in the situation. Why did you not say "well, the ICE agent should have known that this woman may be dangerous, so he should not have acted in a way that led to increased tension, the onus is on him". And if the ICE agent would have been the victim, would you have said "the onus is on him" for not having been more careful?
<< Are you seriously saying that if your family member would shoot you, you will agree that the main responsibility is on you?
I am, admittedly, a simple man. I do not put myself in dangerous situations unnecessarily or, at least, go out of my way to avoid them. Blame may be shared, but it really is on me to assess a risk of any given moment. I admit that it must be nice thinking everyone else is responsible for me. However, that is simply not true.
<< you can use this argument anyway you want to blame any people in the situation.
You make me sound smarter than I am, but, really, you are just misunderstanding the argument ( not sure if on purpose or not ).
<< The main point is that she did not put herself voluntary in a dangerous situation.
You know what. I am all ears. I may simply be wrong. Present your evidence of the case as you see it.
> but it really is on me to assess a risk of any given moment
Yes. And the situation we are talking about should clearly not be a situation that should be assessed as "life threatening". By your own admission, she put herself in a minor offense, not something that should be life-threatening. And the fact that the ICE agents carried guns does not justify that one should consider that any interaction with them means that they are putting themselves in life threatening situation.
> I admit that it must be nice thinking everyone else is responsible for me
Well, you are litterally the one here saying that the ICE agent should think everyone else is responsible for them.
No one else does that. I fully agree that people share some responsibilities in the situation they put themselves into. Where we disagree is when you are saying "the onus is on her". No, the onus is not on her: she put herself in a situation that should NOT be something that should be assessed as overly dangerous.
> You make me sound smarter than I am, but, really, you are just misunderstanding the argument ( not sure if on purpose or not ).
Your argument makes no sense at all. Your argument was also quite downvoted. Surely not because of a woke conspiracy, probably more because indeed your argument makes no sense. Maybe you should consider that maybe it is the case?
> You know what. I am all ears. I may simply be wrong. Present your evidence of the case as you see it.
I asked you first. My FIRST COMMENT: "What do you mean? For what I know, she was at the wrong place at the wrong time, did not do anything voluntarily illegal, and was in a situation where everyone should agree would never have had to degenerate into a life-threatening situation."
You never answered.
If you want the discussion to progress, first provide your answer first. I asked you three time to answer on this point.
edit:
in another comment, YOU say:
"""
<< can you give information about the case? (Which "videos"?)
No. Most of the stuff out there. I am already wasting time on HN. I won't also google this stuff for you ( or w/e equivalent you use ).
"""
You are so full of it. Someone says "present your evidence" when you explicitly said there are videos and you refuse, and here, you are asking exactly "present your evidence".
Before I present my evidence, apply to yourself what you put to others, just strong-man the discussion and try yourself to find element that support my way of seeing the situation.
<< Your argument was also quite downvoted. Surely not because of a woke conspiracy, probably more because indeed your argument makes no sense. Maybe you should consider that maybe it is the case?
Friend. I don't care what you downvote. I have seen what you vote for. In a sense, I don't even have a need to convince you here. Life will go on with or without this argument proceeding. Allow me to demonstrate.
I'm not the one downvoting. Several persons downvoted because your argument is non-sensical, because you failed to answer basic question and because you keep making mistakes showing that you have no idea what you are talking about or not being intellectually honest.
I also don't care about convincing you. Simply, it is nice that when someone says something totally stupid, other people stops the non-sense to be spread.
And indeed, conveniently for you as you were unable to provide basic evidence of your claim, end of communication.
> neither the child nor the mum should have been there to begin with. The onus is on her. [...] She chose to gamble her and her kid's future
At first level this seems simplistic. Then, it seems inconsistent with «happily dropping them for school» - can somebody explain...
Edit: and the "simplistic" perspective is outside the gross understatement of "«should not have been there» hence «only to be shot»"... Which again makes no sense without all the relevant information (hopefully).
Edit: maybe the poster could elaborate on which details exactly he believes justified the events.
If you could you please present the facts as you know them, as I suggested, because this in topic must be one of the cases I missed from the news - and you seem to have details that support your view anyway, so a generic narration will not suffice.
Fascinating framing, which manages to confuse the issue.
Friend, we are trying to be nice about it and move within the contours of the lines drawn. Surely, that is preferable to people just doing whatever they want?
There is law to be enforced. There is mandate to be carried out. Do you have problem with either or both?
>There is law to be enforced. There is mandate to be carried out. Do you have problem with either or both?
I hope you wont have to hear this when the gestapo is at your door because that's how they get into power, people like you just saying we need to follow the law when people get executed by trigger happy <law> enforcement
Friend. You are barking at the wrong tree. I am merely amused that the moment any level of accountability finds the participants of the movement, it is all gestapo this, stasi that, you are worse than hitler ( although lately it is just a generic nazi instead.. possibly because it is offensive or something ).
Edit: to expand on this - if you think interacting with an ICE agent(even if that interaction is blocking their way with your car) is "gambling" then I'm afraid you've accepted that you live in judge dredd society - where agents can execute someone on the street and face no repercussions. After all, they are defending the law, and Renee Good was a criminal for blocking them, right? You know what would happen in a normal country? She would be arrested. The coward of an officer pulled out his gun and fired at the vehicle driving away. I wonder if he'd have the balls to explain to her kid why mummy isn't coming home. I wonder if you'd tell her child that mummy isn't coming home because she "gambled". I'm disgusted by your comment.
The one that means weak of character. The one that applies to the person who thinks Renee Good "gambled" by interacting with an ICE agent - only a feckless person could have such a poor moral stance.
Oh? IIRC, ICE had vids of the same guy kicking their cars and was apparently a recurring figure. It was not, shall we say, a bad luck that he was shot. He was literally asking for trouble. He just did not get lucky that time. Yes, he gambled. And he lost.
What guy? This comment proves more than anything else that you're a bot, or are not really able to read comprehensively. Multiple people have asked you to clarify your position and you always give some crappy excuse why you can't, walking around it like a shit circling the drain. And now you replied to me talking about a completely different person? Are you just following some script?
Firearms are legal in Texas. One person committed violence. Others got 50 years for being at the same protest. Another got 30 years for picking up his own box of zines.
The First Amendment was written by people who experienced this same chilling of free speech.
Unfortunately, people have thrown out all pretense of caring about proper justice or first amendment rights. There really isn't any point in arguing with them because they'll continue to make spurious associations or illegitimate defenses as to why their enemies deserve to be locked up for life.
If you're using your 2a rights to fight against the government (tyrannical or not), it does not free you from facing the consequences if you don't "win", or prevent the government from fighting back (in self defense, or otherwise).
It's an incredibly serious thing to say "the government is so tyrannical that we need to use violence to overthrow it" (see: history).
The 2nd amendment is an absolute and utter bullshit against tyranny. In fact it is a method to make ordinary people not engage in peaceful protest when it is needed most.
Why do you need to protest at the slightest sign of the government becoming authoritarian when you have "the ultimate argument of force" on your side?
But it's an illusion. Guns are a nice hobby I enjoy as well. They are great for self defence, but good luck to you if you think you'll use it "against government tyranny"... You'll be dead and no one will care.
2nd amendment makes an ultimate duty of a citizen in a democratic country - to not allow it to turn into a tyranny, into "you don't need to worry about politics, worse case scenario you have your AR15 and a box of ammo".
While in a country without such false ideas people get out and protest in mass numbers.
I don't think I've ever heard of a proper protest happening in USA. The kind of protest that involves 10% of adults at least and happens in every city and town. (Also I'm not talking about rioting like in France)
Burning down a school to protest against class overcrowding is like something straight from idiocracy.
Peaceful protests work on governments, even those hell bent on authoritarianism, but they have to be massive.
Let's say you have a million or two of people show up in Washington. Will it make any difference? Nope. Why? Because it's under half a percent of US population.
Let's now say 10% of people in every city and town go to their town centre and protest. Does this make a difference? Yes it does, because it shows real power to everyone.
Well if we're comparing I've been here a bit longer.
I would make two points here.
1. ICE is breaking the law in many, many different ways. It is not legal to murder multiple US citizens like Alex Pretti and Renee Good. The conditions of their internment camps (I will use the euphemism as I suspect you would not like the more accurate term) are not legal. And many, many other issues, please see:
By your legalist moral standards, is this not also "black and white"? Do people not have a right or duty to protest it?
2. What is legal is not always what is morally right. The comments you are making mirror those in past "legal" civil rights violations at scale. The same arguments were made against the civil rights movement in the 60s, anti apartheid movement, and pretty much every civil rights movement. The answer in all of those cases is the same: what is legal does not determine what is morally right, and we have a civic duty to nonviolent protest when the two conflict. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lawrence_Kohlberg%27s_stages_o...
Should the paramedics be the one arresting the people impeding their function? If the answer is no, then ICE shouldnt be tracking people they think might impede their function.
If their job is arresting people in the country illegaly, any other matter of public safety should be handled by the correct institution at local or federal police level. Hint, its not ICE.
ICE arguably has a mandate for aggressive deportation. The Trump campaign did not sugarcoat what their goal was. And people still voted for that. Still, the lack of due process, the excessive use of force, deporting people to random countries, ... that's not normal.
> if there's a government agency whose job it is to deport people in a country illegally,
Following you so far
> and they do that,
Yeah, that's where you fucked up. That's not what ICE is doing that everyone is upset about. It's the locking up, deporting, and killing of people who are here legally, they just happen to be brown.
ICE is rogue* agency. They need to be disbanded. Fine if we still have an agency doing ICE work or whatever, but every single person employed by ICE needs to be fired, potentially prosecuted, definitely black listed from federal government work, and their funds returned for the blatant unconstitutional and dangerous use they've been put towards.
Put them back under the DoJ and have the FBI handle criminals, not ICE. Bring back the INS.
As history has already shown during the Nuremberg Trials, "Following orders" doesn't absolve the individual responsibility of the people under command.
The point of bring all this up isn't to expect the trump admin to do anything, it's an expectation of a (hopefully) future democrat admin to change forces and stop framing the ICE problem as a training or lack of body cams issue.
It's more a self reinforcing side-effect of a withering democracy than the cause. The rhetoric from the far right keeps implying that we're much closer to a single party state than the current election cycle suggests and they have proven themselves to be weak predictors of outcomes they don't directly control so I'm sure more shenanigans will be revealed shortly.
State resources and armed officers are all part of a political stance. If you don't recognise it it's because they are on your side. But at a moment's notice their allegiance can switch.
> But at a moment's notice their allegiance can switch.
Is that true, though? I don't expect that the individual biases of officers or judges, or the institutional biases of the police or immigration departments, can switch at a moment's notice.
Rational people act according to the incentives they’re provided. If that incentive is “follow these new instructions/directives or you’ll lose your job” (or worse?) it takes an especially principled person to object.
Well, no, but you could have the very rude awakening that the in-group that you thought you were part of is suddenly now more narrowly defined than you had deluded yourself into believing. “I’m one of the good ones” quickly receives the response “there are no good ones” once the dominoes start to fall. The curse of reactionary politics is that it always crumbles under its own weight of an ever-narrowing definition of the in-group.
It's less true every day, now that Trump is busy filling the ranks of the bureaucracy with people who respond to the loyalty-test question "Who won the 2020 election?" with "Donald Trump."
Entities like the courts and law enforcement optimize for the retention of people who do what they're told and the turnover of those who have their own principals. And this is before you account for the fact that most people will do what they're told before they threaten their paycheck.
It’s so cute that some people imagine the armed forces and police were on the other side or are on their side. If you’re average Joe, the police in a tyrannical state are never on your “side”.
The police never but historically the military is less predictable. Militaries have their own cultures & norms, separate ideas of and sources of prestige & reward, commitment to the military as a valuable institution in its own right etc. Officers are also educated and high ranking ones are powerful political actors within their own domain in way almost no police are. This can really change their relationship and susceptibility to power and political influence.
These aren't universally positive attributes I'm not necessarily praising them. But militaries have come down into a very broad spectrum of positions around specific coups, revolutions, insurrections etc including abetting or openly joining them, both pro- and anti-democratic.
This is also why the second trump term has been so focused on officer purges! You definitely want the military to come down on your side and making sure all of its leadership is on your side is a reliable step if you can take it.
Americans should absolutely imo not be looking for their military to help them with the problems they're facing. But depending on the exact arrangement, people in other countries may have good reason to hope for that.
Our armed officers first and foremost protect capital. The constitution is what limits their conduct in that pursuit. I don’t believe that in a capitalist society any alternative is possible.
That’s not to say we shouldn’t have armed officers (or not have a capitalist society), we just shouldn’t allow rhetoric to convince us of some false ideal. The 3rd and 4th amendment have a spirit that should be much more embraced and expanded at the expense of law enforcement’s ability to do their “job”.
They've never done what they're "supposed" to do, though. While maybe not so egregious in the past, these eager violations from the police apparatus are a large part of why I'm an abolitionist.
Why is this being voted down? This is fundamentally how states and governance work. The state has a monopoly on legitimate violence, and can, at any moment, make that a problem for its citizenry.
When, in the history of the U.S., have police forces ever been on the left?
Heck, historically the cops have even broken up peaceful union protests, despite being in unions themselves, throwing away all class solidarity in favor of their right wing leanings.
And the police unions have uniquely been extremely right wing, other than during rare highly localized conditions (often involving the democratic candidate being center right at least).
How are the actions of the feds at Waco and Ruby Ridge "left"? Authoritarian, yes, but supporting collectivism, shared ownership, etc? Nothing at all left wing about their actions.
Both-sides-ism is probably the single worst stance to take here. You're tacitly siding with whoever actually holds and wields the power. Not caring which one wins isn't helping anyone at all, even you.
That's not actually true, though. In some sense all governments are posessed of "weapons" like this, the cost of use being only the violation of some norm. Or even law. The "rule of law" is a gentelemen's agreement at its core. Yet the world is filled with basically good governments who broadly follow that code!
So the way you treat that is by calling out and resisting the attempts to weaponize the government in new ways, not just throwing up your hands because it was "eventually" going to be used anyway. No, it's bad. You should say that it's bad and take action to oppose it.
If you're not American, then you should consider before commenting that you may be missing important context. The allegiance of US federal law enforcement agencies does not switch on a moment's notice or even follow electoral control of the government; one example of this you can easily verify is that the director of the FBI is always a Republican.
