The slide into authoritarianism and fascism is becoming more blatantly obvious every day. It’s legitimately terrifying.
This is "computer says no (not a citizen)". Which is horrifying
They've just created an app to justify what they were already doing right? And the argument will be "well it's a super complex app run by a very clever company so it can't be wrong"?
This was also one of the more advanced theories about the people selection and targeting AI apps used in Gaza. I've only heard one journalist spell it out, because many journalists believe that AI works.
But the dissenter said that they know it does not work and just use it to blame the AI for mistakes.
Accountability literally means "being forced to give an account of your decisions", i.e. explain the reasons behind why you made the choices you did. The idea is that when you have a public forum of people with common values, merely being forced to explain yourself will activate mechanisms of shame, guilt, and conformism that keep people inline. Otherwise you'll face the judgment of your peers.
This mechanism breaks down when your peers don't hold common values. If nobody agrees on what right and wrong are, you just find different peers until somebody thinks that what you're doing is right. Or you just don't care and figure solipsism vs. the status quo is just a matter of degree.
When they decide that someone is in the US illegaly using the app... what happens? Is the person apprehended? Driven straight to the border? Taken into custody while more data about them is gathered?
There's no "custody", these people aren't being afforded the Constitutional, legal, or human rights. This is internment by militarised fascist gangs.
"Officer", ha. These are people given a gun and told to go out and brutalise others. There not performing an office of state, they're far outside the law. All, it seems, to try and force those who support democracy to step out of line so Trump/Vance and their handlers can have more people killed and claim civil war is getting in the way of having elections.
Incidentally, I was reading about the Lincoln County War recently and realized it was a microcosm for all the kinds of corruption that we see on display nationwide today. The rings controlled commerce and any upstarts were facing brutally low chances for success and would be snuffed out if they became a threat.
As long as they can claim that whatever they did to you is part of their official duties (which, again, good luck expecting the current federal government to take your side on this even if the ICE officer clearly oversteps their duties) only the federal government/DOJ can prosecute them for misconduct, which also obviously won't happen under the current administration.
1: https://xcancel.com/ProjectLincoln/status/191249066980685851...
I worry what this app and systems like it might mean for me. I'm a US citizen, but I used to be an LPR. I never naturalized - I got my citizenship automatically by operation of law (INA 320, the child citizenship act). At some point I stopped being noodlesUK (LPR) and magically became noodlesUK (US Citizen), but not through the normal process. Presumably this means that there are entries in USCIS's systems that are orphaned, that likely indicate that I am an LPR who has abandoned their status, or at least been very bad about renewing their green card.
I fear that people in similar situations to my own might have a camera put in their face, some old database record that has no chance of being updated will be returned, and the obvious evidence in front of an officer's eyes, such as a US passport will be ignored. There are probably millions of people in similar situations to me, and millions more with even more complex statuses.
I know people who have multiple citizenships with multiple names, similar to this person: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45531721. Will these hastily deployed systems be able to cope with the complex realities of real people?
EDIT: LPR is lawful permanent resident, i.e., green card holder
The headline plus this quote reveals the real intentions — to create a comprehensive dataset that includes biometric data and can be used however the government wishes, regardless of one’s citizenship. I have no doubt that this data will also be sold to other entities.
I remember reading years ago about how facial recognition was particularly bad at correctly identifying people with darker skin and was generally not great as the sole method of identification. The possibility of a mistaken identity being captured by this app would have life-altering implications with essentially no recourse. This is really disturbing.
Not forgetting Elon's mass data scraping from earlier this year.
That's what happens when you don't have mandatory id system and want to enforce immigration policy -- government just does whatever bullshit sticks and there is no carefully crafted set of safeguards and procedural rules to slap it for doing too much.
> remember reading years ago about how facial recognition was particularly bad at correctly identifying people with darker skin
I would imagine that for current administration it's not a bug, but a feature.
But later it flanderized into, we want to break the rules. The rules are an impediment to goodness, not the guarantor.
Rorschach was the bad guy.
Ice can say what they want. The Constitution is the ultimate law of the land here.
Oh yeah, and facial recognition does not work to anything like this degree of accuracy, and probably never can. Nice try.
It's probably not, but your post almost reads like satire in reference to the tv show by Sacha Baron Cohen with the same name. Living with so many contradictions for so long just leaves one confused and disoriented when it all shatters around you. American exceptionalism means the freedom to poison the well and the freedom to die from drinking poisoned water.
If anything, it seems to be helping the people more than the government. Turns out that if the government decides it doesn't need due-process, it doesn't need to spy on people either.
Meta and Palantir are probably the IBM:s of the current age.
For the record: Apparently they helped the original Nazis. One link of many: https://time.com/archive/6931688/ibm-haunted-by-nazi-era-act...
> IBM, according to Black’s book and the lawsuit, was responsible for punch card technology used by Nazi demographers in the years leading up to World War II — and eventually by the SS, which was charged with rounding up Europe’s Jews. Although it has long been known that IBM’s German arm, which was taken over by the Nazis, had cooperated with the regime — and, indeed, was in a consortium of companies making payments to survivors and victims’ families — Black says that the American parent was fully aware of the use to which the technology was put. And after the Germans surrendered, Black says, IBM’s U.S. office was quick to collect profits made during the war by the subsidiary, called Dehomag.
> The punch cards and counting machines, says Black, were provided to Hitler’s government as early as 1933, and were probably used in the Nazis’ first official census that year. The technology came in handy again in 1939 when the government conducted another census, this time with the explicit goal of identifying and locating German Jews — and finally, Black alleges, in tracking records at Nazi concentration camps.
> It’s this specificity of purpose, says William Seltzer, an expert in demographic statistics at Fordham University, that provides the most damning evidence. “Microsoft is not responsible for every spreadsheet made with Excel,” Seltzer told TIME.com. “But if someone is doing custom designing of a database, they have to know what’s going on. With these punch cards, Dehomag had to design a card for every piece of new information that the government wanted.”
Fake masks are so advanced now, I'm sure the IC has 3d printers that could just arbitrarily map any face to any user. And this insane spoofing capability would give not just the government, but contractors, corrupt police departments, or hackers or rich people that aquire the data.
And that's just the physical realm because to me that's the scariest one, but giving these power manipulators access to likeness for deep fake video is probably sufficient to cause all kind of havock.
There may be some confusion here. It's legal for anyone to take a photo of anyone else in public, with few exceptions. TFA is not saying that ICE is forcing people to stand for a photo, it's saying that once ICE takes a photo, they can do stuff with it.
As an aside, it's my understanding that, unless someone is arrested, they're free to wear whatever clothing they like including something that covers their face. Probable cause is required for arrest, therefore ICE cannot force you to uncover your face. I'm not sure this has been tested much though, especially with folks temporarily detained.
Second aside, I anticipate a ton of lawsuits where folks give clear and convincing evidence of US citizenship and are unlawfully detained thereafter.
You don’t have to look too far on the internet to see that ICE is acting with impunity, and that the regular rules and rights are not being applied.
I have US citizenship + SSN but never lived in the USA. I do have a passport though and visited a few times for vacations.
This is a trust issue.
You can't refuse your transfer to New Eden.
But of course fed-cops were never seriously prowling neighborhoods where the nearest grocery store is a Whole Foods so nobody on HN cared until now.
Border patrol specifically is wildly different, looking for people who are suspected of being subject to their jurisdiction without a specific indictment, detaining with in practice, if not in law, a much lower standard of suspicion than applies usually, and then generally having those detained subject to process that is almost entirely within executive branch “courts” with consequences as severe as criminal process but much lower protections than criminal process (where literal toddlers defend themselves in “court" against government lawyers.)
The current “immigration” crackdown, while ICE (which historically has worked more like a regular federal law enforcement agency despite its detainees often flowing into the executive immigration system and not the criminal justice system) has been the public face of it is effectively applying the Border Patrol culture/approach far more broadly (which is also why, in frustration with the “inadequate” results so far ICE middle leadership is being purged and replaced with Border Patrol personnel.)
The road to hell wasn't paved in a day.
Will ICE get it right? or will she be put into a prison for months with poor conditions, with an administration that does not want lawyers involved, with little ability to be found or call out for help?
This site likes to do the cowardly take of avoiding politics as long as it's advantageous. I'm going to look into these companies that produce this tech, and memorize the company names. If a resume ever passes my desk with a significant time at any of these companies, it's going to be a "no" from me. That's the small bit of power I hold.
Hands on the ground don't read the laws, they only bring people before the person who actually knows them.
So no, ICE goons will do the basic thing -- check how white the person is, if not white enough, ask for documents, if documents are not convincing enough to them, snatch the person and let the more nuanced decisions to be made by those who can read.
Now if the person above them isn't agreeing with interpretation of the law that was used to issue those documents, it's sitting in the jail waiting for a judge time.
Better yet -- whisk her out of the country and then claim that she no longer has standing to sue.
I struggle a lot when I see comments like this. The point is to be a pain. The point is to empower a national police force to subjugate the populace. The people in charge don’t care if it is “ able to cope with the complex realities of real people.”
I don’t understand why people, especially those like you who have complex realities, significantly more complex than me a white man who can trace his lineage to the 1600s in VA, are still giving any benefit of the doubt to these actions.
and where exactly did those white men in 1600s VA come from? right, you're an immigrant, you should be detained. the 1600s detail is just smoke. the only key thing you said was white. everything after that is just fluff for telling the story.
This comes off to me as a more refined "Yes of course, what did you expect you naive person ?" type of comment you often find online (somewhat common among radical leftists)
Maybe commenter agrees with you that the point is to empower a national police to subjugate the populace (This opinion does not raise any of my eyebrows) but do you think this is going to reach people who don't already think that ? To put any doubt in their minds ? I understand the anger the current situation is causing and I am guilty of breaking the hn guidelines a few times myself but I am also convinced of the need to actually explain what you think are the actual problems from the ground up rather than just casting your own conclusions onto people, no matter how obvious they seem to you
So I did think they did a good job with their comment
Otherwise, you have a 'king' issuing general warrants which allow federal agents to search and seize anyone they want in the course of their investigations based on 'feels'. What makes it even worse is some court said racial profiling is sufficient reason to conduct a Terry stop to determine if the person is engaged in (civil) criminal activity and lets law enforcement demand they show their papers or be scanned by some dodgy app.