Both sides argument are springing up like weeds all over the various forums in the last couple weeks before a predicted major shift in Congress.
If you have deeply unpopular policies but only 1/3rd of the country is expected to vote, telling everyone their vote won't matter is the best stance to take.
What the US needs to do to survive is basically do to the ultra left extremists what Bolivia did to their gangs. Arrest them in quantity and prosecute.
Doing this rapidly before the country collapses requires measures which inevitably will catch some false positives.
Let's say some friends and family looks are their target demographic.
We know the drill, a suspicious vehicle follows you until, we assume, check your profile after they look your plates, then they suddenly stop showing interesting in being close.
The same political groups that support hate speech laws are now looking for support from the freedom of speech groups? That sounds like a temporary alliance at best. They aren't going to support you long term because they know leftists are authoritarians of a different color. AKA your rhetoric isn't going to work because you have no principles and they do.
I see you brought up the freedom of speech group, but didn't address the potential implications of other similarly important groups such as fursuit afficianados and PETA and, most egregiously, the Taylor Swift fandom.
No, it's Leftist rhetoric to use their principles against them. Leftists are trying to weaponize principles even though they don't share the same ones. They don't actually care about the hypocrisy it's a guilt tactic for political leverage.
Freedom of speech is a first amendment issue, my friend. The "second amendment types" OP refers to are the people who claim that citizen ownership of any and all types of firearms is a buttress against tyrannical government. Since the Trump admin is at least arguably a tyrannical government, it seems legit to at least ask where the previously vociferously pro-gun people are right now. Many should be at least warning of potential tyranny, but appear not to be doing so.
Previously, they claimed they stand with nazi solely for free speech of everyone purposes, not because they would share the oppressive authoritarian ideology of nazi.
If that was true, that is why.
Now in reality, that was not true, they stood with nazi cause they themselves are nazi who want to bully others.
I keep seeing that subreddit mentioned in a context that appears trying to push those against this to violent solutions. Almost as if it is an attempt at driving some sort of stochastic action.
turns out, they’re into it. they were in favor of it in the 60’s and still are.
the 2nd amendment (the entire Bill of Rights) was written to protect us from our own government, but it’s way more convenient to just shoot brown people or people who speak a different language.
> The Mulford Act is a 1967 California statute which prohibits public carrying of loaded firearms without a permit.[2] Named after Republican assemblyman Don Mulford and signed into law by governor of California Ronald Reagan, the law was initially crafted with the goal of disarming members of the Black Panther Party, which was conducting armed patrols of Oakland neighborhoods in what would later be termed copwatching.[3][4] They garnered national attention after Black Panthers members, bearing arms, marched upon the California State Capitol to protest the bill.[5][6]
Just to add color to your comment. These folks were directly exercising 2nd amendment rights against oppressive state forces and that Act was the response to them exercising it.
Go join your local Pink Pistols/Brown Berets/SRA/whatever chapter.
The leftist gun community is mostly focused on arming the LGBTQ community at the moment though. Your chances of getting canoed while trying to stab a trans woman are way up over the past couple years.
Since most people aren't gonna have context on this part of the literature.
This paper is heavily rejected by mainstream criminologists. It relies on victim memorial lists for a count of victims and it relies on a database made by an anti-Trans group for the perpetrator count. This leads to both a significant undercount of victims and overcount of perpetrators.
The ONS has come out against it and said that official homicide data does not track transgender status so there is no official data to back this research up on.
None of this has stopped rightwingers from heavily circulating this paper of course. Somehow I doubt science is the goal here.
The people who would normally argue "but muh 2A!" are either applying to be on ICE, are on ICE, or just support what they're doing, completely oblivious to the obvious.
It wasn’t self defense, it wasn’t for recreational fun, it is to provide a physical check on government overreach. Therefore it’s sensible to discuss it during times of government overreach.
But I don't bring up the second amendment when complaining about income taxes either. Again, what part of what ICE is doing infringes on the second ammendment?
The #1 reason sighted by 2nd amendment loyalists for needing such liberal gun rights is to protect us all from government overreach. I assume that's what he means.
Common misunderstanding. The reason is to protect themselves from government overreach (and other threats), not you or anyone else. You were supposed to get your own gun to protect yourself, that's why the right needs to extend to everyone.
(disclaimer: this is not my opinion I'm just explaining their logic)
Not without work it won't. Trump II has been using "Who won the 2020 election?" as a shibboleth to fill the ranks with True Believers. Nobody gets power without answering "Trump" to that question.
I change countries a lot and my default assumption for any new country is that overstaying your visa will be treated seriously, resulting in something like immediate detention (in a very lousy environment), probably a fine, and near-immediate deportation (at your expense), and probably some sort of quite serious ban (probably greater than merely months). And that's if the individual has a clean record; I'd expect it to significantly less benign otherwise.
Although this default expectation is pessimistic (and some countries might not be nearly that harsh), I don't think it's wildly inaccurate. What I don't understand is why it's common for intelligent people (seemingly only in the US) to consider violations of visa/immigration conditions acceptable and ICE bad guys for enforcing the law?
Got it. So distain is more for ICE's thuggish approach than the laws/consequences themselves.
To play devil's advocate for the heavy handedness and harsh detentions, Australia had a problem with 'boat people' in the 2000's, and subsequently built a massive detention centre on a island, meaning those intercepted never made mainland. The heat was oppressive, processing times were usually measured in years, and illegal arrivals were mostly sent back to where they came from.
But.. the illegal arrivals basically entirely stopped. So although it was harsh (including on a lot of legitimate refugees), it did force entry via legal channels (of which Australia has historically had many).
I lived in Australia for a year during COVID. It's surrounded by water and doesn't have thousand-mile long borders to any country. Controlling entry is not the same logistical problem as controlling entry to the US.
That said, a lot of US's immigration problems has been neglect to enforce immigration law, deliberate sabotaging of legislation throughout the years, and multiple broad amnesty decrees that basically broke the system. The system is broken by design and almost tailor-made to foment anti-immigrant sentiment that has sparked this new, ugly phase driven by unaccountable maniacs.
The majority of my concern has to do with tactics, yes.
The other issue is intent.
I support reasonable immigration enforcement for practical reasons like added strain on public facilities like social programs. That’s rational.
Our 2024 Trump-aligned candidates ran on more of a xenophobia-centric platform. Xenophobia is irrational and unpredictable reasoning for immigration enforcement.
I mean, it's also a bit of disdain for the law, because in the US we've somehow made laws whose actual enforcement is economically untenable. Large chunks of our economy depend on illegal labor. But yes, it's mostly the nakedly evil "enforcement" methods under Trump.
> They’ve murdered multiple peaceful protestors in the street.
Unapologetically, then tried to frame each of these people as radicals who deserved it. And there is no investigation, no punishment, no accountability.
It is the utter shamelessness and craven dodging of responsibility that is criminal.
And the American media and American populace do not hold their feet to the fire.
There is no line they won't eventually cross, and the slide into the abyss is accelerating.
First off, there is a difference between “I come from a decent country and therefor have no real reason to take the risk of illegally immigrating somewhere” and "My country is very, very bad (possibly in not small part due to country X), and moving to country X illegally is less risky for my life and family than staying here". We tend to have at least some empathy for people in the second scenario.
But even never minding that, you could say a lot of things : The U.S.A is a country literally built by immigrants. The native-american are a minority in their own land. So is it surprising that a lot of people in an immigrant country support immigrant ? Then, there is the dirty economic secret that illegal immigration fill the low-wages jobs that citizen don't have to lower themselves too. A lot of ties, rule of law, etc. Of all country, it is weird that the U.S is turning anti-immigration.
Helping refugees makes sense, but should existing laws be changed or broken? (there's a big difference). It feels like many smart people are advocating the latter, which appears at odds with their behaviour and attitudes in most other domains (i.e. law abiding). Also, what makes refugees specifically the US's responsibility? E.g. verifying, processing and integrating refugees puts strain on domestic systems, and strain scales with volume.
Some people DO advocate for better laws. It doesn't mean that it will pass. At then end of the day, you have to convince enough people to vote for people who want to make it a law, or make enough noise and be an enough electoral power that politician wants to do it. But, while a lot of people care about immigration and such, at the end of the day, some other issues (the typical example is the cost of living), might take precedences.
> Also, what makes refugees specifically the US's responsibility? E.g. verifying, processing and integrating refugees puts strain on domestic systems, and strain scales with volume.
I think nobody said it's the U.S responsibility, in spirit. Factually it is by the fact that they have to handle it and international laws. But that is why country sometimes collaborate on those issues. The U.S and Mexico do collaborate on immigration issue. Mexico do stop a lot of south american immigrant from reaching the U.S border. But the border is huge. There is also other ways to get in, legally or illegally. You can't possibly stop everything. And it is the burden you get when you are a rich country. The U.S is not the only one. And mind you, the U.S and Western European country have benefitted a lot from exploiting the people and resources in poor country and pushing allied authoritarian regime there. Immigration is but a small cost they pay for what they did, and got.
Agreed completely, I’d never illegally migrate to Japan and expect them to do anything besides arrest and deport me. It’s only western countries that get this weird illogical hate for not opening the borders to literally anyone and actually enforcing immigration law.
The 15 people charged in the case this story is about were not overstaying their visa; they were protesting ICE after ICE killed a US citizen in Minnesota.
Even ignoring the fact that ICE is a rogue agency that behaves thuggishly and routinely lies to judges, the United States has spent a long time having a tacit policy of only partially enforcing its immigration laws. Suddenly enforcing them as written would fundamentally not work. It would be cruel, since the people you've effectively let live here for decades are now parents of American citizens who have the right to live here. It would also be self-destructive, because large parts of the country function because of the labor of those individuals. Despite the fact that Trump's administration is full of people who advocate remigration (ethnic cleansing), the pro-business parts of his administration have made a lot of concessions to avoid deporting so many people that they'll disrupt farming (though there's been a lot more than 0 disruption).
This is downstream of the fact that the US government just doesn't work well. Problems fester, and are unsolved. Immigration policy hasn't made sense for longer than I've been alive (and I'm 40+).
Imagine that you find that the water supply in your town was built illegally, because the former mayors prohibited the building that was necessary. You may think that is a travesty, you may want to enforce the law strictly in the future, and force the issue, rather than working around it. But what you will not do is tear up the water system and leave the city without water.
> the United States has spent a long time having a tacit policy of only partially enforcing its immigration laws
This seems relevant. In other policy areas (unrelated to immigration), there's the concept of gradual change, or a 'glide path'. For example, when raising prices on things like licences or levies, sometimes governments do it gradually over a number of years. Another example: when something is banned, the ban is not enforced immediately but intermediate steps are taken to ensure the public can adjust. By contrast, the transition from immigration rules being unenforced to enforced seems to have been sudden.
You won't get much traction with the "shouldn't people follow the law" angle. The far left is running rampant with the idea that laws only apply to them if they agree with them.
You should look up the two guys who viciously attacked armed police officers in Manchester Airport in the UK, all on video. Incredibly they were out almost immediately, police officers were up for firing and the trial dragged out for months ending in a pretty lenient sentence. In that case the new UK "two tier" justice kicked in where thanks to crazy far-left thinking, there is now consideration of race in whether something was illegal and what the punishment should be.
Without a doubt this direction will be the downfall of the west. Which is probably the idea from those financing all this "grass roots" protesting and law breaking.
Because some people have to have their opinions on things be reaffirmed by how it maps to coordinates on the cultural battle map.
Today being anti-h1b is deemed racist although no other than Bernie Sanders was outspoken against it for decades until very recently. Never mind.
Never mind that some people deemed anti Covid measures racist (ie hugged people in Chinatown for PR stunts, or licking handles in public transit for online clout) and unscientific (masks are bad) until Trump did a 180 (ie. masks are mandatory now). Or how many ppl said they would never have the „trump-vax“ injected and yet after Trump lost the election 2019 were gluttonous about the restrictions to be implemented against the unvaxxed.
ICE is not enforcing the law, they are in fact regularly breaking the law. Judges said so, repeatedly. And ICE threw middle finger. Breaking the law is the literal intentional strategy of ICE. They also mistreat people who are in the country legally, who are citizens and committed no crimes.
Also, in normal countries, if you break the law, arbitrary abuse is still not the expected behavior of the police.
ChatGPT can you take the sentiment “Why haven’t immigrants just tried not being poor? Are they stupid?” and dress it up as intellectual so I can get upvotes on Hacker News? Make it personal and anecdotal. Thanks.
Snideness aside, your argument is that laws ought not apply to someone who is poor.
That's sometimes reasonable - e.g. the apocryphal loaf of bread being stolen to feed a starving family. But it's not a universal defence. And not all illegals are poor in the first place.
If a law can only possibly impact the poor, then that law is effectively written to impact the poor - the purpose of a law is what it does.
If you make it illegal to sleep on the street at night (by extension, sleeping anywhere that isn’t a legal residence), you are de facto making it illegal to be homeless.
That a law applies to everyone is not a “universal defence” in its fairness.
The primary problem others have with ICE is thuggish enforcement and lack of accountability, especially when reckless.
But your problem seems to be a combination of the wealthy having an easier time accessing the US (agree, but many countries have purchasable visas), and poor illegal immigrants having no other option (partially agree, but not all illegal immigrants are poor, and many who are do have alternative places they could go legally).
No, my issue is specifically with the original poster comparing himself with economic migrants because they’re technically subject to the same laws, even though their relative difference in wealth means that the law affects them differently enough that it’s not a fair comparison.
The original question was why do people take issue with the US enforcing its immigration laws, but not with other countries enforcing theirs (when the laws are approximately the same).
Your point is that immigration laws don't sufficiently take into account an illegal migrant's economic status (i.e. make reasonable accommodations for those in poverty or desperate circumstances), which is a totally fair perspective.
But that doesn't affect OP's initial question/observation, since countries other than the US also apply their rules uniformly, which disproportionately affects the poor.
Because seemingly only in the U.S. the legislature hasn’t meaningfully passed significant new legislation, making the immigration law out of date. A lot of intelligent people voted for Obama, and Obama created DACA, which says overstaying your visa as a child is fine and results in “deferred” deportation. Hence a lot of leftists think visa rules in the U.S. are so outdated that violating them is fine. IMO Obama made a careful calculation to degrade the sanctity of immigration laws to avoid hardship on a million people; it was a good idea on humanitarian grounds but it did open a large can of worms.
As for why ICE are the bad guys, well that’s a completely different question. The way they enforce laws is thug-like and have resulted in multiple innocent deaths. Regardless of if it is ICE or a normal police department if enforcing laws causes death you bet there will be a large pushback.
For decades the US has turned a blind eye to illegal immigration because of how much profits agribusiness and construction makes from it. It wasn't an Obama thing, but spanned several presidents and both parties.
Correct. But I should say Obama was being very public about the program whereas previously it had been more of an under-the-table thing. Now the question is, why hasn’t Congress made laws so agriculture and construction can benefit from cheap foreign labor in a legal way?
That's what the H-2a program is. Many employers have avoided using it because it gives labor actual rights, requires an above-minimum wage, and includes free housing. All of those provisions are currently being gutted though.
Votes that lose by a large margin have no information. They’re commitment free actions taken purely for political gain. Narrow wins are the only ones where you can really learn something.
If everyone else is voting for some necessary evil, it frees me up to vote against it while still wanting it.
For me it wasn't so much that he was the only one to vote against it, as it was that when he did vote against it the people of his state promptly replaced him with a more Law and Order senator.
In the US we claim we want freedom, privacy, and all that good stuff. But where the rubber meets the road, it becomes pretty clear that we don't.
Their status in society should be comparable to former Stasi. You probably haven't heard much about how former Stasi were treated, and how they still are perceived.
You mean being voted into regional parliaments in the former GDR states?
Sorry, but the German far right party that just won their first state governmental majority vote has the highest share of former Stasi officials in their ranks.
So basically - being ex-stasi is nothing to be ashamed of anymore in some parts of Germany.
What's new? Gov been doing this to every dissident group for decades now. Funny that "left" now care about it since it's pointed at them. Making this a left vs right debate is so tiresome.
For years the social contract was that neither side did it to the other because once that rubicon was crossed, both sides would do it.
As a centrist my observation is that that left crossed it first, believing that they were doing it for a just cause. Unfortunately that broke the contract and now we are seeing both sides trying to grab power by any means necessary. Until both sides de-escalate, this will continue.
Just like war, many innocent people will pay the price as collateral damage until a truce can be negotiated.
I'm honestly curious. What line do you think the left crossed first? There is nothing in my mind that comes even close to the lines that have been crossed by this administration.
Just that line alone makes me think you're far less centrist than you claim to be.
This response is rich in vibes, low in fact, but my guess is OP is generally referring to things like the FBI's storming of Branch Davidian compound in Waco, the infiltration and surveillance of organizations, basically right and far right, in response to the OKC bombing, in the name of preventing domestic terrorism.
Go farther back and we have Hoover building kompromat on basically everyone, farther still you get McCarthy anti-Left. I don't think there's an era without any kind of corruption or abuse of power. It's romantic to think there was ever restraint, and like believing so seems to depend on starting the clock at an aribitrary historical point.
If you aren’t going to include a shred of justification to back up why you think the left started it, you’re just deluding yourself that you are a centrist.
Surveillance in combination with law enforcement is not the immediate problem, and so blaming ills on extended surveillance provides a smoke screen to ignore the actual problems.
The two problems of surveillance are misuse by government for political reasons in opposition to constitutional rights and misuse of surveillance by non-government agents who are not held to the same high ethical standards/limitations. These two concerns of misuse will continue their malicious growth until they are challenged regardless of the increases to surveillance technology.
Let's put aside whether or not surveillance is necessary.
The very big problem I have here is that ICE is not the agency that should be doing this sort of surveillance. Their role is immigration control, not leftist or citizen control. If they suspect there's some dangerous criminal problem going on, then that's the role of the FBI to investigate.
The specific reason they are doing this is because ICE doesn't use traditional courts for most of their actions. As such, they are fairly unaccountable.
ICE also isn't even technically criminal law enforcement, they are civil law enforcers. They are supposed to involve local law enforcement or federal law enforcement when going after criminals. Their roles are, instead, to dish out tickets. The fact that they've been militarized is a major problem. CBP is the only agency under the DHS that is supposed to have any sort of military equipment and general detention powers and those are only supposed to be exerted at a border.
Constitutional rights extend everywhere the Constitution covers regardless of immigration status. If ICE is conducting business in opposition to rights conveyed by the Constitution then you have found a far more grave concern to address.
For sure, my point is that there's no way you can slice this as being justifiable. Even if you are pro surveillance and anti-leftist. ICE shouldn't be doing this, it's the job of the FBI.
No, the surveillance is at the core here. People love making pro-surveillance arguments in this same vein by just asserting that there can exist a world where everyone is surveilled but the usage of surveillance is checked and will never cross any line.
That world can't exist. Mass surveillance IS power, and power corrupts. Any situation where the use of surveillance is reasonable is a temporary transitory state, the final end is always the same - repressions and authoritarianism. The technology is a siren song, it's too attractive for bad actors so they will try to get it in somehow. And once your system of checks and balances springs a leak somewhere, it sets in motion its eventual undoing, because there's almost no stopping it once it's relied upon somewhere.
I am not making a pro-surveillance argument, though. I am merely stating there are malicious concerns that if left unaddressed will continue to be malicious irrespective of any technology.
I understand, this is why I said that the same line of reasoning is used in pro-surveilance arguments, not that yours was necessarily one of them. I agree that the concerns outside surveillance are also very real, I'm just saying that surveillance itself isn't an ideology-agnostic tool that's at the whims of its users, the technology itself inherently will always motivate all those other malicious actors and should not exist.
I agree with your second paragraph, but disagree with the first.
Society and its laws have been built around the central idea of selective enforcement. We have all manor of laws on the books that are created with the assumption that they cannot or will not be enforced perfectly.
The spy powers of our governments have always been assumed to be limited - that if they choose to invasively track a person, it would take limited human resources and that would naturally limit their capacity (in theory) to those who the government truly deems a concern.
Omnipresent surveillance that can record and analyze and correlate every citizen's movements and behavior at all times is inherently totalitarian and anti-freedom. It is a power the government should not be allowed to have, period.
So, what are the harms? This is the very first question that comes up in any form of judicial review. If there exists vast increases of surveillance and law enforcement is forbidden from using it is there still a harm? There absolutely could be, but that is what must be addressed to provide the proper regulation.
The forth amendment is not modified merely because the technology evolves. This is the kind of thing defense lawyers look for. To permit evolving technology to be used as evidence in violation of privacy generally requires new law.
We might be talking past each other. You're talking purely legal interpretation, I'm talking society and philosophy.
My point is that government cannot be trusted to have this kind of power because it will at some point be turned against the population when dissent threatens the people holding power; it is inevitable. The least we should do is make laws strictly controlling access and purpose of access to such tools for criminal investigations, but I don't think that's enough to stop abuse and civil oppression.
Great. So when the dems get back in power they can go after all the far right militant movements that are armed to the teeth and breaking countless laws?
They aren't going to support Leftists. There might be a temporary alliance at best but they know leftist aren't actually interested in smaller government, freedom of speech, and private property rights. They know Leftists are equally as authoritarian because of the social control policies implemented during COVID. For example The political hunts connected to the SPLC and FBI/DOJ burned those bridges. They remember how Leftists treat them when they work against them. Therefore your attempt to use their principles against them aren't going to work very well.
Ya this is the big lie 2Aers are bought into, turns out being able to organize is as important or more than just having a bunch of guns and a ooh-rah attitude. And as you can see from article the government will be there if you start acting in a way the admin disapprove of
I read the article and the facts don't match up with the title. The thesis is actually
The Minnesota 15 case is the clearest example yet of DHS pursuing the Trump administration’s efforts to crack down on what have long been upheld as First Amendment–protected activities
But did the Minnesota 15 commit actual crimes? There's lots of hyperbole "15 terabytes of data" but in the end it centers on investigations into the Minnesota 15 and doesn't answer this question. The Minnesota 15 are not accused of ordinary protest. The article gave no evidence that these people hadn't committed any crimes it just went on and on about investigative capabilities of HSI.
Obstructing law enforcement is a crime even if you don't like law enforcement. I think it's a stretch to go from "Minnesota 15 investigated" to "ICE is a private police force used to suppress dissent". Also, there's no mention of the ~10 million people who entered illegally under Biden. Is it democratic to have open borders? I get the sense this writer believes deporting people is anti-democratic.
> But did the Minnesota 15 commit actual crimes? There's lots of hyperbole "15 terabytes of data" but in the end it centers on investigations into the Minnesota 15 and doesn't answer this question. The Minnesota 15 are not accused of ordinary protest. The article gave no evidence that these people hadn't committed any crimes it just went on and on about investigative capabilities of HSI.
The indictment itself makes no specific mention of violence as far as I know because there was no actual violence committed. It's staggering that people are getting set multi-million-dollar bonds for what is essentially civil disobedience.
"Also, there's no mention of the ~10 million people who entered illegally under Biden. Is it democratic to have open borders? I get the sense this writer believes deporting people is opposed to democracy."
A few things to unpack with this statement. 10 million people never entered illegally, that number is derived from DHS reporting of 10 million encounters which includes people who are arrested, denied entry or removed.
Also, that doesn't cover the fact that this was a recognized issue by Democrats hence why the party had the bipartisan border bill that was killed by Trump because he wanted the border as a political issue for the upcoming election.
The ~10 million were not substantially deported, they entered illegally and then were given Notices to Appear which is completely a lawyerly way to cover for it all.
The bipartisan bill would've still allowed in thousands of people per day. Some people don't want that. It wasn't even proposed until 2024. By then people might not have trusted the admin.
> The article gave no evidence that these people hadn't committed any crimes
Are we now doing “guilty until proven innocent?”
> there's no mention of the ~10 million people who entered illegally under Biden. Is it democratic to have open borders?
Where is that figure sourced from? Are the borders still open?
You’re ignoring the bipartisan bill that would have increased border security in 2024, but Republican politicians shot down for political purposes to help Trump in the election. What did that bi-partisan solution get wrong that you would have done differently?
I get the sense this writer believes Immigration Enforcement Officers deporting and tracking legal American citizens is anti-democratic.
Abolish ICE, abolish DHS. Put every single ERO officer and person involved in efforts like this on trial and/or bar them from any public service of any kind going forward.
You have the power to stop them. There are plenty of technical opportunities out there and every internal security memo with your hn handle on it is another piece of grear they can't use and time they've wasted ratcheting their own paranoia.
For 40 years left wingers have in no particular order:
1. Threatened me and my family for having the wrong political opinion up to and including calling the house phone and threatening to shoot and rape(!) us.
2. Claimed that my relatives who ended up in the Soviet Gulag must have deserved it, because imprisonment by default implies guilt.
3. Happily implemented surveillance networks on everybody "for their own good" when they were anywhere near power.
4. Have repeatedly told me that I am a stupid immigrant and that I should do exactly as I say because I'm too stupid to understand things for myself.
5. Have simultaneously held the positions that all of the above was "justified trolling/just joshing man" and "words are violence" depending on when it suited them.
Behold, the field in which I grow my fucks. Lay thine eyes upon it and see that it is barren.
I'm having flashbacks to when I was in high school in the 1970's while Nixon was at the height of his powers.
The difference is Nixon had real domestic enemies to worry about: The Weather Underground were bombing buildings, heiress Patty Hearst was kidnapped by the "Symbionese Liberation Army", the Black Panthers were making demands which conservative America found frightening, mass protests were going on about the war in Vietnam on college campuses which resulted in the deaths at Kent State. Nixon believed these protests were driven by Chinese and Soviet influence to support North Vietnam in the war. The CIA’s Operation CHAOS spent years looking for foreign control of the antiwar movement and reported back that there wasn’t any.
What domestic enemies does Trump have? Antifa is a philosophy, not an organization. Black Lives Matter protests were his last administration. There have been a few lone wolf attacks like the Dallas ICE sniper, but the domestic threat is no here near what Nixon faced.
Under the Trump's White House directive NSPM-7, which defines a potential domestic terrorist as anyone expressing “anti-Christian, anti-capitalist, or anti-American” views, DHS launched an operation to find a “network of conspirators” against ICE.
The surveillance op in the Wired article targeted labor unions, a climate change group and socialist collectives — the SEIU had three years of wire transfers investigated, and the AFL-CIO, DSA and Showing Up for Racial Justice were also investigated. That’s the mismatch: a 1970s-scale dragnet for a threat that isn’t 1970s-scale.
Trump appears to be grabbing power for the sake of grabbing power.
yeah - he's shaken u.s institutional protections to their core. but lucky they keep standing. maybe he or someone else will finally make a break through - but most likely it won't be trump due to his incompetency and him surrounding himself with 'yes' incompetent people.
They're standing, but he's weakened them. He's also laid down a pattern of how to attack them.
Either the institutional protections are strengthened after 2028 (presuming the Democrats win the presidency) and before 2030 (presuming the Democrats lose a bunch of seats in Congress in the midterms), or the next try (whenever it comes) is likely to break the institutional protections and result in authoritarian rule over the US.
Not really the bent of the article, but it's also worth pointing out that this shows some really terrible opsec practice by the activists in question. Like, no, you don't just spin up a cloud server to coordinate your protest activity and then ssh into it from your home IP. Dude...
> Court records show the feds used an administrative summons request reserved for violations of customs and taxation requirements, which does not fit the activity that made up the criminal charges filed by the Minnesota US attorney against former CNN anchor Don Lemon and others.
When they are arresting news anchors for reporting on ICE's activities, it should be obvious that Trump and his administration is fascist-curious.
It is eerily similar to the 1930s era in central Europe.
I would not call it "Anti-Left" though. Fascism should
never be confused with having an agenda other than
fascism itself, be it Trump's corporate fascism or
Putin's neo-Stalinism. All pocket away wealth and power
to their cronies.
What gets me is how much of this stuff is just bought, not built. Agencies can purchase location and social media data from brokers and skip the warrant step entirely, so I'd honestly put more energy into closing that loophole than into fighting any one agency.
anti-left sure, but more like "anti everyone who isn't part of a small set of VERY far right movements by general western standards, many affected people just don't know about it yet or are willful ignorant about it"
you are centrist and have a good point to complain about not liked by them, sorry you are now left
you are conservative right, but have very different views about separation of religion and state, sorry that is woke you are now left, too
you care bout civil right of all US citizens and especially want to better protect workers against abuse, oh dang I fear that is "left extremist" maybe even "domestic terrorist"
I am from the US and the headline is accurate. Not “the largest,” but “one of the largest.” We’ve been here before. The question is does it get kneecapped or does it spin out of control?