An ICE officer can't just detain somebody for having an accent or whatever, but if they have probable cause to think the person may not be a citizen then they have a substantial amount of leverage to affirm that. Probable cause has been tested somewhat rigorously in the courts and really means probable cause and not the knee-jerk obvious abuses like 'he's brown!'
Seems to the rest of world that this is very much what America is now.
Meanwhile last week I was in LA for a family thing and caught some TV ads playing there. That dog-killing gnome woman was on TV saying something like "We will hunt you down and deport you, there is no hiding, leave now". Initially I thought I was watching some comedy skit, but no it was an official US government advert.
Whether I'm in Montana or in LA vastly changes my perception of what's considered ok in America today.
Do you just throw up your hands “i guess there is nothing we can do”?
What I find entertaining as a non-US citizen is how border enforcement is table stakes in every other country I’ve lived in (5 so far). Even the left doesn’t question it, it’s a basic function of a government.
Even the less developed countries have relatively straightforward enforcement. You produce proof you’re there legally or you’re put on the next flight home.
Since I lived in the US people keep asking me why some Americans don’t want border security. I don’t have a good answer.
Cope with?! These systems and procedures are designed to circumvent the "complex" realities and give cover for deporting citizens and legal residents. So maybe you have a passport, but you've been attending protests, and perhaps even dared to be lippy towards an ICE agent; your passport is going to the shredder, and your ass to Liberia.
I don't know how folk keep assuming DHS/ICE are acting in good faith - a shocking number of people continue to be oblivious until the agents come for them or theirs.
I get that nobody wants to be tracked by the government. But we are already being tracked... just imperfectly to the point where innocent people are being jailed.
The question should be how accurate do we want the government's data on us to be. And how much of our taxpayer money do we want to spend on companies like Palantir to fuzzy match our data across systems when we could simplify this all with a primary key.
If the U.S. wanted to have a national ID system with rules, a defined scope, and redress procedures when things went wrong, and established it in the open, following a democratic process, I would be much happier.
The system we are getting instead has all the downsides of centralisation, with none of the upsides.
States prefer having the power to issue ID cards and all of the control that grants them, they do not want to give up those powers, and politically the states have enough political and legal power to keep it this way.
Don’t make the mistake of presuming that this the result of a flawed cooperative system. It isn’t — it’s adversarial.
Just look at how long states fought to stop Real ID legislation.
I see you, Wintermute, I see you.
It's the official status of green card holders.
(second result was Lawful Permanent Resident; make of that what you will)
If you get captured as part of this Mobile Fortify stuff, it sounds like it's going to merge it with all other CBP records you have (including all border entry interactions). Pulling up at the passport desk or at a land crossing is just begging for the officer to see that an ICE HSI agent pulled you at a protest and scanned your face to pull you in for "secondary screening" for "higher risk factors" going forward and throwing nice glowing red targets on your back.
If you're white British with an accent from our shores, you don't have a very serious problem. Sure you could get locked up somewhere away from a lawyer for a few days which is terribly inconvenient —- that clearly is happening to British citizens -- but nobody is going to pin you to the ground until you can't breathe. We appear to be getting the benefit of some doubt (unless we have opinions).
And if you are white and have an American accent you're going to be ignored entirely anyway.
Perhaps carry any paperwork you need, definitely carry any medication you'll need for a few days.
As to whether the officer will ignore evidence presented: that is clearly what they are being told to do. There are lawful citizens carrying their papers with them and there's video of an ICE agent mockingly saying "what papers?"
Because on the ground it's not about immigration status really, it's about race and white power and sheer numbers of arrests to meet Stephen Miller's quotas.
This may be statistically true, but it's probably not very good advice. You might equally end up deported, now that they are running everyone through every database looking for things that might make you technically deportable that would never have come up under previous administrations:
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c4g78nj7701o
You used to be able to get bailed while stuff got sorted out. That has changed. Now they keep you locked up for months, not days. How long are you prepared to hold out before agreeing to be deported despite being in the right? Racial profiling is certainly happening, but anyone can find themselves in this situation if the wrong database pings when they walk through an airport, and once you have been dropped into immigration detention, relying on your ethnicity to get you out is not a sure thing.
They've certainly been held in custody, though.
Unfortunately, lots of people are going to arrive at a first-hand understanding of the oft-repeated systems adage: "the purpose of a system is what it does."
For now, until they move on to persecuting political adversaries.
It’s no different than a US citizen having an arrest warrant but then showing the cop a final disposition from the court showing the charges were dismissed.
Whats next? It’s certainly not the cop just walking away.
You detain the person until the discrepancy can be resolved.
Are some innocent people going to be held in custody? Yes, in both cases. But until a better approach can be found (other than just ignoring it), it’s how it works.
(Not suggesting anything about enforcement practices - just trying to understand what the edge cases are like.)
Unfortunately USCIS doesn’t know anything about this (as it was all handled by the department of state), and presumably thinks I’m an alien who abandoned their status.
The light turns green.
You go blindly.
Get maimed in an accident.
"But the light was green!"
https://theonion.com/trump-claims-he-can-overrule-constituti...
You roll a persuasion check: it's a 1 - it failed. Your argument of "you can't do this, the Constitution says nu-uh" failed.
"Fuck the constitution", the masked ICE officer yells at you. "civil rights are for real American citizens, not for your kind." He spits in your face.
The two masked goons holding you start to drag you towards their unmarked van. You struggle a bit. The officer stashes away his Scanning Smartphone and puts his hand on his sidearm.
What is your next move?
A lot of Americans have the impression that SCOTUS keeps deciding in the administration's favor, but this is not true.
SCOTUS is saying: "We're not going to hear this case right now, but we likely will in the future. In the meantime, we are going to overturn the lower court who did actually hear the case and allow the administration to continue its actions. No, we will not explain we think the lower court got wrong."
Increasingly these SCOTUS orders totally unexplained which is a blatant violation of their judicial obligations, and they are frequently unsigned by the majority (conservative) Justices. Presumably because they don't want their names written on papers that they know will be understood by future generations to be totally indefensible.
SCOTUS has proven itself functionally incapable of fulfilling its Constitutional duties and has proven that we need a lot more Justices. If you don't have the time to hear the cases we need you to hear, then the court needs to be scaled up and we can pick random panels to hear different cases.
Nothing to do with policy disagreements (how would any American even know if they had a policy disagreement with an unexplained, unsigned SCOTUS order?) – we just need courts that can decide on things that are important to our country.
The supreme court over the years has watered down constitutional protections against government enforcement upon individuals massively because doing so was necessary to empower the government to enforce speeding tickets, financial regulation, environmental regulation, chase bootleggers, etc, etc, with it's power only constrained in practice by political optics.
So now here we are, in a situation where the government is doing what it always does, levying what's essentially a criminal punishment (incarceration in this case, typically fines historically) in a case where allegedly no crime has been committed, and then give the accused only kangaroo court administrative process because it's not a crime, but now it's doing it at scale, flagrantly, loudly and against the political will of some of the locations it's doing it in.
There are a lot of bricks in this road to hell and someone somewhere was issuing a warning as each one was laid. Should have listened.
What is the point of a database with incorrect biometric data connected to a person?
The point is domination, and the app is simply one means to that end. They'd find another if they had to.
This is a problem from your government, by your government, that you voted for - one way or another. Pretending this problem is originating from anywhere else except the political choices you're making as a nation is denying reality.
What happens right now is this: ICE can run loose and do whatever they want. If some judge finds their activities illegal, they can block ICE from doing the illegal things.
But...who's going to stop them? Not the DOJ. Stephen Miller has said that ICE have "federal immunity". The keen observer will of course know that there's no such thing as "federal immunity", so a charitable way to interpret that statement is that no-one federal will go after them.
So what about states, and local police? Sure, they could start arresting them, but then again, Miller et. al have warned the states about not interfering, threatening with going after LEO's etc. with federal charges if they do so.
The long story made short is that they can (and will) keep doing illegal shit until someone stops them, and that's not going to happen as long as Trump is POTUS. DOJ and ICE leaderships has explicitly said that their workers should just ignore the law and courts.
The scary thing is that there is.. you should look up "sovereign immunity". The government has complete immunity, except where and how the law permits it to be held accountable. And while we have a constitution, defending those rights through the courts requires legislation to permit it. For the most part, federal law permits lawsuits against states that violate the constitution, but have permitted far less accountability for federal actions that violate the constitution.
For example, Section 1983 of the Civil Rights Act only permits individuals to sue state and local governments for rights violations. It can't be used to sue the federal government.
There's many court cases, dating back decades, tossing out cases against the federal government for rights violations. Look how SCOTUS has limited the precedent set by Bivens over the years, basically neutering it entirely.
Their budget right now is larger than the Marine Corps and a lot of their members are looking at unemployment or prison time if the democrats get back into control of the government. Think about what they are likely to do during the mid terms if they are told to monitor election sites. They are a gang of dangerously brutal violent thugs operating with complete impunity.
The immunity is only from state prosecution and only for acts taken required as part of their official duties, but it does exist.
States ought to do that aynway, then instigate cop-on-cop violence. Ask Putin or Xi for help.
The fact that Americans are getting caught in the dragnet, having their possessions and lives destroyed, getting sent to secret jails or being assaulted for merely being in the same zipcode as an ICE agent doesn't matter to them. It's all about inflicting harm on people they dislike, and if ICE is harming someone then obviously it's because it's they did something bad.
It's pretty dire circumstances. ICE was always close to a paramilitary organization, it just took Trump to actually fund it and push it over the edge.
This is in fact one of the most distressing parts of the situation. Most people conceive of getting off the couch to vote in the midterm as the absolute height of their potential power to stop this. Phone banking for some blue dog in the midterm isng going to cut it in this situation.
Meanwhile the "opposition" has decided to lay low rather than risk their (checks notes) low 30% approval rating by taking a stand on anything (except funding genocide) for most of this year. Every institution is being steamrolled, gutted, corrupted, and weaponized faster than we can keep track, and folks are trying to make themselves believe if we just vote hard enough this will all end in 2-4 years like it was a bad dream rather than an ongoing play-by-play descent into fascism.
I think it remains to be seen how broader US society responds to the approach being taken. Hard to say how close the Senate will be next year.
For example, deportation is a civil action, not criminal. That means that to exile you from your home the government does not need to prove their case beyond a reasonable doubt, does not need to provide you with legal representation if you can’t afford a lawyer, and the procedure takes place in an administrative court. There have been numerous cases of small children representing themselves in deportation proceedings. And this was all before the current administration.
The point of a bogus database is to give them cover for arresting, imprisoning, and deporting anyone they wish to.
> What is the point of a database with incorrect biometric data connected to a person?
The answer to both questions is ‘to cause fear among the [immigrant] population.’
To keep everyone else in line. Americans are so programmed to defer to aw enforcement that they will watch the most blatant abuses carried out right in front of them with little other than hand-wringing. Immigration status is just the excuse, compliance is the goal. What do you think is going to happen at the next election? ICE doesn't even need to intimidate people at polling places, just the rumor that hey are doing so will be enough to scare many citizens away from voting in person. They could vote by mail, but no doubt you're aware that the President ad his party constantly impugn the validity of such votes. How much do you trust them to uphold and abide by the voting process? We've already seen what happens when they get a result that's not favorable to them.
First of all, it's misleading in its categorization: "half of people who voted in the last election" is not the same as "half of all eligible voters".
Second of all, a lot of the people who voted for Trump do not meaningfully "want fascism". Some do—no question about that! And, unfortunately, some who didn't before have rationalized themselves into wanting it now in order to self-justify their decision to vote for him.
But many of them are low-information voters who genuinely do not understand what is going on, and fall into one (or more) of a few categories:
- People who have always voted Republican, because their parents always voted Republican, and that's just The Way Things Are.
- People who have been brainwashed by constant propaganda from Fox News over the past 30 years telling them that Democrats are Evil.
- People who have poor to no civics education, have seen their economic situation slide slowly downward over the last few decades (or fall off a cliff, eg in 2008), and have heard the various Republican candidates telling them, over and over, "Just vote for us! We will solve all your problems. You don't have to worry about how!" (or "...by punishing the evil Others who are the cause of every ill in this country", depending on how racist they're already primed to be)
None of that requires "wanting fascism". And I can tell you, from personal experience, that there are still people out there—left, right, and center—who genuinely do not know what is going on. They don't watch the news. They just try to get by. They have no idea that ICE is abducting citizens off the streets, that Trump has shattered the executive branch institutions that actually run this country, or that the Supreme Court has said that Trump can do whatever the hell he likes.
If you want to be able to fix a problem, you have to understand it in all its nuance, and just dismissing tens of millions of people as "eh, they all wanted fascism; guess there's no possible way to reach them, then" is the wrong problem definition.
To act as the domestic enforcement arm for Trump's autocratic fascism red in tooth and claw, the culmination of what everyone not drinking social media Kool-aid has been saying for the last 10 years. Yet a third of our country chose to aggressively reject these concerns because throwing the Constitution in the trash "owned the libs", which was the only concrete policy they had left after decades of being led around by the nose by the corporate state.
I've been troubled by the normalization of "daddy" and paternal government rhetoric, especially the "daddy's home" framing that's become so prevalent. This language isn't just colorful—it signals something genuinely dangerous about how we're being asked to relate to political authority.
When we accept government through a paternalistic lens, we're accepting a fundamentally anti-democratic premise: that citizens should be treated as dependents rather than as autonomous equals. This isn't new—fascist regimes have consistently used paternal imagery to justify concentrated power, from Stalin to Hitler to countless others. The "strong father" archetype is a proven tool for normalizing authoritarian control.
What's particularly troubling about the "daddy" rhetoric we're seeing is how it combines paternalism with threats of punishment and retribution. It invites a dynamic where citizens compete for approval from a leader who's positioned as both protector and disciplinarian—someone who will "spank" the nation for "misbehaving." This language erodes the principle that government authority should be accountable to the people, not the reverse.
Democracy requires citizens who see themselves as stakeholders in governance, not children waiting for a father figure to tell them what's best. When we accept government as "dad," we're tacitly accepting a hierarchy where some people are "favored children" (the in-group) and others are outsiders to be excluded or punished. History shows this path leads away from democracy.
We should resist this framing, not because strong leadership is bad, but because paternalism is incompatible with democratic equality and individual autonomy.
I am not saying you are, but many people who talk about individualism and autonomy are.
It is ridiculously inconsistent.
You are choosing a daddy(or rather 50%+1 best case is choosing a daddy for you) ignoring the technicalities for each so-called democratic-block country (sometimes it's a committee, sometimes the committee chooses a daddy, sometimes they choose the most voted daddy even if only by a minority, etc.).
We could discuss the benefits of more direct participation in politics but I don't think that framing changes the essence of the question as it stands.
Some don't trust the committee, others don't trust the strong man, others don't trust the 50%+1, others don't trust the 50%-1. None of them being able to trust anyone else is the core issue.
Now I just hope these Nazi tactics don't continue to become a playbook in my country. Meanwhile, actual Nazis are emboldened and encouraged.
_Being aware_ of the use is also not exactly damning. We're all aware of what ICE is doing, that by itself doesn't make us responsible for that any more than we are responsible for the starving children in Africa.
It's interesting that everyone is kind of on the same page without communicating some things. It seems we are at the point now where were referencing Nazis by which volume/edition they are from.
Enough of a difference in degree is a difference in kind.
Oh it was partly sarcastic ("terribly inconvenient" being something of a Britishism for really quite awful)
Re: Stafford Beer, we're beyond that in so many ways —- what in ordinary times might be considered an emergent, unthinking consequence of this system is what it was actually designed to do: the terror and arbitrary quality or even the perception that the USA is hostile to foreigners, is not an accidental, emergent quality of the operation. It's Stephen Miller's intent.
If you were to take a truly Stafford Beer approach to this, then you might say the purpose of this system is to desensitise Americans to the arbitrary and/or violent expression of presidential power.
But when you combine that with blowing up boats that contain no combatants and could have been interdicted, the use of selective prosecution, and the confidence with which they say, look, that is exactly what we're doing, even that feels like it is pretty close to text, certainly not unconscious subtext.
But we cannot stop there, and needs ask why. There are structural forces that lead to this government, some of which are corporate. Fox and MSNBC exist to extract wealth from polarization, and have every incentive to drive wedges between us. Meta and X likewise get paid for optimizing engagement and hate drives engagement.
It's not all corporations, but they contribute to structural forces we're have to unwind as we also try to fix the government side too.
Corporations absolutely have an effect on all of this, you can bet they'd save time and money by focusing their efforts elsewhere if they thought it was pointless.
Note that all the facial recognition is being done by governments, which is the entity everyone suggests using to protect against facial recognition.
https://etias.com/articles/eu-biometric-border-checks-begin-...
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c4gp7j55zxvo (under the control of the executive)
https://www.politico.eu/article/how-facial-recognition-is-ta... (under the control of the executive)
https://www.biometricupdate.com/202405/police-in-germany-usi...
https://www.reuters.com/technology/italy-outlaws-facial-reco...
The important part about the Italian "ban" is, as with most privacy laws in the EU, the government bans facial recognition for companies, and explicitly allows the government to use it for everything they do)
This is common in the EU. For example, the GPDR guarantees that your medical data isn't used by companies. That sounds great! Except for the exceptions: insurance and health care providers are exempted, courts (even foreign ones) are excempted (and so a judge can subpoena your private medical information for divorce or custody cases), the police is exempted, youth services is exempted, ...
Networks of companies support political candidates, so there really isn't a true separation between the government's actions and the will of these corporations.
No, I didn't, not one way, nor another. I might have had a share of influence over policy in certain statewide elections, but not in most other elections.
You as an individual are defenseless against an incorrect and badly trained officer. This goes for local cops, federal cops, the twitter racists they brought in for ICE, etc.
Even if you oppose this with all your heart, if you're semi-intelligent you know the Admin is looking for an excuse to execute greater powers, so any kinetic action against the poorly trained, illegal actions of the state will only cause greater harm.
The worst part about this, is if we allow the slow "legal" process to take it's course, even if all this is proven illegal and thrown out, people released, etc, nothing will happen to the people who brought it on. Those who have the power to hold accountable only reached the position of power by being amenable to others in power. We likely wont have trials against the individuals picking mothers and fathers up off the street for a bonus, we wont have trials against the people who offered the bonuses either. They'll disappear and come back when the times are more kind to their sick world view of violence and cruelty.
There are common recurrent motivations and indicia uniting this pattern of violent and terroristic activities under the umbrella of self-described “anti-fascism.” [ . . . ] Common threads animating this violent conduct include anti-Americanism, anti-capitalism, and anti-Christianity; support for the overthrow of the United States Government; extremism on migration, race, and gender; and hostility towards those who hold traditional American views on family, religion, and morality.
Not according to immigration law, which is all that matters for the current discussion. The parent of you comment made a point which you failed to notice.
BTW holier-than-thou attitudes and picking fights with friends are largely responsible for where we are. Spotting them is also a good hint for bot detection.
You overlooked the fact that ICE goons are breaking the law on a regular basis.
There are emotions (half support) and then reality (less than 30% of Americans). The emotions got us into this mess about misdemeanors at the federal level.
The authoritarians want you to say: “50% of people love this, give up already.”
When the truth is that 28% of people voted for Trump in 2024. He has lost a percentage of that support through his actions since January. Don’t help them normalize this through emotion.
Say it’s “half” is negotiating with fascists.
Perhaps because your peers are recent immigrants who are culturally and linguistically foreign to you, and are physically here primarily because the place they are originally from is terrible, rather than because they are actually interested in joining your community and sharing its values.
https://krebsonsecurity.com/2025/04/doge-workers-code-suppor...