Attacking agents of a democratically elected government makes you the bad guy.
If you want to change things then vote to change it, don't attack the people doing the work that just makes things worse. These "protests" are on the same level as the people threatening and blocking abortion centers, don't do that it just makes you a menace even if you believe it is a good cause.
Your framing is highly disingenuous. The Democrats _and_ the Republicans should be looking into Musk for a litany of reasons. The fact that one side of the government sees nothing wrong with his actions is not an indictment of the side that rightfully sees them for what they are. Then to compare that to what this article is describing? Jesus.
How is Musk a political enemy other than people think he breaks the law kind of a lot? Isn't seeing Musk as an ally of the right kind of an admission of corrupt money dealings with the administration?
Reaching really hard to try to both-sides the narrative.
I remember as a 14 year old (2004) thinking about how I'd make sites like TPB or 4chan without getting it shut down, a place that anyone could speak freely. Then Kim Dotcom happened, and even Lavabit, and I'm sure many others.
It's a thankless thing, but we need more people who are willing to just do it. Now I know some of you will point out that Kim Dotcom was hosting movies, shows, music, etc. That's not my point, look at HOW they took him down, and WHEN. They were trying to pass SOPA, claiming it would help them take down people like Kim Dotcom "because they couldn't" so what they did to Kim Dotcom was questionable from a legal perspective...
Sigh. I really do miss the internet before the 2nd and 3rd waves of "Eternal September" (Facebook then Smartphones) it was much nicer.
> I really do miss the internet before the 2nd and 3rd waves of "Eternal September" (Facebook then Smartphones)
Very apt. These two things did really make the internet a lot worse. I would even add AI as the 4th wave, with all the captchas and slop we now need to deal with :-(
The evidence will remain in ssh logs and such. That is part of why it got posted here. This political struggle has gone technical and we're all involved.
Wow, I wonder how they got SSH session logs?!
The breadcrumb trail here is chilling.
Two concrete questions. Did Fly challenge this request, or just comply? And does he still think server-side trust is a non-issue when the identity in this case was built entirely from provider-side records (signup IP, SSH audit logs, a Stripe fingerprint)?
When I said in 2023 that the infrastructure around E2EE matters, he called it misinformation (rather aggressively).
This case looks a lot like the infrastructure mattering.
As much as you'd like his take to, I don't think he's out to burn bridges or open himself up to a lawsuit.
This is an unreasonable request.
At this point there's a non-zero chance you and your employees are detained on spurious national security grounds, or simply end up in an ICE internment centre - accidently or otherwise.
Two things are true
1) Tech has become more financial people and "techbros" than principled nerds.
2) The powers of the USG have become a lot stronger and far reaching- quite literally to the level where talking about complying with an order is itself a crime.
Now that the precident has been set, there is no going back. Team-D sees these companies as their servants. Team-R knows the companies will turn on them the second team-D has any power, and understands that failing to use power when they have it is suicide.
95% of the population is on team-D or team-R, meaning there is no hope of fixing this without an explicit truce. Any member of either team who offers that truce would be eaten alive by their own team's rabid base.
The other side wants to take pictures of and track the masked men taking their neighbors.
This are very much the same, insert meme
For you they at least require a warrant. Usually. Unless you're crossing the border or are undocumented or something.
The problem here is the cops not where the computer sits.
You can also use proxys and/or tor to create external accounts/upload stuff.
Yeah that’s gonna be super helpful, try to keep chanting “fourth amendment!” while pinned to the ground and the heavily armed swat team that just blew your door away is searching through the house.
I do watch too many movies.
no such thing called constitutional protections in 2026 USA.
Having your own server and infra, at least in part.
>Having my own door kicked down and my dog shot so they can get at my personal home server?
The government doesn't have infinite resources, nor is it immune to political considerations (obviously, that's the problem here!). There is an enormous, qualitative and quantitative difference between:
vs Scale is inherent in the topic here. It's not just "why", "HOW" is "ICE running one of the largest anti-left surveillance ops"? Well, in part because they can do so so cheaply, efficiently, and stealthily via purely electronic means. They aren't kicking down ten million doors and shooting ten million dogs, and indeed they CAN'T do that, not because they wouldn't like to but because it's physically impossible with their resources and would provoke furious (undoubtedly including some lethal) pushback.And again, even if absolutely nothing else, it means something to know they're after you. Nothing stops you from immediately surrendering your server when asked, but you can then also instantly get a lawyer/support and push back right then and there. You can't adapt to what you either never even realize happened or only realized too late.
Where's the furious pushback for the people they've murdered already?
I think it is a threat model thing primarily, which I should have been more clear about. I'm more worried about being lawfully murdered in front of my family than I am going to jail because my ssh sessions were read. But the ssh thing is a totally valid concern for someone doing different activities than I am and I shouldn't have dismissed it.
The US is currently, probably, still a Democracy with a semi-functioning independent Judiciary and public pressure can still have an impact.
Although it may still be possible that some jurisdictions will emerge, even within the US, that have the capacity to preserve basic civil liberties for their residents, whether via tacit agreement or overt paramilitary enforcement.
I wouldn't bet my kids' childhoods on that happening, though.
A critical mass of people pushing back against fascism leave a country, and that country tends to devolve into the kind of place that starts wars with its neighbors.
This is why I always turn my head and squint at Americans fleeing to Canada, as if an America that fully embraced everything they see it doing wouldn't come right after Canada next.
"technical and network-activity records from fly.io included:
SSH session logs (CSV format) listing multiple "New SSH session" entries for <redacted> with verified=true between approximately 2026-03-26 and 2026-04-01, timestamped in UTC.
outbound-connection records (CSV format) reflecting numerous TCP port 443 connections originating from internal fly.io addresses <redacted> to external IP addresses attributed to AMAZON-02 (Amazon Web Services) in the US and Cloudflarenet (Cloudflare)".
"i wonder if fly.io bothers to vet/challenge records requests or if they just hand data over".
(this one can be edited, though. very strange)
thanks dang/tomhow.
the most annoying part is that i got no indication that i was suddenly shadowbanned. if someone didn't tell me, it would have probably been a day or two at least of wondering why i had no engagement on my comments.
no notification, no appeal system outside of email and pray. very cool system.
It's nice that this place maintains an email endpoint that's actually staffed by humans who can intervene if needed. That's more than can be said about most places these days.
shadow bans here have no purpose. i would have found out in a couple days even if no one told me. so yes, it might as well just be a regular ban, correct. at least that way i would know what rule i broke.
If there's a hack, HN will say, "How could Fly.io not be keeping logs? Malpractice!"
If there's a warrant, HN will say, "How could Fly.io be keeping logs? Malpractice!"
"They don't know who hacked them? Malpractice. What if it was the government?"
This lobbying means that the politicians might be elected by "us" but they work for "them" - the "lobbyists."
Does this answer your question sufficiently?
Now they can just chip away at whatever regulation is left, and create mistrust in oversight bodies and the rigging of the game is complete.
Better than communism, the government hardly even has to pretend to work for the benefit of the people, because the wealth imbalance has a closed circuit of money between private entities and elections. They can bring suitcases of cash, walk in the front door literally holding a chainsaw and prune off every olive branch extended toward the citizens.
These election "investments" are clearly paying off at high multiples now. Why spend your money in a capitalist competition when you can more efficiently spend it in public elections to eliminate competition, divert tax revenue directly into your businesses and eliminate any responsibility you should have? Do a Nazi salute for the whole world to see, and watch the propagandized twist themselves into whatever shape pretzel you ask them to.
Whether you see that as good or bad or something which needs to be checked and controlled is a separate discussion, but it's an obvious and expected result.
Also re: AI, how do we not fall behind those who are willing/on the same team as Anthropic, OpenAI, X... SOTA models are currently fully captured by ideologies I would consider to be willfully and gleefully violating nearly all human rights.
I’m voting against the face eating leopard party every time. I’m not voting for someone. I would like very much to be voting for someone instead of against someone.
The internet era has brought about the rise of small dollar donors making an outsized impact (for better or worse - it's not always a good thing)
This has given rise to more forms of populism (left and right, benign and toxic)
In any case, it does provide some counter weight to large donor class.
Money tends to have diminishing returns past a certain point, when it comes to elections.
And I think people underestimate what dopes many large donors are - that just get milked by the party people pumping them full of sweet talk and don't really get much in return
They also see it like an insurance payment. Kick some amount to both sides in the hope that they leave you alone.
He’s basically proof of the power of the common man’s vote in the US.
He still spent the least and publicly eschewed donations. His skill was being able to connect with the voters that matter (unfortunately).
As far as I can tell, donations after he was elected in 2016 are simply bribes.
I guess you can pretend Liz Warren, Ron Wyden, Patty Murray, dozens of house reps and thousands of Democratic legisltators in statehouses and towns around the country don't exist and just vote for the "party that lowered my taxes" again , right?
You can argue the warrant was poorly justified (and I'd agree!), but I don't see a plausible world where "ISPs aren't allowed to do connection analysis on their own networks" is going to help anyone. Well, anyone except spammers. They'd love that.
Because of FUD spread about data protection laws… such as the GDPR?
Headline makes it seem like ICE just did this in a vacuum.
Homeland Security finally got one in 2003.
The Homeland Security Act of 2002 also let those offices start having their own statutory powers and carry firearms without needing to be deputized by the US Marshals Service.
This was heavily affected by them being founded in 2002.
As a MN'n, I have my own opinions about the escalatory tactics of protestors (the marches were awesome, but many of the follow/callout patrols seemed designed to get people killed), and the predictable response of ICE. All while I strongly oppose gov surveillance and tracking like this.
What operation? Did they go around hacking into servers and invade their privacy?
> Headline makes it seem like ICE just did this in a vacuum.
Would they not do it in a vacuum? There’s been a a vagrant disregard for laws on their side. Why are they getting the benefit of the doubt here? It’s very clear they have been targeting certain demographics and political leaning from its institution.
If people started doing that to UPS delivery trucks I would expect UPS to do everything in their power to protect their staff.
I fail to understand why this is a problem when they do the exact same thing to civilians? On top of that there are companies like Flock who monitor civilians when ICE isn’t there.
I don’t get why you love ICE so much and want to protect them like they’re doing you some big service and not going around instilling fear in others. Have you been living under a rock?
One might even go a step further and say people are obligated to do so when the government repeatedly abuses its power to intimidate and violently affect the lives of people without due process or cause.
The headline makes it look like they run "One of the Largest Anti-Left Surveillance Ops in US History". The only way the trigger matters is if the response to that trigger is justified. These justifications, once you consider them valid, just start a vicious cycle. Most of the people are being put under surveillance by this "massive anti US citizen campaign" with no reasonable suspicion, no judicial supervision, by an agency which should have no business doing any of this. Just another flavor of authoritarianism. Is it justified for them to escalate? If not then your argument is bunk. The title says what it really is and justifying the extremist actions of one side only betrays a bias.
A proper warrant must be respected and adhered to …
… but was it a proper warrant or just a bluff and, further, was the customer notified?
I insist on knowing the answer to this question and if you are a customer of fly.io (I am not) you should too.
Also SSH isn't a perfectly opaque protocol. There's stuff you can use to fingerprint e.g. client/server versions and often narrow it to architecture, OS, even OS version. That helps.
Someone is using paid service to surveil actual LEO agency and they are surprised LEOs can compel paid service to produce records? And all that while playing with license plate searches ( and heavens know what else ) that would normally suggest some basic levels of competence?
You play with a bull. You get he horns. Sometimes even if you know what you are doing.
edit:
Kids these days: Wah, the government is not playing faaaair.
https://www.fox8live.com/2026/08/07/unchecked-overtime-nopd-...
https://niemanreports.org/mining-the-data/
https://gijn.org/stories/investigations-using-strava-fitness...
I expect a "but this case is different" type reply; it's almost always possible to make an argument like that.
But it's a big grey zone between some clear cut "black" and "white" cases. I don't know if prosecutors are using or will use the fact of surveilling law enforcement as a crime itself or as evidence for intent to commit other crimes.
I’d actually be OK with a symmetric response to this, in fact, I WOULD LOVE a symmetric response: law enforcement can’t use AI to track citizens and we can’t use AI to track them.
… but there is a lot of 1st and 4th amendment shenanigans going on with all of this and I can’t even guess where it will land.
Interesting times man.
Like, in a non-dystopian world, they'd not be hiding their activities and not be attacking people who observe them, but would instead be behaving legally and ethically and therefor not be concerned.
The problem is we have a beehive full of ICE/HSI agents that are going around in plain clothes, yelling "trust me bro" in place of warrants/badges/names, and demanding full obedience to anyone they approach.
The same people will injure, sometimes gravely, and refuse medical treatment while holding them in terrible conditions. The party line is that anyone who is arrested by these people are "criminals", which is just a direct contradiction to the bill of rights.
At the end of the day, your comments are saying "I don't care about the bill of rights, all that matters is authority regardless of the legitimacy."
I’m not surprised, but this is not how it’s supposed to be in the US.
The fourth amendment is supposed to force a high bar for collecting evidence in this way but we’ve been slowly eroding those rights away over the last 50 years.
What is good for the goose and whatnot. What I am saying is that when you do things that are bound to get attention is not to assume that you won't get attention.
You may think you have nothing to hide but See NSPM-7. National Security Presidential Memorandum 7 that directs the federal government to disrupt groups “before” they result in violent political acts. In other words, pre-crime.
The DOJ/FBI etc. can now investigate and unilaterally DECIDE if you have something to hide if they believe you hold views "anti-Americanism, anti-capitalism, anti-Christianity, government overthrow, race/gender/migration extremism, and hostility toward traditional views on family, religion, or morality"
The DOJ/FBI can DECIDE this for any reason they want -- the shoes you bought yesterday, a Reddit comment from 5 years ago, a rainbow sticker on your water bottle. I have everything to fear just opening my Mac or stepping out my door.
Allowing law enforcement to maintain a default stance of antagonism - “us vs them” - can only lead to law enforcement being leveraged by those in power (political or capital power) to define who the “them” is.
I’d much rather have law enforcement have a default cooperative stance with their communities and society at large. You know, if “protect and serve” wasn’t just a marketing gimmick but an actual principle applied during process and procedures.
In essence: thin blue line is an illiberal aesthetic that has 19th century American leaders rolling in their graves - at least the ones who weren’t chasing down slaves to return to the South.
Your body determines your function oversimplification for the purposes of this argument.
The idea that illegal immigrants need to be deported (and not have a path to legal residency) comes from a view that those jobs should go to American citizens (which will bring economic pain that is intolerable) or from a view that browns don't belong in the USA.
Additionally, it gives business owners a bunch of workers they can exploit, since those workers can't go to the police or report them to the labor board.
Doesn't the qualification of them being illegal immigrants imply that they aren't going through the legal processes immigrants should go through to get work and residency?
If illegal immigrants gain the same rights as legal immigrants, why even bother following the rules?
The purpose of a system is what it does.
So the first step is revoking the fraudulent claims, and processing the cases so they can be deported legally.
Instead, we spent the money setting up a heavily armored police organization to forcibly find, process, and detain people who "might" have broken a law. Putting everyone in a detention center doesn't really seem like a great way to speed up the processing time. In the meantime multiple actual US citizens have been killed, detained, and intimidated. Makes you wonder what the actual goal was in the first place.
Isn't that obvious? I mean I can't imagine why this would be even remotely controversial.
But that isn’t what the right wants; a modern coalition of racists who want no immigrants, and opportunists who want a underclass of labor that can’t organize, vote or otherwise fight back currently is in power.
And that coalition is in power after successfully scapegoating immigrants to average Americans who have no idea what the Byzantine legal citizenship process looks like now when they repeat that they want “legal immigrants”.
I love to see your source on this one. I personally haven't seen this policy stance from any Democrats.
By what metric does the Democratic party want “as many illegal immigrants as possible” and why would they be deporting so many people if that were the case?
In a case where "the purpose of a system is what it does", whoever changes the outcome changes the purpose of the system
You haven't provided any value to the conversation
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/come-on-obviously-the-purpo...
It's not about the outcomes of something taken in isolation, it's about the actions taken in order to achieve it, and when those actions continually run counter to achieving the stated goal.
So the response article examples are missing half the context needed to make it's claim:
* The hospital only curing 2/3 of cancer patients being simply a failure to achieve it's true mission of 3/3 cures would rely on knowing it is taking action in earnest to actually cure all patients.
While we can assume that for an obvious hypothetical, if for instance a whistleblower leaked evidence showing that 1/3 patients were being intentionally withheld care, the hospital responded it was an accident, but then evidence came out proving they still did this, then POSIWID would apply.
In a real-world, non-hypothetical example:
ICE keeps deporting American citizens. Every time this gets reported on, they insist it's a mistake. They keep doing it.
Insisting that adverse behavior is an accident/mistake/incidental, but then continuing to do the bad thing yourself, is the purpose of the axiom.
"Insisting that adverse behavior is an accident/mistake/incidental, but then continuing to do the bad thing yourself, is the purpose of the axiom."
So, in your (faulty) interpretation, the axiom applies perfectly to the fact that cars kill pedestrians
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/highlights-from-the-comment...
At some level, this is because the optics still matter. Most of us don't want to see brown families rounded up and tossed over the nearest southern border.
Our current administration ran on a platform of paying criminals who were convicted of breaking laws.
The fact is, the huge majority of undocumented folks came into the country legally. Most overstayed their visas, had the laws changed out from under them, lost their employment, etc. In other words, they’re virtually all tax-paying, productive members of society who want to be here. It’s a win-win for them to remain.
This obsession with “the law!” only ever really seems related to immigration law. Wonder why…
This is why advocates have always tried to reframe things from "illegal" to "undocumented"
It's actually not a crime to overstay a visa or to be here without one. It's nothing.
The act of crossing the border "illegally" is a misdemeanor (the first time) on the level of something like a speeding ticket - but its still not illegal to be here even if you crossed "illegally"
If you want more people to immigrate you should make the legal pathways more accessible, not tolerate the illegal ones.
How do you do this in a way that preserves the leverage that business owners have over undocumented workers? Those people form a pretty strong coalition with the people who think all immigration is bad for ... other reasons, so this is pretty much a non-starter politically.
Sounds like the Democratic party really wants to exploit those undocumented workers in US
Then say someone is cruel for not allowing more illegal migrants to stay in US (to be exploited I guess???)
IF better immigration laws are not possible because people want to exploit illegal migrants THEN why would it be considered cruel for someone to oppose illegal migration?
P.S. When has anyone ever responded to the the sanctimonious phrase "be better" by actually "being better". You don't want them to "be better", you just want to try and shame them into adopting your ideological views.
How does, e.g., deporting a person who was illegally brought to this country at the age of 2, back to their “home” help their home country? What about the Haitian who came here legally under TPS, then, after Trump ended TPS, is now “illegal”? The Dept of State’s own website currently says of Haiti: “Do not travel to Haiti due to the risk of crime, kidnapping, terrorism, unrest, and limited health care.” How is deporting people back there helpful?
If it is not a crime, then what is it?
If you're not rich enough to lawyer up, spend five figures fighting through the kangaroo administrative process and then another five sticking it to them in real court a civil infraction is actually worse in a lot of ways because those pesky 4th through 8th amendments don't really protect you all that much. There's a lot of judicial precedent from the past 100yr that basically waters down your rights when a bureaucrat is after you rather than the cops.
Consider this scenario. A friend of yours walks up to you and says "man, I got a ticket yesterday." You will have a general idea of the level of enforcement involved, how that's looked at by the government and others, etc. You probably do not see your friend as a criminal.
Now, suppose the same friend walked up and says "man, I got arrested yesterday, I just got bailed out." You will have different ideas of the enforcement model and perceptions of that. There is now a greater probability that you see your friend as a criminal.
Do you have an example that is not isolated incidents?
It’s a sleight of hand, they say “the worst of the worst” and what they mean is “all illegal immigrants are the worst of the worst”
This is why they’re going to lose their majorities next week.
Yeah, it boils down to the same reasons why many corporations want an incredibly broken H-1B system at the higher end: it provides an exploitable pool of workers.
And currently in both cases you can find a lot of consternation from the people who benefitted from how things worked prior to Trump because the administration is making significant changes to the status quo. The business owners loved the rhetoric about fixing immigration, but assumed the broken systems that gave them the benefits of exploiting those worker pools would largely be maintained as they had been.
And to be explicitly clear with my opinion, neither side of this conflict (businesses that want to maintain the broken-but-works-for-us system, or the Trump administration) are the good guys here. The businesses want to keep exploiting migrant workers unimpeded and the administration wants to be maximally racist more than it wants to help businesses keep exploiting.
Also, you are shifting the blame for immigrants getting arrested to the owners. That means the employees are actually blameless: they are caught between seldom-enforced laws and a need to thrive and feed their families.
Um?
Th policy has just been struck down, but we'll see whether that makes a practical difference.
IME ICE are simply a death squad. Immigration is a pretext.
The goal is political terror against regime opponents, not a rational and proportional response to people without paperwork.
Or, you know, from the idea that they are doing something illegal and the job of law enforcement is to enforce laws.
It only becomes a crime once you're formally deported
"The idea that illegal immigrants need to be deported comes from a view that those jobs should go to American citizens or from a view that browns don't belong in the USA"
Calling everybody a racist who wants laws enforced is weak. Immigration laws are made necessary by a welfare state I happen to not support. The conversation has literally nothing to with race or racism. We're talking about the laws that govern the country and whether we should enforce or ignore them.
What do you think? Do you have any profound insight or ideas to share?
(And the people who sign onto an organization like ICE knowing exactly what they do and why.)
Are you serious? The choice for them was to go back to their home countries.
Or they could have "moved back south" like you said, and stayed there.
Since this "program" was ended it sounds like it should be as simple as "no papers? gotta go".
Funny how democrats always care so much about "the law" and "due process" until it relates to immigration.
Funny how often the very problems republicans are so adamant about are caused by their own policies. Before the change the population flowed seasonally and had little reason to stay long term. Suddenly it's an issue but by shutting off the flow without a way to do it legally it screwed both parties. Farms still need the crops picked and the work is difficult and the pay is only good relative to the opportunities in other countries so there's no replacement domestic workforce.
"for that wage."
This is wage suppresion you're supporting.
The main point though is that the "problem" of seasonal farm workers staying in the US illegally is to some extent artificially created by attempting to strictly enforce the border. Before that they were able to come work freely and would happily return to their home country because the process of getting into the US for the harvesting seasons was (relative to the modern process) easy, safe and cheap so there was no reason to stay in the US. Why would they, their wages would go farther in their home countries and that's where their families were and they would be able to cross back for the next major harvest they wanted to participate in.
Is this one of these stupid "yeah 300 years ago this used to be on that land!!!" argument? Buddy, if so, stop living in the past. Territories are conquered all the time everywhere throughout the entirety of History.
Plus, this has nothing to do with current immigration laws.
How does it apply to the specific case mentioned in the parent? How does it relate to illegal workers who somehow are now "trapped" in the US because some weird fringe program was stopped?
A nation is literally defined as an entity that has control over its borders. If it permits just anyone to enter or exit, it is technically not a nation anymore.
I’m all for changing immigration laws, giving more people a legal route to becoming temporary workers, students, residents, and citizens. But being choosy about who gets in and who does not. Attract the best and brightest to lift your country up, not freeloaders and criminals that tear it down. Look at the riots in Europe right now - and learn from their mistakes. Immigration is good but there have to be limits, laws, and control over borders.
A state*
A nation is a people with common identity, culture, language, history, etc (see first nations, stateless nations, etc)
I can cross a dozen borders in the EU without so much as slowing down. I can sell my house in one US State and move to another without asking for permission.
It wasn't until World War 1 that passports for international travel became common in Europe.
Don't let the xenophobic posts on social media trick you. Immigrants in the US are factually less likely to commit crimes than born Americans, look it up. They've just repeated the lie so many times that people have accepted it.
Big words considering the rest of your comment.
> If it permits just anyone to enter or exit, it is technically not a nation anymore.
You cannot "permit" something you do not control, so this is a contradiction in terms. If you mean that the constraints put on the US by itself to not police immigration in overly violent or cruel ways mean that it does not control immigration, then by the same logic the 4th amendment implies that there is no rule of law in the US (since certain criminals can't be convicted due to bad actions by the state).
> But being choosy about who gets in and who does not.
Nobody really denies this. The question is how violent or cruel you can be in the exercise of this choosiness.
> Look at the riots in Europe right now
The riots in Europe are not primarily about immigration. Get off twitter.
Statistically this is false. No amount of hand picked undocumented drunk drivers will change this. A large majority of undocumented immigrants follow the law closer, aside from the obvious immigration laws.
So yes, if it quacks like a fascist duck, it's a fascist duck.
Lets ignore that the richest man on the planet has a credible record of being n immigrant who stayed in the US illegaly, and has open criminal record probes in at least 2 countries. But I guess a 350 million donation to the standing goverment in campaign donations might make it difficult for ICE to find him
Perhaps resistance to mass immigration, which correlates with race, isn't based in race. Perhaps almost everywhere, almost always, people resist the mass movement of new and unfamiliar people into their territory. Perhaps that has been the overwhelming democratic consensus of every western democracy since mass immigration was a thing, and it was only ever enabled by an anti-democratic elite consensus.
Which is why sadly the city of Boston is a hellhole and not one of the best cities to live in the USA.
> And when it was poles in the UK, likewise.
Funnily enough reform voters now want the poles back, because industries like construction have slowed down and the lack of EU priority means that the global south now dominates the entry visas into the country. Kurwa we didnt know how well we had it, they say on their way to get a Chinese takeaway on their german car while they check their south korean phone
> Perhaps resistance to mass immigration, which correlates with race, isn't based in race.
Well America has a pretty significant history with racial discrimination. I am even going to ignore history, you know little details like the first cops being slave catchers, and just focus on the present. Where brown neighbourhoods have way more police and despite no racial difference in use of drugs, the percentage of arrests for drug use is disproportionately brown. Something that isn't that weird considering chemically crack and coke are the same thing but crack cocaine originally had a 100 year sentence versus the 1 year in jail for coke, or the FBI starting the war on drugs by going after opium and mass rounding of asian workers and renaming weed as Marihuana to make it sound more Mexican and allow another round of mass arrests.
Those kind of things make ignoring the racial issue a bit more difficult. The constant references to eugenics, and "cleanliness" by the admin are also not particularly quiet dog whistles.
But lets pretend for a second that it has to do with mass immigration. Would the populations that "suffer" that immigration not be the ones up in arms because of the problems they cause? How come its rural villages with 0 immigrants that vote for Brexit and red states that are negative tax contributors and no one wants to live in the source of most of the complaints and not the multicultural cities that are the entire GDP of either country and are chalk full of those newly arrived immigrants?
Does it not make anyone think that the statue of liberty saying that immigrants are welcome and NYC being one of the richest cities in the world might be inextricably linked? While Alabama being the world incest capital and not making money once in 50 years might also have something to do with each other?
You can argue about how they should go about deporting people, but them deporting everyone even those without a criminal record is their intended purpose.
This is not in fact the stated mission of the agency.
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2025/09/10/immi...
However what ICE gets to decide is what cases to prioritize, they don't get to decide who to exonerate but their limited resources means that they prioritize those who are bigger dangers. Still if they had infinite resources they would take everyone.
Should they go around and do that too?
Anyone who don't say yes just wants a police state, the reason your American police is so dangerous and powerful is because they have these choices and can arrest you for a lot of things that people don't normally get arrested for.
So yes, they should do that. That you think they shouldn't is exactly why the American police is so horrible.
There was a post here about a year or so ago about a guy on Facebook being arrested for incredibly benign posts [1]. It's the clearest example of violating one of our foundational laws of this country. Yet the police get away with a slap on the wrist as taxpayers pay for their abuse of power. American police are powerful and are not subject to the same level of scrutiny or justice as average individuals. They can selectively ignore laws and constitutional rights as is.
[1] https://abc7ny.com/post/tennessee-man-jailed-charlie-kirk-po...
The issue is we don’t run our country that way. We do apply it on a spectrum. So as long as that’s the status quo, I will expect them to back off on things that don’t need strict enforcement. You don’t need to eject every single undocumented person with impunity. It is not productive or ethical.
https://wannabewonk.com/how-are-they-different/
>Many of the discussions above are based on a central fact: Undocumented immigrants are here, now, in large numbers. In a world where America had zero undocumented residents, arguments could be made to be less tolerant of their presence, to discourage them from being here. It wouldn't be patently inhumane to deport someone if they have been here weeks, rather than years or decades.