This is some more detail about the whisteblower's testimony from an earlier Krebs article:
https://krebsonsecurity.com/2025/04/whistleblower-doge-sipho...
Was there anything else about Russia?
1. Scraping a website, by anyone, allowed by courts if it is publicly accessible
2. "Scraping" of data, by the government, from various sources into a centralized database in partnership with Palantir. It's a worse version of the "Patriot" Act
Why are you defending this crap? They also destroyed the departments that were actually making digital services more streamlined and easier to use 18F by dissolution and US Digital Services by capture.
doge was a fucking disaster.
“You know those problems you’re pointing out? Well if you listen to the people in charge they are saying they aren’t problems" is much better than "Duh, what did you expect ?"
No matter how obvious you think the context that led to your conclusion is, it's always worth it to share it along, especially in times of information bubbles
The peddlers of the things that caused the legitimate gripes that drove them into the harms of these movements need to do some looking in the mirror.
Most people don't care about most issues most of the time. If they're holding their nose and voting for blatant extremism, the people they're not voting for ought to do some reflecting.
It's literally "owning the libs" but on a cultural level.
I'm not saying it's smart or right, but it doesn't take a genius to see what's going on here.
The awkward ‘Siemens and the holocaust’ section was so pathetic.
And examples such as "de-Baathification" in Iraq show that even the best-intentioned actions can have wide-reaching and truly devastating unintended consequences. I won't pretend that I have some neat and clean answer to any of this, but there's a persistent sense of moral outrage that feels earned around all of this.
Turns out IBM had a rather... Uh, pragmatic attitude towards the uses the nazi regime found for IBM equipment.
There's real serious questions about what rights people have when being accused of non-criminal infractions and to what degree the punishments can overlap that people ought to be asking here.
But nobody on HN wants to ask these questions because all the things HN wants strictly regulated are done so using the same legal theories and doctrines and precedents.
Once the fallacy of composition starts becoming common in a forum, it is the beginning of the end for good discourse.
The tech industry is full of fine software developers. Not sure they'd make great public policy.
Early 90's 2nd amendment anxiety, Ruby Ridge, assault weapon bans/Brady Bill and McVeigh's terrorist bombing in Oklahoma City propelled this stuff, and when we tried to impliment the national id (REAL ID Act) they very much flipped out, so they leaned on States Rights to shatter this notion, basically letting any state just not do it. 20 years later after REAL ID passed, you still don't need it unless you want to get on a plane.
It is highly ironic that the very same humans brains that constitute the right wing which railed against the REAL ID act are now basically demanding REAL ID Act. This is worth reflecting on.
[0] https://web.archive.org/web/20060702184553/http://www.nonati...
... or shop at Home Depot.
> It is highly ironic that the very same humans brains that constitute the right wing which railed against the REAL ID act are now basically demanding REAL ID Act
Ironic, coincidence, or all according to plan?
The so-called right wing has been being led around by the corporate lobbyist agenda for decades now. It's not a terrible stretch to imagine the same corpo political operatives that were behind the ratcheting authoritarian ID requirements are now behind the fascist kidnap squads as they tighten the noose around our society.
A bit paranoid and non-actionable, of course.
One important dynamic I think people often miss is that party discipline is weak in the US. Schumer can’t make the caucus go along with a shutdown fight; he has to convince them it’s a good idea, and be confident they’ll stay convinced for long enough to get what he wants, because otherwise the 7 most moderate members will happily defect and start writing their campaign ads about how they’re independent minded who won’t be pushed around by anyone. He’s already got 3 defectors in the current fight.
Citation needed lol.
https://www.cbp.gov/newsroom/local-media-release/cincinnati-...
That ONE CBP office in the US. And it’s not even in a state with a high population of illegal aliens. There are 20 offices in the US.
And sure creating fraudulent documents from scratch isn’t easy. But it’s not that hard to use someone else’s identity to get documents that support US citizenship. Hell, a paper social security card is proof as long as it doesn’t say “NOT WORK AUTHORIZED on it.
So it wouldn’t even be that unusual to locate an alien that the database says (correctly) has a deportation order but for them to claim US citizenship and even produce a document that looks like they are.
You can even read a nice CBP report on the problems they have with fraudulent documents.
https://www.oig.dhs.gov/sites/default/files/assets/2025-09/O...
We made these decisions for various reasons, but broadly because the voters felt that US citizenship and lawfullness should be presumptions, rather than something you had to prove in order to enjoy your rights as a citizen.
For an immigration agent, this is really tough. You have to identify unauthorized immigrants in an environment where you can't just require lawful citizens to carry ID or proof of citizenship. You legally can't arrest or (more than briefly) detain a US citizen for failure to carry citizenship documents. You have to walk on eggshells even with actual unauthorized immigrants, to avoid violating the law. And our proof-of-identity document systems are deliberately decentralized and unreliable, so you can't just check a master database. It's a tough problem!
But that's the way the cookie crumbles. We designed our society to make this kind of "papers please" enforcement difficult, which means that immigration enforcement needs to be smarter and more savvy, or else we need to actually change the laws. What ICE and CBP are trying to do now is just to ignore the law, and that doesn't work. Citizens' built this law to protect their rights; you can't just take away those rights because CBP have a tough job.
This was a problem in 2012 and SCOTUS ruled unambiguously in Arizona vs United States that we cannot stop people based solely on their outward "apparent" immigration status. In SCOTUS's own words, "the usual predicate for an arrest is absent" and being merely "suspected of being removable... does not authorize an arrest."
"As a general rule, it is not a crime for a removable alien to remain present in the United States. See INS v. Lopez-Mendoza, 468 U.S. 1032, 1038 (1984). If the police stop someone based on nothing more than possible removability, the usual predicate for an arrest is absent. When an alien is suspected of being removable, a federal official issues an administrative document called a Notice to Appear. See 8 U. S. C. §1229(a); 8 CFR §239.1(a) (2012).
The form does not authorize an arrest."
This is a MAGA and Heritage Foundation-driven reversal of VERY recently settled law. Absolutely not business as usual.
https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/567/387/#tab-opi...
> They'll find other ways to force people to produce their papers
Okay, so make them find other, increasingly illegal ways so they can be held accountable at a future date. Not quasi-blessed by SCOTUS's delay tactics.
Don't be absurd. Fascism rose in Germany, and was defeated. Fascism rose in Spain, and Italy, and was defeated.
We can defeat fascism too. We will defeat fascism too.
It'll just be harder if more people think like you.
You are in such a rush to be sarcastic that you're accusing the GP of wanting to cooperate with fascism, when they're simply stating the reality of the problem. You're saying naying nice words about the outcome you want to see, but ignoring the horrors between the institution of fascism and its eventual defeat. That suggests to me that you don't really have any idea or plan about how to overcome it, you're just wishcasting. The danger of this is that many people will advocate waiting for the next election to decide if it's really fascism (because that's an unpleasant thing people would prefer to avoid), but don't have anything in reserve if the election is subverted, and in any case are giving away the political initiative for a year.
Instead of trying to rally people with WW2 tropes (which the non-fascists are in no position to wage) it'd be better to build momentum toward general strikes, which have a rather successful track record in the US and have been quasi-outlawed as a result (eg by the Taft-Hartley act, which bans solidarity and political strikes by labor unions).
Someone forgot about the 40-year long fascist dictatorship Spain was under
1)https://www.wral.com/story/fact-check-trump-says-immigrants-...
Obama had similar rules around standing deportation orders and how quickly they could be executed once an alien was in custody.
If you’ve stood before a judge, argued why you should be allowed to stay and lost, you have a standing deportation order. That’s due process. Nothing has been denied.
It makes for a great talking point but is a pretty shallow analysis of what is going on or their historical relevance.
https://www.politico.com/news/2025/10/28/man-deported-to-lao...
Additionally, the performative method of how they're looking for deportations, its random, violent, and meant to send a message of powerlessness and fear.
The point is fear and cruelty. As was Family separation under Biden, the cruelty is accelerating.
Or even when they do end up before someone who knows the law, and that someone says "no, this is illegal, you have to set them free," they say "nah, we can do what we want" and put them on a plane to another country unrelated to the hapless detainee.
If you are a US citizen they can call your county that holds the birth certificate, take affidavits from parents or other family members.
I mean the fact we haven’t heard of any US citizens detained for months (as you put it) is a good indication it’s not happening because you know the media would blast that story to the top for weeks.
How it works now in Trump 2.
Obama, notably, had a better approach, with a faster rate of deportation of illegal migrants, and he did so without absurd threatening intimidating cruelty, or ordering arbitrary kidnappings off the street by violent anonymised paramilitary thugs. There was a really quite high level of voluntary compliance with that system.
The only reason this is all happening is that Stephen Miller wants to beat Obama's number: it consumes him that during Trump 1 they didn't get close to the performance of ICE under Obama 2. And he wants it to be showy, threatening, arbitrary, militarised and for it to overpoweringly favour white people.
It's legitimately crazy to normalise it by framing it in normal terms like you are doing. There is nothing normal about this, nothing essential, procedure-based or unavoidable. It's an attempt to build a white police state.
The point is that in Trump 2.0 ICE tactics have changed up from targeted raids (where a few US citizens might have had time to identify themselves as such in the process of an enforcemenr action) to untargeted sweeps where people are being dragged off the street based on their ethnicity and dumped in holding camps in other states by masked goons who are not at all interested in the process because they are literally working to quotas and bonuses.
The rate of US citizens being arrested and held for days has increased exponentially and the process no longer cares about fairness; it cares about detention, intimidation and causing fear.
This change is obvious, marked to anyone paying attention, and not remotely normal.
I completely agree but fear the democrats will be too spineless to do anything like this. A radical change in the democrat party is needed - they should be promising to pack the supreme court and prosecute 3/4s of this administrations officials, at a minimum.
Evidence suggests that about 30% of people will accept being worse off in order to inflict a greater loss on someone else. They form a plurality, with the other groups being win-win types (~20%), loss-averse pessimists (~20%), selfless volunteers (~15%), and inconsistent folks who may be confused (~15%).
Now this is just empirical observation rather than proof, but it's a good quality observation, enough that it has heuristic value. If you admit the possibility that about 1/3 of people are mean, then an awful lot of ongoing political phenomena become much easier to understand.
I didn’t come to this easily, as someone who generally believes in the goodness of others. But it’s really the only explanation at this point
If the computer says you’re in the US illegally, but you have documents that say you are a US citizen, then you are put in custody until the discrepancy can be resolved.
It really depends on whether or not there is a standing deportation order for that person. If not, then it’s a lengthy process where you appear in front of a judge who may release you (yes, low risk aliens are still being released) or held in custody until the trial is held.
If you have a standing deportation order, and your identity is confirmed, then yes, you may be deported quite quickly.
No due process is being denied. If you have a standing deportation order, you can be deported.
Yeah, this is exactly the problem. It is not, in fact, illegal to be in this country without a visa. It's a purely civil matter. Like, parking ticket level.
Hauling citizens (or anyone, really) off the street and holding them for indeterminate amounts of times when they haven't committed any crime is not due process.
JP Morgan was sloppy in it's mortgage approvals contributing to the financial crisis of 2007. Do you think that's not a serious matter? That was entirely a civil, not criminal matter.
And overstaying a visa has serious consequences. It's not a fine and you can go on living in the US illegally. You will be deported and receive a 3-10 year ban on re-entry. Reenter again and it's criminal matter.
But you're also ignoring the numerous criminal violations that occur with illegal immigration. Illegal entry, reentry after deportation, immigration fraud, using fraudulent documents, human trafficking, recieving social services reserved for citizens. All of these are criminal violations.
And no, investigating a possible civil or criminal matter and detaining people while you conduct your investigation has nothing to do with due process. Police and immigration officials need these limited powers to do their job. Each of these people detained will either be released or stand in front of a judge, which shows they received due process.
Readers are likely to interpret this generally and it may act as a lightning rod - the statement may need some qualifiers to define what is not denying due process.
So ICE go around masked and put people in some kind of camps based on what some app says? And then when they are in the camp what happens?
I don't believe there's a clear picture of what happens next.
Though I know some report the conditions inside the camps are pretty bad, access to lawyers is spotty, reportedly some people are deported without an official removal order / due process, and some people we don't know because they disappear from the public database that's supposed to inform family about the detained person's condition and whereabouts.
I'm not sure if all of that is covered in this BBC report, but feel free to read other journalistic sources
> Most of the spending was on guns and armor, but there have also been significant purchases of chemical weapons and “guided missile warheads and explosive components.”
I'd really like to know why ICE needs guided missile warheads to do their job. (Edit: pointed out below, this is a purchase category that includes distraction devices like smoke grenades – they're thankfully not buying actual warheads.)
At this point, I'm confident that ICE could kick down my door and blow my white, midwestern, US Citizen ass away where I sit on this couch, and none of them would ever see the inside of a courtroom.
The purchase order PDF is linked here: https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/ice-guided-missile-warhead...
They're all going to receive a blanket pardon.
Well, we've already crossed into "the law is what I say it is" territory thanks to the republicans, so the next admin just needs to leverage that. The GOP thinks that pardons signed by autopen are invalid [0] so I don't see what would stop the democrats from apply the same logic to ICE agents and administration, except perhaps cowardice.
[0] https://thehill.com/homenews/house/5575379-house-gop-comer-d...
To the extent that their actions are unlawful, they are often crimes under state law in the states they occur, as well as federal law. The President of the United States has no power to pardon state law offenses (and while there may be political considerations that discourage pursuing charges while it might provoke conflict with the Trump Administration, but in many cases the statutes of limitations for violent crimes under state law are not short.
Having the ability to stop people isn't worth much if you don't have the unaccountable bureaucracy that can unilaterally doll out whatever punishment it wants.
The usefulness of these sort of fishing exercises regardless of what kind of violation is being gone after is wholly predicated on the upstream system denying these people their rights. If enforcement bureaucracies had to give everyone subject to "serious punishment" (whatever we agree that is, incarceration likely fits it) real rights, follow real protocols involving warrants, evidince, etc, etc. and potentially drag them in front of a jury then you wouldn't have any of this.
And it's not just limited to ICE. Pretty much every other law (and I don't just mean criminal, civil too) enforcement excess evaporates overnight if people get full protection afforded by their rights after law enforcement interacts with them.
Now, you could argue that we should instead impose the constraints on law enforcement contact and then all these unaccountable systems that violate people's rights will be fine because the enforcers won't be shoving innocent people into them, but looking at the last ~50yr of executive branch (not just feds, states very much too) history, that's basically what we've done and it clearly hasn't worked.
This isn't a brown people problem. This is a bigger fundamental problem with how we've architected law (once again, not just criminal) enforcement in this country. The brown people are just the newsworthy implementation at this particular minute.
Are you looking for a "good job potato3732842 for being mad about Stop and Frisk previously," and unless you get that you're going to hem and haw about how awful a nationwide expansion of a far more aggressive variant with far worse consequences at orders of magnitude larger scale of a similar policy is?
> enforcement excess evaporates overnight if people get full protection afforded by their rights after law enforcement interacts with them.
Yeah, duh. That's why people are here advocating for people to retain their rights and for law enforcement to be held accountable.
If your argument is that the current policy is just another point on the same continuum as many others: yes, obviously that's true.
If your argument is that this means it's somehow equivalent to other points on the same continuum: no, obviously it's not.
If your argument is instead that this is a different point on the same continuum, but because people weren't upset about Point A they have no justification to be upset (or even more upset) about Point B: that's ridiculous.
There is a lot of constitutional law here, not a lot of ambiguity. While mistakes happen, and ICE is clearly becoming more eager to violate the law (see TFA), that doesn't mean we should be unclear about what the law says. In particular, prioritizing the (incorrect) results from an app over any sort of claim or presentation of proof is illegal.
So how do you discourage this? We could start prosecuting and imprisoning people with fake documents, but that would send our already absurd prison population through the roof and cost immense amounts of money. An alternative way is exactly what this article is about.
As I said in a different comment, we US folks have decided as a society that we don’t want to have mandatory difficult-to-forge national ID. When asked this question democratically, US voters and their representatives have repeatedly* turned down this option and explicitly banned the Federal government from issuing Federal ID cards outside of optional passports for international travel. We made this decision precisely because we distrust the sort of Federal government that would require us to carry that sort of document. There is nothing accidental about this, and you can find explicit statements of this bipartisan consensus all over real Federal legislation; there’s really no possibility that we did this by accident or without due consideration of the tradeoffs.
You’re correct that this lack of standardized documentation makes the immigration enforcer’s job harder, since they can’t just force people to produce proof-of-citizenship on demand and they can’t detain US citizens, and they can’t necessarily trust every paper document they’re given. I’m sympathetic! But that’s the tradeoff we’ve made as a society. The answer is not “throw out the rule book and risk depriving citizens of their rights because our job is hard.” The answer is: respect the rules you were given and due the best job you can without depriving US citizens of their rights.
And PS this situation is hardly unique: we also make ordinary cops’ jobs harder by requiring them to respect suspects’ civil rights and demanding probable cause to make an arrest. It’s tough! The result there is that cops have to work harder and be smarter; they don’t just get to detain anyone they want just because they might vaguely hypothetically be a criminal.
But they're not going to, because the people in charge don't sincerely care about the topic.
As for Iraq: I don't see much evidence that US actions there were "best-intentioned", or even well-intentioned.
It's not like people aren't still frothing at the mouth to repeat the same mistake in Venezuela or Palestine or Yemen. Maintaining empire requires shows of force. There's always profit to be made along the way. It motivates itself
Paul Bremer made something very, very stupid.
I'm always surprised more people don't know how many Nazis were in NATO offices and the West German federal police
I dare you to say with a straight face that opinions questioning the legal doctrine or legitimacy of civil regulation are anything other than an occasional rounding errors when the subject is any sort of regulation that people here generally likes.
It is not at all a stretch to say this HN believes strongly that administrative/civil law as it mostly currently stands is highly legitimate.
Of course, backpedaling and hair splitting ensues and the "doesn't represent us all" excuse flies when someone points out that those legal doctrines and, precedents are also empowering ICE. At some point you're responsible for who you associate with.
"The world is what you make of it" can be interpreted multiple ways.
But yes, far less bothered by stingrays, ALPR national surveillance, etc in more recent times.
I just want to give people their dues on this. For example Rand Paul introduced the Justice for Breonna Taylor Act which would have banned no-knock warrants if it had passed.[1]
[0] https://www.cato.org/policy-report/july/august-2008/real-id-...
Yes, Rand Paul deserves credit for this. But isn't he basically like an exception that proves the rule?
The 2005 vote on the REAL ID ACT was 218 Yea 9 Nay for Republicans, and 42 Yea 152 Nay for Democrats. Ron Paul was one of those Nays. He deserves credit along with the other 8. But overall, it was still a Republican bill. That's what my original comment was referring to.
And it's great that Republican opposition to REAL ID built. But of course the immediate question is how much of that opposition was due to being bored with Bush, and having a Democratic administration on the horizon? Just like the dishonest appeals to fiscal responsibility during Democratic administrations.
Because while it's important to give credit and look to build pro-freedom coalitions, it's also important to call out the rank hypocrisy. And rank hypocrisy seems to be the entire platform of the Republican party these days. For example, I don't see any of these purported 2nd amendment enthusiasts forming militias to defend their states against the federalized abduction squads.
This is part of the thread that became FEMA camp conspiracies and birtherism after Cambridge Analytica helped make conspiracy theorists the mainstream. What I’m asking is where are the mark of the beast weirdos now?
Well, they’re telling themselves that Domald Turmp was sent by God!