A serious, ethical attempt to reduce illegal immigration would be to set a path to legal, documented residence for all current non-felon aliens, and begin "undocumented" enforcement with a clean slate.
---
edit to reply to Izikiel43 since my participation in the thread has been throttled:
Is it incomprehensible that we could have a compromise solution not involving deportation of tens of millions of people, while at the same time implementing employment validation and other checks that begin actually doing immigration enforcement before families settle?
You assume that a path to legal citizenship for long-time residents here would 100% mean the situation would repeat itself, and I disagree.
Why follow the rules then? If it happens once, it can happen again, it would have the opposite effect.
So the problem here isn't ICE, it is Trump and his politics. ICE following the law and doing their job is the wrong target.
IMO, Republicans like the status quo because the business class enjoys exploiting workers they can threaten with deportation, and they enjoy it as a rallying cry for their voting base.
Who must be deported is mostly left up to discretion.
And since deportation is very expensive and drastic - an option of last resort - it's usually better for all involved to come up with other arrangements.
Most prior presidents had good sense enough to understand that mass deportation is a major foot-gun, politically and economically. And kind of morally monstrous.
For better or worse, the arrangement that's been informally agreed upon is to let most of the undocumented who have been here a long time, remain (dreamers, etc).
Sadly, that left them all vulnerable to the discretion of a capricious criminal wanna-be dictator like Trump.
If they recognized this is an issue just add a way for upstanding undocumented immigrants to become documented immigrants, problem solved.
Instead they preserved the status quo where they can use ICE to hammer their enemies, that is a very bad thing. ICE taking everyone is the only way, it robs it of its power.
Only Trump has really done this. ICE was created in the wake of 9/11 and didn't exist before then.
Before Trump we had Bush and Obama presiding over ICE - the 9/11 aftermath heavily influenced both of their administration policies on deportation (in both cases, pretty hardline).
Before ICE, deportation was mostly a matter for lawyers and judges, and not full of smashed car windows and gun fights, by chuds that make mall-cops look like Marines by comparison.
The weaponization of ICE against political enemies is new and dangerous
We can certainly blame congress for not doing reform, but also it's really hard. The immigration system is probably the most complex legal and bureaucratic regime in the country
So if someone lives here, works and pays taxes, and has not been convicted of any other crime... why would we want to deport them? By some measures migrants pay more taxes and commit less crime than natural born citizens. We should just get them paperwork and let them continue being good citizens while we also reform the process that resulted in them being here illegally in the first place.
Why should we spend billions of dollars on this problem that in many ways, on paper, is beneficial?
See the execution of Renée Good. Remember how the ICE terrorist deliberately stepped before her car, to try to make a defensive claim aka "had to shoot her to stop her". Meanwhile his other two terrorist buddies were standing NEXT to the car, thus invalidating the lie quite logically. After all, how did two other ICE terrorists manage to not get into that situation that the murderer chose to employ here? So there is a lack of consistency among ICE terrorists.
But in US human life is not worth much.
https://digitalcommons.wcl.american.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?...
>Americans’ liberties have been trammeled in a variety of different ways. Under the guise of stopping terrorism, law enforcement officials and government leaders have now been given the right to conduct searches of homes and offices without prior notice, use roving wiretaps to listen in on telephone conversations, and monitor computers and e-mail messages, even to the degree of eavesdropping on attorney/client conversations.
>Conceivably, these extensions of the definition of “terrorist” could bring within their sweep diverse domestic political groups, which have been accused of acts of intimidation or property damage such as Act Up, People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA), Operation Rescue, and the Vieques demonstrators.
It should have been stopped before it grew into the leviathan it is now but the general consensus by the politicos of the time was that this was just histrionic left/libertarian worry, and that something like that could never happen in the USA, we were too just, too democracy-loving.
CBP's job is to protect the border and stop drug and people trafficking entering, whereas ICE's original purpose was to enforce immigration law within the US.
While not "everything" ICE was tasked with was immigration, that was their bread and butter. Where the vast majority of their workforce and spend went.
David Hearn, the former Olympic canoeist was accused and indicted for damaging the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool, purely as a scapegoat.
All federal funds to the state of Colorado frozen to force them to release a convicted-and-imprisoned ally of the administration (see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DOE6DTMjPEc )
All of this happening out in the open, no checks, no balances. Yeah it isn't "pretty close", it is a police state.
https://www.npr.org/2026/09/10/nx-s1-5961220/dhs-ice-observe...
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cg7pyjxjxrvo
ICE has murdered protestors but each case is a headline. Start worrying when it's not a headline anymore. Either because the media are suppressed or because it becomes so common that it's not newsworthy anymore. Wait until the army indiscriminately opens fire on crowds of people and the government isn't even trying to justify it. And when you hear stories of people just disappearing. Then you will be scared to post comments like this.
I fireproof my house before it catches on fire.
I feel like a big lesson of US politics over the past few years is if you hyperventilate and accuse your opponents of doing some type of drastic shit which they haven't yet done, that backfires by creating political cover and possibly even motivation to do the drastic bad thing. "Do not obey in advance" is a related concept. By helping to make the unthinkable thinkable, you might just be doing a favor for a potential tyrant.
Anyways, HN loves to glaze China, and they have much stiffer speech controls. I think these complaints are motivated more by anti-Trump sentiment than a genuine love for liberty.
"If you ignore everything that's happening the problem will just go away. So easy, I don't have to do anything at all".
>By helping to make the unthinkable thinkable
If I just close my eyes the fire will magically go out by myself.
Have you ever stopped to think that the opposite of what you're thinking may actually be closer to the truth.
This level of control is unnecessary when the population is mentally captive and the chilling effect of police violence prevents any actual action.
By then it's too late
The problem is that I say things like that and folks respond "well, what do you mean". But of course, by your standards you -also- don't know what folks in general are complaining about because you don't pay attention.
If you've been paying attention to radical politics in the US, you will know that the state has been consistently infiltrating and destroying groups of folks who are legally organizing since the 19th C labor movements. You'd consider the genocide of indigenous folks, the assassination of Fred Hampton, the MOVE bombings and understand that the US does all the same repressive work, but the citizens in the US think that is a "good" thing.
Most of the East side of the Wall was like that, it's just less known.
Btw I've lived in one of those regimes. Yes people often privately expressed their stark opinions against the system, sometimes in more vague forms also publicly. There is infinite amount of gray between those 2 extremes, and US is already somewhere there moving darker a bit each day.
Er. No? Start worrying before it is not a headline anymore. If you wait to worry (and take action) at the point you propose, it's become too late to do anything about it.
It's sad that this seems to be a prevalent attitude. "It hasn't gotten unbearable yet so there's no reason to take action now." Ideally we'd be pushing back on these things long long long before they're even a remote possibility.
We still have roving packs of ICE people abducting people across the country with almost no accountability. We're not far from "the army indiscriminately opens fire on crowds of people". I like to believe that if ICE were to go even farther and do something like this that it would trigger a mass pushback/reaction, but TBH I don't feel entirely confident that it would.
"Either because the media are suppressed" -- we're seeing media suppression now, from two angles: the head of the FCC is literally trying to intimidate media outlets regularly, the most recent (that I'm aware of) being telling media outlets not to run polls that show how unpopular Trump is. The other angle is allowing the buy-up/consolidation of media by right-wing oligarchs who then start tampering with news coverage.
Another important concept is the Dual State; there will always be some people who remain within the Normative State even as it shrinks and shrinks, and while the horrors of the Prerogative State become more and more extreme.
classic American cope
and this round, everyone without birth naturalization is being investigated for removal based on their speech, when it doesn’t match the state opinion
Your argument is that if a word gets used more it dilutes the word? That's not how language works.
[0]https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/clyedgnyn4mo
... and then shot him dead. I recommend an alternative source than the Daily Mail, it's a sensationalist rag.
say it with me:
In the USA, government agents are not allowed to kill people for protesting. they're not allowed to kill people for being a mouthy lesbian. they're not allowed to kill people for provoking them, insulting them, or making them mad.
I know that idiots will argue that "attacking a government building with explosives and committing attempted murder" is "technically correct", but it is stupidity to not understand that it leaves out important nuances.
But instead a few of them had guns, and one of them decided to get into a shoot-off with the police.
You are unequivocally fucked if you have any degree of association with those people doing shit like that on federal property.
(the bodycams and security footage for this event are on youtube)
One of them had a gun, which the US decided was ok for someone to carry in public.
> You are unequivocally fucked if you have any degree of association with those people
Guilt by association is it?
And please don't forget the attempted murder that the leader really did carry out with a firearm.
In fact, let's use your argument. People drown accidentally in swimming pools regularly. So then if some "protester" decided to set up one of those portable pools and forcibly hold people down under water in one, wouldn't they be guilty of attempted murder?
Using things that are known to cause death and serious harm in a way that is intended to cause death and serious harm is in fact the thing I'm against.
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/10/27/podcasts/the-daily/antifa...
tldr, the govt (not the court) decides whether it is terrorism or not, which elevates misdemeanor into decades long felony conviction.
The J6 crowd was not charged with terrorism.
Unless of course your guy ends up in power again and offers you pardons and reparations.
The government's case explicitly tried to throw the book at all involved (including 30 years for someone not even at the protest; for moving a box of anti-fascist literature) in line with new executive direction including NSPM-7[1][2].
The BBC article you linked takes many of the procecutor's statements at face value. Looking into this case more may illuminate how wide this survailance and punnishment net will be cast against the administration's political enemies.
[1]https://theintercept.com/2026/06/23/prairieland-texas-ice-pr... [2]https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/09/coun...
If you are too lazy for that, just read the Brooks Brothers Riot wiki page and square that with your recollection of Jan 6.
And: which country has the highest incarceration rate in the world?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_incarcera...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incarceration_in_the_United_St...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_incarceration_ra...
> [El Salvador (16.5/Mln), Cuba (8/Mln), Rwanda (6/Mln), Turkmenistan (5.5/Mln), United States (5.5/Mln)]
And the other protesters had huge, unjust sentences applied to them for protesting.
Or the lack of one for a bunch of feds pinning a man to the ground and executing him. And then scattering like fucking roaches after they do so.
But you know all this. Why are you carrying water for it?
I'm pretty sure that 5 minutes before the incident, everyone involved would agree this was not a life-threatening situation. The only reason there was a death was due to huge failure of ICE.
It's so easy to take any incident where a cop shoot a citizen and says "well, cops have guns, so the onus is on the citizen to be extra careful around cops".
This is the wrong framing. This was a premeditated (first degree) murder. The killer, Jonathan Ross, had previously tried cowboy heroics with a moving vehicle and had ended up being dragged a few hundred feet - surely a traumatic experience. In the run-up to the murder of Renee Good, he went out of his way to approach her vehicle using the positioning of his own body to box it in - in direct violation of written ICE policies of how to interact with motor vehicles (for obvious reasons).
The reasonable inference is that this was setting up a pretext to use his gun if the vehicle started to move, while leaving enough room to jump out of the way - so as to be able to attack a driver who might disobey him, while not ending up getting dragged again. And when Good started to reverse the vehicle, he acted according to that plan.
The involvement of ICE itself is that they are protecting this violent criminal from seeing justice. Not merely as an immediate reaction of waiting until the dust settles, but as long term policy. This indicates the organization itself is a criminal conspiracy, rather than an institution of civil society governed by the rule of law. Of course this is merely one among many other such indications.
What is a baseless "narrative" is your repeated implication that it's somehow within the scope of law enforcement officers - in a civil society governed by the rule of law - to summarily execute people for disobeying them.
As if asserting "I am just right" isn't being righteous...
It seems like you're trying to hang some moral authority on what is, even after having spent most of your time on what ought. But what ought - an abstract model of ideals - is exactly what defines us as thinking beings above the level of animals. Twisting your estimation of what ought based on what [presently] is drags us down to that lower level.
As for what is? That is easy! It's always easy, which is why it's so fucking appealing. Would I have started moving my car after I was being assaulted by ICE agents? Probably not. Would I have engaged in the type of protest she did now that I have a kid? Fuck no. There are plenty of things Renee Good could have done differently to avoid being murdered that day! And I'm sure if she could have gone back and changed her actions after seeing the consequences they ended up having, she would have.
But still, none of this has any bearing on what ought to be in a society based around individual liberty and a government subservient to the People! And what ought to be, what we should be aiming for if we want to have a just society, is that murderers end up behind bars regardless if they happen to be employed by the government.
I am not familiar with the case under discussion, but surely there is no legitimate advancing that one should be tame in front of danger (as in "bending as they are armed").
In other words, to disambiguate: an example about prudence proportionate to danger cannot be simply exported to social life.
Hmm. I see.
My personal recommendation is that you at least few videos before commenting then. It may make you reconsider your support of this particular 'cause'.
And again, your argument is illogical: you can say exactly the same about the ICE agent (they did not acted carefully enough). Why is the victim guilty of not have considered the aggressor as unhinged, and the aggressor not guilty of avoiding the situation that they use to justify their behavior.
Because the 'aggressor' is not aggressor, but a governmental employee mandated to be violent when necessary AND we do have a verb ( and corresponding crime ) for people who choose to stand in the way of such an employee: obstruction of justice ( edit: replaced duty -- other thread was on my mind ).
Your whole world is mildly warped, because you think you can simply apply victim/perpetrator filter to make the whole concept somehow flip. But reality does not work that way.
You were saying that the onus is on her for putting herself in a situation where she should expect to be shoot. But by your own admission, even if we accept that what she has done properly constitute obstruction of duty (which I doubt is the case, and at best is highly arguable) she was putting herself in a situation where she should never be in any real danger.
But again, you did not answer: she was at the wrong time at the wrong place, she did not go out of her way to be in this situation. Pretending that she "looked for it" is just twisting the facts.
> Your whole world is mildly warped, because you think you can simply apply victim/perpetrator filter to make the whole concept somehow flip. But reality does not work that way.
No, your "whole concept" is just highly subjective. You decided that "the onus is on her" because you decided that when she has responsibility over the fact that the ICE agent was unhinged, while the ICE agent had zero responsibility on the fact that she might be unhinged.
Ok. I think we got to stop for one simple reason. You have no idea what you are talking about.