2. Because it's not clearly and entirely and immediately unlawful, and would take a court to rule about it (the courts are also fucked - SCOTUS recently ruled that lower courts are expected to defer to whatever batshit version of reality the government's lawyers are peddling) people in the chain of command can't clearly tell if the orders they are receiving are obviously illegal, and don't have good grounds to disobey them.
3. Also, that's, like, the way to civil war.
---
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Little_Rock_Nine - When integration began on September 4, 1957, the Arkansas National Guard was called in to "preserve the peace". Originally at orders of the governor, they were meant to prevent the black students from entering due to claims that there was "imminent danger of tumult, riot and breach of peace" at the integration. However, President Eisenhower issued Executive Order 10730, which federalized the Arkansas National Guard and ordered them to support the integration on September 23 of that year, after which they protected the African American students.[4]
re (1) then it's time to start standing up state laws that assert sovereignty, and legal supremacy over autocratic dictats from the out of control federal executive / judiciary.
re (3) yes, that's where we basically are. Red state (un)patriot militias hopped up on social media rah-rah juice about how they've been wronged, being sent into blue states and let loose to attack citizens. If our American ideal of Constitutionally-limited government is going to endure, then states need to start picking up the slack for the governance being overtly shirked by the federal anarcho-tyranny.
I don't like any of it and the dice are stacked against us, but the sooner we acknowledge the reality the better we can defend against the all-too-plausible possibility of our country going up the smokestacks of Trumpist big tech fascism.
But part of this process is candidates being nominated by the major parties, and the RNC put forward a candidate that people actually wanted to elect. The DNC did a worse job of this, as a seeming plurality of votes for Harris were not because they liked her, but because she was "not Trump".
Both parties have agency, but the DNC did a worse job at picking their nominee (assuming the goal was to win an election).
Dem flaws aside, Trump isn't just 'a candidate people actually wanted to elect'. He's an authoritarian, every major prediction about how authoritarian this administration would be has turned out to be correct, he instigated efforts to overturn the result of the last election where he lost, and 25-30% of the voting population likes authoritarianism and do not give a shit about what the Constitution actually says.
It can be argued as shared fault.
By, without vote/primary, unilaterally selecting a candidate to go on the ballot an unelected bureaucracy jammed up the election. Unfortunately in USA, it doesn't work how you propose, whether you appear on ballot is only up to democratic choice if there are primaries, if not an unelected bureaucracy selects the people that actually go on the ballot and due to dynamics of our voting system virtually ensure those will be the options.
In most states you basically have Democrat, Republican, maybe Libertarian party nominated candidate on the ballot and that is it. Writing in is throwing your vote.
I would argue we probably could fix this with write-in only and some sort of ranked voting kind of system or similar, but as it stands a large part of the election process is vulnerable to anti-democratic processes and this played out in Trump's favor last election.
Which I will completely accept as true. They didn’t.
From here, there are two branching paths. Did the Democrats put up someone who was actually worse than Trump? As in, are we better off than if the November election had gone the other way? Or did the Democrats have a better candidate who just wasn’t better enough to win? (Fully understanding that this is a very subjective question.)
It’s my firm opinion that it’s the second one. Harris would have been a better President. (So would Jeb! Bush, Mitt Romney, the festering corpse of Richard Nixon, or a frog snatched out of the Tidal Basin.) In which case, giving Democrats any blame for the outcome requires the people who voted for the actual winner to have no agency. They were presented with a choice and they selected the worse one. That’s entirely on them.
If you look at Trump, the only people who think he's honest are his opponents. His own supporters swear up and down he's a liar, he doesn't know what he's talking about, he won't do this or that. And this is their defensive! These are the best arguments they can articulate in his favor!
I think, the thing is, a lot of people don't want effective leaders or care. They want to win, or maybe they want to screw over some people they don't like. So go ahead and elect the idiots with bad policy, because government sucks anyway or something.
That doesn't absolve the republicans for turning to fascism, but we shouldn't say the Dems are blameless here.
My only point is that when a deportation order shows a name and face, people can still produce fraudulent documents showing they are a citizen.
It’s not a uniquely American problem.
If you want a national estimate that grossly undercounts, just multiply by the 20 field offices. Now we’re in the hundreds of thousands.
Anyways, I think it’s perfectly reasonable to nowadays take that philosophy and apply it universally. Just because it was done unfairly and hypocritically in the past is no excuse for us to also be hypocrites nowadays.
You can eventually punish humans abusing power. Cant do that wuth software designed to be abusive.
“ICE officials have told us that an apparent biometric match by Mobile Fortify is a ‘definitive’ determination of a person’s status and that an ICE officer may ignore evidence of American citizenship—including a birth certificate—if the app says the person is an alien,”
"Trust the word of the black box" is pure technocratic dystopian nonsense.
Do you understand that point? Political debate is discouraged here by design.
So the reason you won't find so much about this concrete ICE issue is simply that this type of debate is not welcome in general and does not say anything about "HN" communities position.
Second thing is, there is no such thing as "HN mind".
You can extrapolate some averages, but .. I for example ain't even from the US.
"opinions questioning the legal doctrine or legitimacy of civil regulation are anything other than an occasional rounding errors when the subject is any sort of regulation"
And from radical anarcho anarchists to radical communists, I have read all sorts of opinions here.
Lastly, the guidelines strongly advice against debating in a "engaged mind". Meaning, you sound a bit emotional and aggressive. I perceive that as attacking .. and my default mode would answer in a different way and we would be in a flamewar situation. (Despite we likely agree on the political side of things here)
My plan to overcome it is to make it clear to elite decisionmakers that they will be held personally responsible for the misery Trump's administration inflicts on people, including by many of the people who thought they supported Trump before they realized what he was doing. It's not a perfect plan, nor does it have a guarantee of success, but it seems better than the alternatives.
make it clear to elite decisionmakers that they will be held personally responsible for the misery Trump's administration inflicts on people
How?
Do you have any evidence of this? Keep in mind you started calling me names.
The rate of US citizens being arrested and held for days has increased exponentially and the process no longer cares about fairness;
Presumably such cases would be all over the news. Could you point me to a few? Not claiming to be US citizens despite no evidence and a lengthy criminal history.
I’m willing to change my opinion but it’s going to require facts not rumor and conjecture.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/jun/15/trump-immigr...
https://www.propublica.org/article/immigration-dhs-american-...
https://www.yahoo.com/news/articles/ice-agents-penske-rental...
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/mar/29/ice-detentio...
https://www.aclu.org/news/immigrants-rights/ice-makes-it-imp...
https://www.latimes.com/projects/la-na-access-to-counsel-dep...
https://www.propublica.org/article/immigrants-in-detention-c...
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/oct/30/ice-hidden-d...
https://www.forbes.com/sites/stuartanderson/2025/06/09/steph...
https://www.propublica.org/article/ice-officer-shoves-woman-...
https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/analysis-opinion/priv...
https://www.msnbc.com/top-stories/latest/ice-nebraska-immigr...
Now google "Kavanaugh stop". There has already been a Supreme Court case where ICE was challenged over their use of simple ethnicity to scoop up possible immigrants. Kavanaugh says: that's OK.
And I am done. It's really not my fault if the news you are consuming is not covering what is happening.
When I say don't be an idiot, I mean it in the sense of a useful idiot. Don't be uninformed. Don't be foolish. Don't let them get you to ignore what is happening.
(Mods, I appreciate this breaks the "long list of links" rule, probably. But it is an answer to the question from a wide variety of media sources which have documented what amounts to a slow-motion atrocity)
And please stop the name calling. Not only is it against HN rules, you’re better than that.
I clicked the first link and they were about Steven Miller? Then the second Propublica was about a lawyer having to drive far to see a client.
The first Probulica article has more details but the examples include US citizens fighting with ICE and being detained.
Do you have any data on US citizens detained beyond what the law allows (Propublica says up to 3 days is legal) without extenuating circumstances like aiding illegal immigration, assaulting law enforcement, etc?
https://x.com/dhsgov/status/1983550041496117532?s=46
“This temporary restraining order was not served to ICE until AFTER the criminal illegal alien was removed….Following his heinous crimes, he lost his green card, and an immigration judge ordered him removed in 2006. 20 years later, he tried a Hail Mary attempt to remain in our country by claiming he was a U.S. citizen.”
Available reporting indicates that judge ruled on Thursday, and that DHS deported on Friday. Moreover, available reporting also indicates:
> DHS and ICE did not respond to questions from The Associated Press seeking additional details on the timeline and how officials receive federal court orders.
So they aren’t clarifying anything. Odd.
And don’t forget back in March, when the administration publicly asserted that oral orders from a judge carried no authority and that they would only heed written orders.
When you put those two together, one wonders: perhaps DHS is playing fast and loose with timelines again.
Why on earth would you treat anything they say as if it were truthful or reliable? They have lost the right to be treated as trustworthy by default.
If that’s the case you must also assume the deportee is lying as well? Between the two it’s the deportee who has the bigger incentive to make things up.
If we’re going to go with those assumptions there is no point in even discussing it because neither of have any facts to base an argument on.
If you are an actual citizen, the law basically says they can briefly detain you to verify. Brief here is meant to be like "15 minutes". However, it is now taking weeks or months in some cases.
These are clear due process violations, and they are happening regularly now.
They also cannot simply ignore authoritative evidence of citizenship because a computer says otherwise, without violating due process (because it affects their ability to have cause).
Certainly they can ignore like a printout or something, but if you have a valid passport or real id drivers license (IE something considered authoritative), it's almost certainly a due process violation to ignore it and detain you for weeks anyway based on a facial recognition match.
Sure if you produce some secure form of proof that has no indication of being fraudulent there is no cause to detain.
But that’s not what’s happening in many cases. People using others ID. Questions about fraud in the immigration case itself.
If you have any examples of US citizens being detained for extended periods (actual citizens, not just a verbal claim) I’d be interested to read about them.
No, but not sure it matters?
"But that’s not what’s happening in many cases. People using others ID. Questions about fraud in the immigration case itself."
Of US citizens being detained? It 100% is not.
The propublica article below gives an example of a citizen being detained, twice, after providing a valid real id from alabama, in their own name.
"If you have any examples of US citizens being detained for extended periods (actual citizens, not just a verbal claim) I’d be interested to read about them."
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/us-citizen-detained-ice... is one such case.
There are many others.
In the end, when they discover they are american citizens, they have often falsified affidavits and indicted them on "assaulting officer" charges. The vast majority of these indictments have been dismissed by judges for lack of any evidence.
In case you don't believe that is what happens, here's a case in texas last week where the judge was having none of it, and dismissed just such an indictment after pointing out they were lying repeatedly about their investigations into immigration status, and then lying about how force was used, see:
https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.txwd.11...
If you want some more stories, here:
https://www.propublica.org/article/immigration-dhs-american-...
They have repeatedly violated the normal procedures, ignored court orders and even lied to judges. They obviously have contempt for the law so it doesn't make sense to assume that they are following proper procedures.
But at the same time, when the prior norms were incredibly lax to the point many immigration laws were ignored, suddenly enforcing what is on the books can look rather jarring.
Maybe start here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uleKvJ5Xsw8
Due process means limiting the government. You do not get to drag citizens into unmarked vans because you think they might have violated a civil matter.
That's the more likely hedge. Their skin won't be in the fire in the case of the first one.
1. What makes you think they don't?
2. There's a trick to it. It's difficult to conclusively tell if an order is unlawful, and there will be incredibly serious consequences to anyone who refuses one that isn't. And at the rate the current court rulings are going, dropping a fucking nuclear bomb on Ohio may be found to be constitutional and lawful.
> it's time to start standing up state laws that assert sovereignty
Good luck asserting sovereignty without an army. See point #2.
> yes, that's where we basically are
If that's the only way out of it, we've already lost.
There will be incredibly serious consequences to anyone who refuses even one that is. It's going to take a long time - years - before they are vindicated, but the punishment is going to start immediately.
Here’s an article discussing how Noem recently claimed that “no American citizens have been arrested or detained”, despite mountains of evidence to the contrary: https://blockclubchicago.org/2025/11/04/homeland-security-bo...
Here’s an article discussing how the recent video published by DHS about their success in DC was in fact composed of footage from different cities and months old: https://www.washingtonpost.com/investigations/2025/10/29/tru...
Here’s another article discussing some of the same incidents and others where DHS put out false statements and would not correct them: https://reason.com/2025/10/22/homeland-security-wont-stop-ly...
Here’s another letter from a congresswoman demanding DHS retract false statements made about an alleged criminal, who was later proven to be framed: https://gwenmoore.house.gov/news/documentsingle.aspx?Documen...
So why should I believe anything they say these days? They are blatantly lying, in ways that are manifestly obvious to anyone that is willing to look. We don’t owe the presumption of good faith to people who time and again have been publicly caught lying - and worse, who haven’t even tried to correct the record.
And let's look at the Reason article. "Martinez also was taken to the hospital by ambulance, and the criminal complaint against her only mentions two cars, not 10."
Ok, so the DHS "lied" about being boxed in by 2 not 10 cars. That seems to miss the forest for the tree no? The DHS agents were still boxed in - normally threatening federal law enforcement officers is illegal, no?
Now if you want to continue sea-lioning, pick someone else.
God help the USA if this eyes-closed standard of avoidance is commonplace.
But regardless, the Supreme Court did not allow profiling based on ethnicity alone. “To be clear, apparently ethnicity alone cannot furnish reasonable suspicion” is the direct quote from the decision.
What the court did allow are things like ethnicity, type of employment, location to be factors. That was based on the fact that those factors are directly related to job the government is trying to accomplish.
If French Canadians working illegally at tech companies in Boston are not major issue then it makes sense not to stop people that fit those profiles.
And now you need every single one of these events to occur, simultaneously. The chances of this happening is practically zero. And even if somehow this does happen, which it won't, it's at worst a significant inconvenience for the person who somehow managed to win the reverse lottery. Though in this case perhaps it's not even entirely the reverse lottery - because there'd be a big paycheck awaiting them in lawsuits, crowdfunding, media fees, and so on.
I simply don't see false positives as a realistic concern here, whatsoever. Going with your analog with the police I'd mention e.g. DNA tests or finger prints. These do have non-zero failure rates, but they're still regularly used to convict people simply because the failure rate is seen as acceptably low. And in this case, the conditional probability we're speaking of is probably even lower, and with much less at stake!
You're free to hope for these things if you want. But hoping does not make them true.
The reason divides on these sort of issues are probably irreconcilable is because of stuff like this. So many people seem to have missed the point of the childhood story of The Boy Who Cried Wolf.
You can’t start with this premise, though. Recent rulings allow stops based on “probable cause” such as a combination of “speaks Spanish”, “is brown”, and “is in a place where we think illegal immigrants might be”.
So like: any Latino US citizen, who happens to be working someplace like a landscaping company. Or a kitchen.
The idea that citizens aren’t likely to be targets is now laughable. And we have ample reporting indicating that in fact, citizens are being detained, for hours and hours (if not longer).
And as I was demonstrating above, the conditional probabilities required for a false positive from this app mean that it's practical effective accuracy rate will likely be 100%.
[1] - https://www.dhs.gov/news/2025/09/23/new-milestone-over-2-mil...
https://pages.nist.gov/frvt/html/frvt11.html?utm_source=chat...
https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/news/press-releases/2023/12/...
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2020/jan/24/met-polic...
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s00146-023-01634-z
https://www.mozillafoundation.org/en/blog/facial-recognition...
https://surface.syr.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=2479&con...
Yeah it's pretty fucking shit, actually.
Here's the science.
No. The model is, "Hey! this guy is being a pain in the ass. He even claimed that The President wasn't blessed with superintelligence and doesn't actually smell really good!
We need to get this terrorist off the streets! He sure looks a whole lot like that illegal on the FBI most wanted list, doesn't he? Off to CECOT with him!
What's that? He's a twelfth generation citizen? No way! Look, the app I used to claim this guy matches an illegal who's also a child rapist!
Your papers are all fake (if, as a citizen he's even carrying them). Onto the plane with you Senor.
That's the model. Feel free to disagree, but come back and reread this comment in 18 months. I hope you read it then and think "what a paranoid guy! Nothing like that could ever happen here!" But I'm not holding my breath. :(
If the paperwork is that easy to duplicate, it's on the government to make it more difficult, not beating in the faces of citizens until they produce documentation they don't have.
Hundreds of thousands of aliens with fraudulent documents seems like a huge problem to me.
Keep in mind it’s US law for every alien to keep documentation of legal status on their person at all times (US code 8 USC § 1304(e)).
Since we know fraudulent documents are not uncommon, then immigration officials must have some powers to validate a person’s status if uncertainty remains.
Obviously in case (1) you can just detain and carefully identify people, since they're actually doing dangerous things and you'll have probable cause to detain them. Note that this was the case that nearly all the 2024 election rhetoric was focused on (i.e., deporting the "rapists and murders".)
In practice we're seeing that the true goal is (2), rapid emergency deportation and arrest of non-criminal immigrants. There is absolutely no emergency that requires this to be done quickly or carelessly, such that there's any risk to US citizens' (or immigrants) civil rights. It can be done carefully, with strong evidence, without violating civil rights. But of course, violating civil rights and creating disorder appears to be the goal.
Controlling who enters and stays in your country is just table stakes for a functioning state. Without it, you don’t even have control over basic things like security.
In every other country I’ve lived in anyone who enters illegally or overstays is promptly removed.
So to answer your question, fraudulent documents is a massive problem. Now not only do you have no control over who enters and stays you have no ability to even determine who these people are even if you do encounter them.
But regardless it’s a 30 min video, so is there something you feel is important because I don’t have the time. Maybe an article from a more reputable source?
I mean it starts with “ICE agents breaking car windows”. If you’re asked to exit your vehicle by a federal law officer and you just roll up the window that will happen. The US (and in fact no country) has rules where a law enforcement officer with probable cause is supposed to give up when a suspect refuses to follow orders.
The five minutes I listened to seemed suspect since it’s a women just saying “they do this” with no sources. Am I just supposed to take her at her word?
Do you want evidence of ICE ignoring legal others? Citizens who were arrested for no reason? An ICE officer admitting they target people based on how they look and not on any actual legal criteria?
Or do you just want to look away and not see?
A YouTube video where someone summarizes what they think is happening is not facts.
But like I said point me to a specific time in that 30 min video you think supports your claim.
You did watch the whole thing, right?
I'm just pointing out the absurdity of claiming there's no faces in the facial recognition database
LLMs are sycophants, how you ask matters
While doing so can be ok, you should probably do some checking via non-LLM means as well.
Otherwise you'll end up misunderstanding things that you _think_ you've learned about. :(
The first point should not apply to everyone, but the second absolutely must. Trusting an un-auditable black box over all other evidence to determine who is allowed in the country is a violation of everyone's human rights.
I'm not sure about citizens being deported other than children of non-citizens together with their parents, but they are deporting huge numbers of people here legally on visas, green cards, and valid asylum claims. They revoked visas of some 6,000 college students - mostly for political "wrongthink" and then sent ICE agents after them, when it's actually legal in the USA for them to remain with a revoked student visa as long as they arrived legally, and illegal to detain or deport. They've also arrested and detained hundreds of citizens, that they absolutely knew were citizens, for peaceful protesting and video taping their illegal activities.
That's news to me.
…based on what, the independent research ProPublica did? DHS doesn’t even keep statistics on how many citizens they detain so I’m not sure we should be assuming the numbers here are that low.
In other words, ICE's errors are highly visible. That my approximation aligns with ProPublica's (which is probably a higher end ballpark since I doubt they were especially critical of any claims they discovered) is unsurprising.
I would be quite interested to know if you can cite sources on that.
> And we also live in the social media age where nothing gets more of those sacred likes and other such things (including that sweet sweet GoFundMe money) than framing oneself as a victim.
What, exactly, is your argument here? That it’s all fine because you think people will play victim and strike it rich on GoFundMe? I’m struggling to see what point you’re actually trying to make.