Just a short overview for you and the -- apparent -- audience:
While it is possible for obstruction to be small enough that it will not matter, it can easily move to felony with actual punishment also highly dependent on specifics of a given case. Therefore, your assertion is, at best, your opinion.
That said, my point stands. Had she not been in US illegally none of this would have transpired including this ridiculous conversation.
When it involves weapons, evidence tampering or higher crime, which is clearly not the case here.
> Had she not been in US illegally none of this would have transpired including this ridiculous conversation.
What are you talking about? Who was illegally in US? I thought we were talking about Renee Good, who was a US citizen, was never a migrant (even legal), and dropped her son 7 minutes ago and was on her way home.
> at least few videos
Sure, but I objected to the general principle: prudence has a limit - the value of one's life has limits. Justice comes before life, Dignity comes before life, etc.
No. Most of the stuff out there. I am already wasting time on HN. I won't also google this stuff for you ( or w/e equivalent you use ).
<< Sure, but I objected to the general principle:
That is reasonable objection, but absolutely not how actual cases work. Minute details matter in how they contribute to a given defense. And it seems you know this.
<< the value of one's life has limits
Sadly, it seems in US it is even quantified.
<< Justice comes before life,
Justice. I hate to go all HS on you, but.. what does justice mean to you.
But second, your example is moving the goal post. You started by saying "the onus on her". Then you say "when I'm next to my family member that has a gun, I'm almost automatically more careful". But the onus is on your family member. Are you seriously saying that if your family member would shoot you, you will agree that the main responsibility is on you?
And where do you put the bar? Does it mean that if I carry a gun, people should be extra careful next to me and please all of my requests, because it is "on them" if somehow I get angry and shoot them?
This line of reasoning is just so bad. It is "unfalsifiable": you can use this argument anyway you want to blame any people in the situation. Why did you not say "well, the ICE agent should have known that this woman may be dangerous, so he should not have acted in a way that led to increased tension, the onus is on him". And if the ICE agent would have been the victim, would you have said "the onus is on him" for not having been more careful?
I am, admittedly, a simple man. I do not put myself in dangerous situations unnecessarily or, at least, go out of my way to avoid them. Blame may be shared, but it really is on me to assess a risk of any given moment. I admit that it must be nice thinking everyone else is responsible for me. However, that is simply not true.
<< you can use this argument anyway you want to blame any people in the situation.
You make me sound smarter than I am, but, really, you are just misunderstanding the argument ( not sure if on purpose or not ).
<< The main point is that she did not put herself voluntary in a dangerous situation.
You know what. I am all ears. I may simply be wrong. Present your evidence of the case as you see it.
Which is quite a move from "the onus is on you".
> but it really is on me to assess a risk of any given moment
Yes. And the situation we are talking about should clearly not be a situation that should be assessed as "life threatening". By your own admission, she put herself in a minor offense, not something that should be life-threatening. And the fact that the ICE agents carried guns does not justify that one should consider that any interaction with them means that they are putting themselves in life threatening situation.
> I admit that it must be nice thinking everyone else is responsible for me
Well, you are litterally the one here saying that the ICE agent should think everyone else is responsible for them.
No one else does that. I fully agree that people share some responsibilities in the situation they put themselves into. Where we disagree is when you are saying "the onus is on her". No, the onus is not on her: she put herself in a situation that should NOT be something that should be assessed as overly dangerous.
> You make me sound smarter than I am, but, really, you are just misunderstanding the argument ( not sure if on purpose or not ).
Your argument makes no sense at all. Your argument was also quite downvoted. Surely not because of a woke conspiracy, probably more because indeed your argument makes no sense. Maybe you should consider that maybe it is the case?
> You know what. I am all ears. I may simply be wrong. Present your evidence of the case as you see it.
I asked you first. My FIRST COMMENT: "What do you mean? For what I know, she was at the wrong place at the wrong time, did not do anything voluntarily illegal, and was in a situation where everyone should agree would never have had to degenerate into a life-threatening situation."
You never answered.
If you want the discussion to progress, first provide your answer first. I asked you three time to answer on this point.
edit: in another comment, YOU say: """ << can you give information about the case? (Which "videos"?)
No. Most of the stuff out there. I am already wasting time on HN. I won't also google this stuff for you ( or w/e equivalent you use ). """
You are so full of it. Someone says "present your evidence" when you explicitly said there are videos and you refuse, and here, you are asking exactly "present your evidence".
Before I present my evidence, apply to yourself what you put to others, just strong-man the discussion and try yourself to find element that support my way of seeing the situation.
Friend. I don't care what you downvote. I have seen what you vote for. In a sense, I don't even have a need to convince you here. Life will go on with or without this argument proceeding. Allow me to demonstrate.
End of communication.
I also don't care about convincing you. Simply, it is nice that when someone says something totally stupid, other people stops the non-sense to be spread.
And indeed, conveniently for you as you were unable to provide basic evidence of your claim, end of communication.
At first level this seems simplistic. Then, it seems inconsistent with «happily dropping them for school» - can somebody explain...
Edit: and the "simplistic" perspective is outside the gross understatement of "«should not have been there» hence «only to be shot»"... Which again makes no sense without all the relevant information (hopefully).
Edit: maybe the poster could elaborate on which details exactly he believes justified the events.
today i learned everyone is supposed to be a docile sheep, just put your head down and keep on plowing the fields
Friend, we are trying to be nice about it and move within the contours of the lines drawn. Surely, that is preferable to people just doing whatever they want?
There is law to be enforced. There is mandate to be carried out. Do you have problem with either or both?
I hope you wont have to hear this when the gestapo is at your door because that's how they get into power, people like you just saying we need to follow the law when people get executed by trigger happy <law> enforcement
>Ha! Fuck around and find out!
right?
But even still, stop fucking victim blaming.
First, she was a willing participant and apparently was explicitly targeting ICE agents and blocking their cars.
Second, what she is is a useful victim; as in, useful to people like you who use her death as a prop.
Edit: to expand on this - if you think interacting with an ICE agent(even if that interaction is blocking their way with your car) is "gambling" then I'm afraid you've accepted that you live in judge dredd society - where agents can execute someone on the street and face no repercussions. After all, they are defending the law, and Renee Good was a criminal for blocking them, right? You know what would happen in a normal country? She would be arrested. The coward of an officer pulled out his gun and fired at the vehicle driving away. I wonder if he'd have the balls to explain to her kid why mummy isn't coming home. I wonder if you'd tell her child that mummy isn't coming home because she "gambled". I'm disgusted by your comment.
The First Amendment was written by people who experienced this same chilling of free speech.
If you're using your 2a rights to fight against the government (tyrannical or not), it does not free you from facing the consequences if you don't "win", or prevent the government from fighting back (in self defense, or otherwise).
It's an incredibly serious thing to say "the government is so tyrannical that we need to use violence to overthrow it" (see: history).
Why do you need to protest at the slightest sign of the government becoming authoritarian when you have "the ultimate argument of force" on your side?
But it's an illusion. Guns are a nice hobby I enjoy as well. They are great for self defence, but good luck to you if you think you'll use it "against government tyranny"... You'll be dead and no one will care.
2nd amendment makes an ultimate duty of a citizen in a democratic country - to not allow it to turn into a tyranny, into "you don't need to worry about politics, worse case scenario you have your AR15 and a box of ammo".
While in a country without such false ideas people get out and protest in mass numbers.
I don't think I've ever heard of a proper protest happening in USA. The kind of protest that involves 10% of adults at least and happens in every city and town. (Also I'm not talking about rioting like in France)
Burning down a school to protest against class overcrowding is like something straight from idiocracy.
Peaceful protests work on governments, even those hell bent on authoritarianism, but they have to be massive.
Let's say you have a million or two of people show up in Washington. Will it make any difference? Nope. Why? Because it's under half a percent of US population.
Let's now say 10% of people in every city and town go to their town centre and protest. Does this make a difference? Yes it does, because it shows real power to everyone.
I would make two points here.
1. ICE is breaking the law in many, many different ways. It is not legal to murder multiple US citizens like Alex Pretti and Renee Good. The conditions of their internment camps (I will use the euphemism as I suspect you would not like the more accurate term) are not legal. And many, many other issues, please see:
https://www.aclu.org/news/immigrants-rights/we-documented-12...
https://www.americanimmigrationcouncil.org/fact-sheet/ice-cb...
https://www.brookings.edu/articles/the-administration-has-de...
https://www.reuters.com/legal/government/courts-have-ruled-4...
By your legalist moral standards, is this not also "black and white"? Do people not have a right or duty to protest it?
2. What is legal is not always what is morally right. The comments you are making mirror those in past "legal" civil rights violations at scale. The same arguments were made against the civil rights movement in the 60s, anti apartheid movement, and pretty much every civil rights movement. The answer in all of those cases is the same: what is legal does not determine what is morally right, and we have a civic duty to nonviolent protest when the two conflict. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lawrence_Kohlberg%27s_stages_o...
This antecedent is false, so we don’t even need to read the consequent.
If their job is arresting people in the country illegaly, any other matter of public safety should be handled by the correct institution at local or federal police level. Hint, its not ICE.
It did not happened. What happened was police committing crimes and people making videos of it.
> If paramedics help casualties, and people impede the paramedics helping casualties
It did not happened. However, police and ICE did in fact intentionally impede the paramedics helping casualties on multiple occasions.
Following you so far
> and they do that,
Yeah, that's where you fucked up. That's not what ICE is doing that everyone is upset about. It's the locking up, deporting, and killing of people who are here legally, they just happen to be brown.
Put them back under the DoJ and have the FBI handle criminals, not ICE. Bring back the INS.
* Misspelled initially
Is that true, though? I don't expect that the individual biases of officers or judges, or the institutional biases of the police or immigration departments, can switch at a moment's notice.
These aren't universally positive attributes I'm not necessarily praising them. But militaries have come down into a very broad spectrum of positions around specific coups, revolutions, insurrections etc including abetting or openly joining them, both pro- and anti-democratic.
This is also why the second trump term has been so focused on officer purges! You definitely want the military to come down on your side and making sure all of its leadership is on your side is a reliable step if you can take it.
Americans should absolutely imo not be looking for their military to help them with the problems they're facing. But depending on the exact arrangement, people in other countries may have good reason to hope for that.
That’s not to say we shouldn’t have armed officers (or not have a capitalist society), we just shouldn’t allow rhetoric to convince us of some false ideal. The 3rd and 4th amendment have a spirit that should be much more embraced and expanded at the expense of law enforcement’s ability to do their “job”.
Heck, historically the cops have even broken up peaceful union protests, despite being in unions themselves, throwing away all class solidarity in favor of their right wing leanings.
And the police unions have uniquely been extremely right wing, other than during rare highly localized conditions (often involving the democratic candidate being center right at least).
No, I’m not doing that. I’m not even American. But I know that giving someone a weapon means they can eventually try to use it against you.
So the way you treat that is by calling out and resisting the attempts to weaponize the government in new ways, not just throwing up your hands because it was "eventually" going to be used anyway. No, it's bad. You should say that it's bad and take action to oppose it.
If you have deeply unpopular policies but only 1/3rd of the country is expected to vote, telling everyone their vote won't matter is the best stance to take.
Or, more appropriately, on an election's notice.
A plurality of voters preferred to have leaders of a certain political persuasion.
Now, we can complain about the fine print in the platform of those leaders, but..
I mean..
democracy is a team sport. We voted them in.
It's like football:
Yes.
That's an awesome DB. Guy got 2 interceptions and 4 TFLs in that game. I'd love to get that safety for my team.
All that said, his offense didn't score. So guess what? He gets to take an "L" too. That's just how it works.
That depends entirely on the degree to which those in power will respect the results of an election.
We know the drill, a suspicious vehicle follows you until, we assume, check your profile after they look your plates, then they suddenly stop showing interesting in being close.
Nice surveillance state we got guys!
If that was true, that is why.
Now in reality, that was not true, they stood with nazi cause they themselves are nazi who want to bully others.
I can gauge how much of an authoritarian you are with one simple question, is it immoral to privately own the means of production?
the 2nd amendment (the entire Bill of Rights) was written to protect us from our own government, but it’s way more convenient to just shoot brown people or people who speak a different language.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mulford_Act
Just to add color to your comment. These folks were directly exercising 2nd amendment rights against oppressive state forces and that Act was the response to them exercising it.
The leftist gun community is mostly focused on arming the LGBTQ community at the moment though. Your chances of getting canoed while trying to stab a trans woman are way up over the past couple years.
This paper is heavily rejected by mainstream criminologists. It relies on victim memorial lists for a count of victims and it relies on a database made by an anti-Trans group for the perpetrator count. This leads to both a significant undercount of victims and overcount of perpetrators.
The ONS has come out against it and said that official homicide data does not track transgender status so there is no official data to back this research up on.
None of this has stopped rightwingers from heavily circulating this paper of course. Somehow I doubt science is the goal here.
Some people view the actions of ICE, like in this article, to be crossing a line that would normally provoke a response from second amendment types.
It wasn’t self defense, it wasn’t for recreational fun, it is to provide a physical check on government overreach. Therefore it’s sensible to discuss it during times of government overreach.
(disclaimer: this is not my opinion I'm just explaining their logic)
it might listen, and turn...
Although this default expectation is pessimistic (and some countries might not be nearly that harsh), I don't think it's wildly inaccurate. What I don't understand is why it's common for intelligent people (seemingly only in the US) to consider violations of visa/immigration conditions acceptable and ICE bad guys for enforcing the law?
People have died in our detention centers due to unsanitary conditions.
They arrested a five year old and sent him to one of these detention centers without his parents.
They’ve murdered multiple peaceful protestors in the street.
I favor responsible immigration enforcement. This is not that.
To play devil's advocate for the heavy handedness and harsh detentions, Australia had a problem with 'boat people' in the 2000's, and subsequently built a massive detention centre on a island, meaning those intercepted never made mainland. The heat was oppressive, processing times were usually measured in years, and illegal arrivals were mostly sent back to where they came from.
But.. the illegal arrivals basically entirely stopped. So although it was harsh (including on a lot of legitimate refugees), it did force entry via legal channels (of which Australia has historically had many).
That said, a lot of US's immigration problems has been neglect to enforce immigration law, deliberate sabotaging of legislation throughout the years, and multiple broad amnesty decrees that basically broke the system. The system is broken by design and almost tailor-made to foment anti-immigrant sentiment that has sparked this new, ugly phase driven by unaccountable maniacs.
The other issue is intent.
I support reasonable immigration enforcement for practical reasons like added strain on public facilities like social programs. That’s rational.
Our 2024 Trump-aligned candidates ran on more of a xenophobia-centric platform. Xenophobia is irrational and unpredictable reasoning for immigration enforcement.
Unapologetically, then tried to frame each of these people as radicals who deserved it. And there is no investigation, no punishment, no accountability.
It is the utter shamelessness and craven dodging of responsibility that is criminal.
And the American media and American populace do not hold their feet to the fire.
There is no line they won't eventually cross, and the slide into the abyss is accelerating.
But even never minding that, you could say a lot of things : The U.S.A is a country literally built by immigrants. The native-american are a minority in their own land. So is it surprising that a lot of people in an immigrant country support immigrant ? Then, there is the dirty economic secret that illegal immigration fill the low-wages jobs that citizen don't have to lower themselves too. A lot of ties, rule of law, etc. Of all country, it is weird that the U.S is turning anti-immigration.
> Also, what makes refugees specifically the US's responsibility? E.g. verifying, processing and integrating refugees puts strain on domestic systems, and strain scales with volume.
I think nobody said it's the U.S responsibility, in spirit. Factually it is by the fact that they have to handle it and international laws. But that is why country sometimes collaborate on those issues. The U.S and Mexico do collaborate on immigration issue. Mexico do stop a lot of south american immigrant from reaching the U.S border. But the border is huge. There is also other ways to get in, legally or illegally. You can't possibly stop everything. And it is the burden you get when you are a rich country. The U.S is not the only one. And mind you, the U.S and Western European country have benefitted a lot from exploiting the people and resources in poor country and pushing allied authoritarian regime there. Immigration is but a small cost they pay for what they did, and got.
Also, any of this can happen to you even if you're a lawful citizen.
The situation in the USA is dire and it's going to get, much, much worse.
This is downstream of the fact that the US government just doesn't work well. Problems fester, and are unsolved. Immigration policy hasn't made sense for longer than I've been alive (and I'm 40+).
Imagine that you find that the water supply in your town was built illegally, because the former mayors prohibited the building that was necessary. You may think that is a travesty, you may want to enforce the law strictly in the future, and force the issue, rather than working around it. But what you will not do is tear up the water system and leave the city without water.
This seems relevant. In other policy areas (unrelated to immigration), there's the concept of gradual change, or a 'glide path'. For example, when raising prices on things like licences or levies, sometimes governments do it gradually over a number of years. Another example: when something is banned, the ban is not enforced immediately but intermediate steps are taken to ensure the public can adjust. By contrast, the transition from immigration rules being unenforced to enforced seems to have been sudden.
You should look up the two guys who viciously attacked armed police officers in Manchester Airport in the UK, all on video. Incredibly they were out almost immediately, police officers were up for firing and the trial dragged out for months ending in a pretty lenient sentence. In that case the new UK "two tier" justice kicked in where thanks to crazy far-left thinking, there is now consideration of race in whether something was illegal and what the punishment should be.
Without a doubt this direction will be the downfall of the west. Which is probably the idea from those financing all this "grass roots" protesting and law breaking.
Detention in particular is a violation of human rights, with an exception to strictly for the time it takes for the next flight to take off.
Today being anti-h1b is deemed racist although no other than Bernie Sanders was outspoken against it for decades until very recently. Never mind.
Never mind that some people deemed anti Covid measures racist (ie hugged people in Chinatown for PR stunts, or licking handles in public transit for online clout) and unscientific (masks are bad) until Trump did a 180 (ie. masks are mandatory now). Or how many ppl said they would never have the „trump-vax“ injected and yet after Trump lost the election 2019 were gluttonous about the restrictions to be implemented against the unvaxxed.
Also, in normal countries, if you break the law, arbitrary abuse is still not the expected behavior of the police.
That's sometimes reasonable - e.g. the apocryphal loaf of bread being stolen to feed a starving family. But it's not a universal defence. And not all illegals are poor in the first place.
If you make it illegal to sleep on the street at night (by extension, sleeping anywhere that isn’t a legal residence), you are de facto making it illegal to be homeless.
That a law applies to everyone is not a “universal defence” in its fairness.
But your problem seems to be a combination of the wealthy having an easier time accessing the US (agree, but many countries have purchasable visas), and poor illegal immigrants having no other option (partially agree, but not all illegal immigrants are poor, and many who are do have alternative places they could go legally).
Your point is that immigration laws don't sufficiently take into account an illegal migrant's economic status (i.e. make reasonable accommodations for those in poverty or desperate circumstances), which is a totally fair perspective.
But that doesn't affect OP's initial question/observation, since countries other than the US also apply their rules uniformly, which disproportionately affects the poor.
As for why ICE are the bad guys, well that’s a completely different question. The way they enforce laws is thug-like and have resulted in multiple innocent deaths. Regardless of if it is ICE or a normal police department if enforcing laws causes death you bet there will be a large pushback.
Russ Feingold was the only Senator to vote against the Patriot act. I really do think about that a lot.
If everyone else is voting for some necessary evil, it frees me up to vote against it while still wanting it.
In the US we claim we want freedom, privacy, and all that good stuff. But where the rubber meets the road, it becomes pretty clear that we don't.
Sorry, but the German far right party that just won their first state governmental majority vote has the highest share of former Stasi officials in their ranks.
So basically - being ex-stasi is nothing to be ashamed of anymore in some parts of Germany.
As a centrist my observation is that that left crossed it first, believing that they were doing it for a just cause. Unfortunately that broke the contract and now we are seeing both sides trying to grab power by any means necessary. Until both sides de-escalate, this will continue.
Just like war, many innocent people will pay the price as collateral damage until a truce can be negotiated.
Just that line alone makes me think you're far less centrist than you claim to be.
Go farther back and we have Hoover building kompromat on basically everyone, farther still you get McCarthy anti-Left. I don't think there's an era without any kind of corruption or abuse of power. It's romantic to think there was ever restraint, and like believing so seems to depend on starting the clock at an aribitrary historical point.
Not saying I agree but if I had to guess…
The two problems of surveillance are misuse by government for political reasons in opposition to constitutional rights and misuse of surveillance by non-government agents who are not held to the same high ethical standards/limitations. These two concerns of misuse will continue their malicious growth until they are challenged regardless of the increases to surveillance technology.
The very big problem I have here is that ICE is not the agency that should be doing this sort of surveillance. Their role is immigration control, not leftist or citizen control. If they suspect there's some dangerous criminal problem going on, then that's the role of the FBI to investigate.
The specific reason they are doing this is because ICE doesn't use traditional courts for most of their actions. As such, they are fairly unaccountable.
ICE also isn't even technically criminal law enforcement, they are civil law enforcers. They are supposed to involve local law enforcement or federal law enforcement when going after criminals. Their roles are, instead, to dish out tickets. The fact that they've been militarized is a major problem. CBP is the only agency under the DHS that is supposed to have any sort of military equipment and general detention powers and those are only supposed to be exerted at a border.
That world can't exist. Mass surveillance IS power, and power corrupts. Any situation where the use of surveillance is reasonable is a temporary transitory state, the final end is always the same - repressions and authoritarianism. The technology is a siren song, it's too attractive for bad actors so they will try to get it in somehow. And once your system of checks and balances springs a leak somewhere, it sets in motion its eventual undoing, because there's almost no stopping it once it's relied upon somewhere.
Society and its laws have been built around the central idea of selective enforcement. We have all manor of laws on the books that are created with the assumption that they cannot or will not be enforced perfectly.
The spy powers of our governments have always been assumed to be limited - that if they choose to invasively track a person, it would take limited human resources and that would naturally limit their capacity (in theory) to those who the government truly deems a concern.
Omnipresent surveillance that can record and analyze and correlate every citizen's movements and behavior at all times is inherently totalitarian and anti-freedom. It is a power the government should not be allowed to have, period.
The forth amendment is not modified merely because the technology evolves. This is the kind of thing defense lawyers look for. To permit evolving technology to be used as evidence in violation of privacy generally requires new law.
My point is that government cannot be trusted to have this kind of power because it will at some point be turned against the population when dissent threatens the people holding power; it is inevitable. The least we should do is make laws strictly controlling access and purpose of access to such tools for criminal investigations, but I don't think that's enough to stop abuse and civil oppression.
The actual restrictions were quite reasonable in the vast majority of cases, weren't in place very long, and were only spottily enforced.
Sorry you missed a couple nights at Applebees.
One person has appointed every single judge to the current US FISA Courts (whose jurisdiction includes domestic surveillance rubberstamping).
You can thank the concessions of Bush v. Gore (2000) for giving this executive-level privilege to the hoNoRAblE [SCOTUS Chief] Judge Roberts.
In 2026, this orchestrated puppetteering probably doesn't even matter anymore..?
Obstructing law enforcement is a crime even if you don't like law enforcement. I think it's a stretch to go from "Minnesota 15 investigated" to "ICE is a private police force used to suppress dissent". Also, there's no mention of the ~10 million people who entered illegally under Biden. Is it democratic to have open borders? I get the sense this writer believes deporting people is anti-democratic.
The indictment itself makes no specific mention of violence as far as I know because there was no actual violence committed. It's staggering that people are getting set multi-million-dollar bonds for what is essentially civil disobedience.
"Also, there's no mention of the ~10 million people who entered illegally under Biden. Is it democratic to have open borders? I get the sense this writer believes deporting people is opposed to democracy."
A few things to unpack with this statement. 10 million people never entered illegally, that number is derived from DHS reporting of 10 million encounters which includes people who are arrested, denied entry or removed. Also, that doesn't cover the fact that this was a recognized issue by Democrats hence why the party had the bipartisan border bill that was killed by Trump because he wanted the border as a political issue for the upcoming election.
The bipartisan bill would've still allowed in thousands of people per day. Some people don't want that. It wasn't even proposed until 2024. By then people might not have trusted the admin.
Are we now doing “guilty until proven innocent?”
> there's no mention of the ~10 million people who entered illegally under Biden. Is it democratic to have open borders?
Where is that figure sourced from? Are the borders still open?
You’re ignoring the bipartisan bill that would have increased border security in 2024, but Republican politicians shot down for political purposes to help Trump in the election. What did that bi-partisan solution get wrong that you would have done differently?
I get the sense this writer believes Immigration Enforcement Officers deporting and tracking legal American citizens is anti-democratic.
They're not even trying to pretend to not be evil.
1. Threatened me and my family for having the wrong political opinion up to and including calling the house phone and threatening to shoot and rape(!) us.
2. Claimed that my relatives who ended up in the Soviet Gulag must have deserved it, because imprisonment by default implies guilt.
3. Happily implemented surveillance networks on everybody "for their own good" when they were anywhere near power.
4. Have repeatedly told me that I am a stupid immigrant and that I should do exactly as I say because I'm too stupid to understand things for myself.
5. Have simultaneously held the positions that all of the above was "justified trolling/just joshing man" and "words are violence" depending on when it suited them.
Behold, the field in which I grow my fucks. Lay thine eyes upon it and see that it is barren.
Read The Nerd Reich.
The difference is Nixon had real domestic enemies to worry about: The Weather Underground were bombing buildings, heiress Patty Hearst was kidnapped by the "Symbionese Liberation Army", the Black Panthers were making demands which conservative America found frightening, mass protests were going on about the war in Vietnam on college campuses which resulted in the deaths at Kent State. Nixon believed these protests were driven by Chinese and Soviet influence to support North Vietnam in the war. The CIA’s Operation CHAOS spent years looking for foreign control of the antiwar movement and reported back that there wasn’t any.
What domestic enemies does Trump have? Antifa is a philosophy, not an organization. Black Lives Matter protests were his last administration. There have been a few lone wolf attacks like the Dallas ICE sniper, but the domestic threat is no here near what Nixon faced.
Under the Trump's White House directive NSPM-7, which defines a potential domestic terrorist as anyone expressing “anti-Christian, anti-capitalist, or anti-American” views, DHS launched an operation to find a “network of conspirators” against ICE.
The surveillance op in the Wired article targeted labor unions, a climate change group and socialist collectives — the SEIU had three years of wire transfers investigated, and the AFL-CIO, DSA and Showing Up for Racial Justice were also investigated. That’s the mismatch: a 1970s-scale dragnet for a threat that isn’t 1970s-scale.
Trump appears to be grabbing power for the sake of grabbing power.
yeah - he's shaken u.s institutional protections to their core. but lucky they keep standing. maybe he or someone else will finally make a break through - but most likely it won't be trump due to his incompetency and him surrounding himself with 'yes' incompetent people.
Either the institutional protections are strengthened after 2028 (presuming the Democrats win the presidency) and before 2030 (presuming the Democrats lose a bunch of seats in Congress in the midterms), or the next try (whenever it comes) is likely to break the institutional protections and result in authoritarian rule over the US.
When they are arresting news anchors for reporting on ICE's activities, it should be obvious that Trump and his administration is fascist-curious.
I would not call it "Anti-Left" though. Fascism should never be confused with having an agenda other than fascism itself, be it Trump's corporate fascism or Putin's neo-Stalinism. All pocket away wealth and power to their cronies.
you are centrist and have a good point to complain about not liked by them, sorry you are now left
you are conservative right, but have very different views about separation of religion and state, sorry that is woke you are now left, too
you care bout civil right of all US citizens and especially want to better protect workers against abuse, oh dang I fear that is "left extremist" maybe even "domestic terrorist"
/s
If you want to change things then vote to change it, don't attack the people doing the work that just makes things worse. These "protests" are on the same level as the people threatening and blocking abortion centers, don't do that it just makes you a menace even if you believe it is a good cause.
Reaching really hard to try to both-sides the narrative.
Back when it was just nerds on the internet, and powerfull people with agenda's had not infiltrated everything
It's a thankless thing, but we need more people who are willing to just do it. Now I know some of you will point out that Kim Dotcom was hosting movies, shows, music, etc. That's not my point, look at HOW they took him down, and WHEN. They were trying to pass SOPA, claiming it would help them take down people like Kim Dotcom "because they couldn't" so what they did to Kim Dotcom was questionable from a legal perspective...
Sigh. I really do miss the internet before the 2nd and 3rd waves of "Eternal September" (Facebook then Smartphones) it was much nicer.
<https://www.little-gamers.com/2001/12/13/372>
Very apt. These two things did really make the internet a lot worse. I would even add AI as the 4th wave, with all the captchas and slop we now need to deal with :-(