> They are actively trying to make a mountain out of every single molehill, yet they are clearly finding themselves annoyingly short of molehills.
Sources? Please list out what molehills were made into mountains. What evidence do you have that they are actively trying to do it because of their “bias”? You’re regurgitating tired, right-wing talking points. Back it up with evidence if you’re so sure about it.
> which is probably a higher end ballpark since I doubt they were especially critical of any claims they discovered
Well, sure. Let’s see some evidence that they weren’t critical enough with their reporting. My understanding is that they are a highly respected journalistic outfit. What makes you so sure they were playing fast and loose with the facts?
But if you want facts, let me google that for you. :)
Here's journalists documenting ICE arresting citizens. They do not have authority to do so: https://www.propublica.org/article/immigration-dhs-american-...
ICE violating rights by deporting citizens: https://www.nbcnews.com/news/amp/rcna224501
ICE holds man in limbo for two and a half months, violating due process: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/oct/30/ice-hidden-d...
Judge rules ICE did not have probable cause: https://thebeaconnews.org/stories/2025/10/09/ice-arrests-imm...
Judge rules ICE behavior "unlawful" by holding someone with protected status for months: https://nysfocus.com/2025/11/01/ice-immigrant-teen-released
Judge rules agents are violating probable cause by making up ICE warrants on the spot: https://www.nprillinois.org/illinois/2025-10-08/court-scruti...
Judge rules ICE violating 5th amendment: https://www.msnbc.com/msnbc/amp/rcna218624
Judge rules ICE violating due process. They also are routinely starving detainees and even denying them water: https://calmatters.org/justice/2025/07/la-immigration-restra...
Judge tells ICE to stop using riot and less-lethal rounds on journalists and protesters: https://news.wttw.com/2025/10/14/trump-administration-contin...
If you can't find facts, then it's a skill issue.
That’s incredibly disingenuous claim that “US citizens were deported”. ICE has already stated that US citizen child can remain with family in the US or go with their parents.
I’m guessing your other links of are similar quality.
Are you saying you’ve seen videos where ICE is like going to bus stops and just beating up random people? Everything I’ve seen is like, ICE rolls up, guys start running, ICE gets rough with them. Or ICE rolls up, people are heckling them, ICE gets rough with them. I think that would happen with any drug bust, for example. If people start heckling a swat team, does the swat team respond with kindness? Well, we don’t see many videos of that, because nobody heckles swat teams. Why are people fleeing, resisting or obstructing? They are law enforcement officers, and if you do that to them, you are going to have a bad time. Law enforcement in America has been like that for my entire life, at least.
Am I in some kind of filter bubble where I’ve only seen ICE videos of the sort I’ve described, and you’ve seen videos of ICE tackling a grandma getting the mail? I’m seriously asking, I just gave up watching videos like this because they were all like I described.
ICE refusing to look at documents seems not unreasonable, have all of those club bouncer tier men had training on how to spot fake government documents? Like can they know what every birth certificate from every state looks like from every year and then verify it on the spot? That doesn’t seem reasonable to expect once I thought about what it would entail.
> and any agents that try to act lawfully are purged
I was replying in a serious manner but comon this is flat earth tier foaming at the mouth stuff. You are seriously telling me that they are firing people who don’t break the law? That is like comic book tier villainy. How would we possibly even know that, did their policy book leak?
My theory is that this is triggering the mental programming everyone had as children about WW2 despite being a completely different situation. If you tell literally all children that X is the most evil thing ever, you might end up with adults who are so sensitive to recognizing X that they see it when it isn’t there.
Distinguishing who is legally allowed to be in the country from who isn't is literally ICE's entire job. If they aren't capable of recognizing official government documentation that definitively proves someone is allowed to be in the country, get them some fucking training before they go around arresting people.
The people who are entrusted with the enormous power of enacting violence on behalf of the state must be held to a higher standard than the people who are entrusted with protecting nightclubs from 20 year olds trying to get booze.
To me, free speech protections prevent rulers from closing off regions of ideology space, because they usually do so in their own self interest so we can’t trust them to do it even in cases when it is clearly for the true long term benefit of the group, which is why it is forbidden for them to forbid “speech”.
I also don’t believe in pornography as protected speech. I’m an atheist, I’m not a conservative, and I’m not against pornography. I don’t support pornography being made illegal. The protected speech argument for it is just stupid. And when you base reasonable practices on stupid legal arguments, you end up having… well, for example, abortion rights getting randomly rolled back by the court.
Yes, in a perfect utopia world, I agree with you that the hiding-foreigner purge guys would also be good at clerical type work. However, from what I’ve seen of humans, they can usually do one kind of thing or the other, not both. Like, guys who like to chase people and knock them down usually don’t like to perform detailed forgery analysis. To expect this is to expect ICE to be staffed by people with an uncommon trait combination. Have you had different experiences? If we had the FBI doing this, then yes the FBI can hire guys who can do both. If a massive org is spun up rapidly, then there is no way to apply the same kinds of hiring practices. I just don’t get the outrage here? Picture that happening in a movie, they hire a ton of guys who are beefy and like to throw people around, and then they rapidly train every one of them to spot fake passports and birth certificates from every state/year. That could make for an entertaining comedy plot, but would you find it realistic in a gritty drama?
Tangentially, I wonder why we haven’t seen more comparisons between ICE and the Spanish Inquisition, it feels much more accurate than the comparisons we do see (e.g. the other N word).
In the last week there were massive purges of regional ICE leadership all around the country, replacing them with more militarized border patrol people, because they have been reluctant to use excessive force. In a 60 minutes interview in the last week, Trump openly stated that he thinks ICE still isn't being violent enough. These purges are not just happening in the government- private universities and companies have been extorted, or attempted to be extorted into performing ideological purges. Take a look at the outrageous letter Trump sent Harvard, demanding that they replace half of their faculty with those in personal political ideological alignment with him, subject to external review by someone he appoints.
Yes, ICE is entering communities and just violently beating up people unprovoked- there are literally hundreds of videos of it that I have seen, on Instagram in particular- including from the ACLU. Look at what happened in Wilder Idaho, where they detained every man, women, and child at a massive public horse racing event, and shot rubber bullets, zip tied, and handcuffed children while sadistically beating their parents in front of them- long high res videos of it are all over.
People absolutely have a legal right to 'heckle' or protest government sponsored violence in their communities, and are being brutalized or detained for exercising their 1st amendment rights, by masked agents refusing to identify so they cannot be held accountable, regardless of their crimes. No, it is not unreasonable to expect federal agents tasked with enforcing immigration law to be mentally capable of reading passports or birth certificates proving citizenship- border agents do this for a million people entering the USA legally every single day.
Now go frame by frame at about the 5.5s mark. You can see the individual in question charge and then thrust his body in front of the responding ICE officer (watch how he leans left into the officer before they are in physical contact) to create a physical altercation. He then attempts to grab the legs of the officer as he jogs away. The same guy then comes out for more, and pushes one ICE officer dealing with somebody else, and then starts grappling with another ICE officer before he's finally tackled and arrested.
Media Framing:
- Surveillance footage shows Ice agents pushing 79-year-old man to the ground (Guardian)
- Car wash owner files $50M claim over injuries sustained during immigration raid (ABC)
- 79-year-old US citizen pinned by ICE agents (Fox)
- California wash owner tackled, arrested 'impeding' ICE arrest (USA Today)
- U.S. citizen files civil rights claim after ICE raid at his car wash (NBC)
As this is the first video ProPublica featured, presumably they think that's the most compelling case. In any case it's certainly one of their cases which are supposed to be injust, yet there wasn't even the slightest injustice there whatsoever. And now he wants $50 million lol. I'd also add that ProPublica implies that the government dropping charges in cases is because of lack of merit. In reality it's going to be a balance of gain:loss from such. This is one of those cases where the charges were dropped, but obviously that was not done for lack of merit.
[1] - https://www.splcenter.org/resources/stories/florida-sheriffs...
[2] - https://www.propublica.org/article/immigration-dhs-american-...
What you see as “thrusting” sure looks to me like he was trying to stop himself from a full-on run - why did he grab a door handle on the wall? Why would you grab and pull like that if you were trying to tackle?
And “grabbing his legs”… come on man. That looks a hell of a lot like an old man flailing after getting tackled.
And you think he grappled with the officer before getting arrested outside? It looks like precisely the opposite.
I’m sorry, I just can’t buy what you’re selling.
The reason he grabbed the door handle is because in his mind he thought he was going to be the one knocking the officer down. He's a big and very aggressive guy that's this spry at 79 - I'm positive this wasn't even remotely close to his first rodeo. He grabbed on to help maintain balance.
As another issue he wasn't running anywhere in particular, except towards the officer. As soon as he collides, he then gets up from crashing into him he turns around and starts racing back towards him again. He then pushes the other officer at 28 seconds and begins grappling with yet a third officer at 30 seconds. He's then tackled at 35 seconds.
Given he was not arrested for intentionally crashing into the first officer I think ICE was generally trying their hardest to ignore him, but that probably became impossible about the point he actively decided to start grappling with them.
My bad. Didn’t realize you already knew his heart, and that this was premeditated. And that you clearly know who his employees were and that they were here illegally.
Whoops. Since we know they’re guilty, I guess all that’s left to do is find the evidence!
Enjoy yourself. I won’t engage in this uncharitable, ugly discussion with you anymore. I hope you find peace in you heart, and I hope others treat you with the charity and dignity you’re clearly unwilling to give others.
He actually gave an explanation for this which we clearly know is a lie - he claimed that "when he tried to speak with the agents and show them the legal paperwork for his employees, they shoved him to the ground, and at least one agent put his knee on Shouhed’s neck." [1] He probably wasn't aware the outside altercation had been recorded. Where's the paperwork? And in this case 5 illegal aliens were arrested, including one who had already been arrested and deported twice previously.
There's a balance to all things in life. Obviously we should not be blindly prejudiced against individuals on one extreme, yet on the equal but opposite extreme one can be so open minded that your brain falls out.
[1] - https://www.newsweek.com/trump-admin-sued-for-50m-over-immig...