Six months ago I would have endorsed wide-scale deportations, but after seeing the consequences—families swept into jails, plain-clothes officers ambushing people on their way to work or school, and communities living in constant fear—it’s clear that indiscriminate removals are neither practical nor just. This approach diverts resources from pursuing violent offenders, erodes faith in the rule of law, and forces the whole country toward a “papers-please” surveillance culture, where everyone must carry ever-stricter IDs. Watching longtime neighbors dragged off for minor infractions, the policy feels capricious, and that perception of unfairness only accelerates the broader corrosion of civil liberties. A sound path must still secure the border, yet focus enforcement on genuine threats and offer law-abiding residents a transparent route to legal status, so safety is preserved without sacrificing the freedoms.
I think the most common of human mistakes is to think that because something is easy to say, it is easy to do.
Once you actually dig in to how to accomplish something you find the devil in the details and complexity in places you didn't realized it exists. I would not believe someone is an experienced programmer unless they understand this idea in their bones.
I think so many people here, with the benefit of hindsight, are accusatory, but they've committed this very same type of error themselves.
I am vehemently against this administration, but feeling like something must be done about border violations is reasonable and thinking there is a way to do that is reasonable. I personally don't think it's the best use of resources, but I think it is reasonable to want some kind of border with meaningful enforcement.
What is not reasonable is thinking this administration would do it in good faith, rather than as a means of power grabs against the legal system, but some people aren't capable of taking heed of warnings, and must experience consequences before they understand. Some people aren't able to think through "where is the public plan that explains this" and realize that if it's not there, if there is only the concept of a plan, then that's someone vying for power, not someone attempting to solve a problem.
When people come back to reality and choose to be grounded in it, that should be celebrated rather than persecuted even if they materially caused damage by their ignorance and lack of thought. Game theory requires punishment/defection against those who don't cooperate, but it also requires forgiveness for those who repent.
I strongly disagree with your framing. Yes, policies can have unintended consequences and immigration policy in particular is a minefield of obvious solutions having terrible results... But that's not what we're talking about.
When OP says "I was for wide-scale deportations until I saw people I like being deported", it's not a case of unintended consequences, it's a case of "When I voted for the leopard party I didn't think the leopards would eat the faces of people I like!"
Unintended consequences means things like "criminality increased because immigrant communities lost trust in the police".
But come on. "Families swept into jails, plain-clothes officers ambushing people on their way to work or school" is how deportations work. Being surprised by that is like being surprised that the death penalty means people get executed.
This isn't a failure of epistemology, it's a failure of empathy. OP just didn't think that the people getting deported would turn out to be people with moral value.
> When I voted for the leopard party I didn't think the leopards would eat the faces of people I like
This isn't a good-faith interpretation of their comment.
There are plenty of illegal immigrants with a criminal record. Trump's pitch was to deport them. There was also a pitch that strongly hinted at deporting basically anyone who isn't white, and I think this appealed to the racist fifth of Americans [1], but plenty of people were messaged the first part with the second being segregated to rallies, NewsMax, Twitter, et cetera.
An underdiscussed frustrating aspect of this whole era is that there is never any true retrospection. There is no adjustment in the credibility of the people who predicted exactly how things would play out or the people whose predictions ended up being incredibly wrong. If there is a lack of consequence for being wrong, it ends up meaning there won't be any consequences for maliciously lying in the moment knowing it's only a matter of time until they are proven wrong because when that day comes, they have already moved onto some other lie and the cycle continues.
Good question. I still think it's unfair for these people to stay here, when legal refugees spent waiting years or decades for permission to enter often in bad conditions in refugee camps. The issue here is officials keep rounding up students on legal visas and parents who’ve lived here for years—exactly the people the article labels “families who had lived in the United States for years and had deep ties to their communities.” Where are the fresh arrivals?
So basically you came to the same conclusion as everyone else who is against this (and who I assume you would consider to be your political opponents): that even though it sounds good and reasonable on paper (as a populist concept), in practice it is invariably used for arbitrary exercise of power.
Here is the thing: hard and complex problems require hard and complex solutions, but you chose to put in power the people who like easy solutions. I hope it’s never late to learn a lesson.
> hard and complex problems require hard and complex solutions
There's actually a simple solution to illegal immigration: go after the employers. We don't because we want to have our cake and eat it too. (Same reason these raids aren't happening on farms in red states.)
So, real story, I work in a university in Europe, and we’ve been told by the immigration explicitly that we need to increase at least 50% of rejections to applications from Pakistani students. Apparently they come with a student Visa to take a Master’s degree but after a month or two they get a job and disappear from the university. And this is not desirable.
The fun part is that they are allowed to work with their student Visa, and they pay the tuition fees normally, which is spicy.
So basically we have a huge gang problem right now, but instead of deporting gang criminals, we’re deporting honest Pakistani young people who are actually working legally for the country’s companies. But guess how many companies ever got in trouble for this?
I think people often forget that even though these people came here illegally, a majority of them submit themselves immediately to authorities to enter into the immigration court. Nine out of ten times, they are just given a future court date and released on their on recognizance legally into the United States (typically with some restrictions on movement).
Why? Because that's how the system was legally designed to work. You want them to stay here, because some % cases are valid (a lot surrender at ports of entry). So then you must ask yourself, what went wrong? Cartels figured out they could break the system by overwhelming it, yet we had a clear cut way to solve it.
The parties politicized the topic by not doing anything about it... and now here we are.
Question: When Obama/Biden supported legislation to hire more immigration judges to work through the backlog of cases, did you support the legislation as well?
There are for more just ways to handle this. These people are tyrant oligarchs, and need to be treated as such. Today's it's "those people", tomorrow it will be "your people".
I’m sure they thought it was like the Boondocks Catcher Freeman master’s version of slavery where they were all in the fields playing games and hanging out with pre-packed picnic baskets, waiting for the expedition
Competently? Just as DOGE isn't the only way to cut government waste, so are these injustices not a necessary component of wide-scale deportations. Most countries, of course, don't have to even attempt this, as they didn't neglect their borders for decades. We could as well blame this as a necessary consequence of that prior neglect, as payment coming due - but we won't, because we liked that policy, but don't like this one.
We also publicize these injustices widely, but when e.g. Meloni released the video of a migrant committing rape, the whole journalistic world called it an outrage and impermissible (then promptly returned to plastering the covers with the picture of a drowned child. A treatment the Southport children didn't get, nor does, e.g., Bernard Fowler's death [1] get the "well how did you think immigration would play out?" treatment).
A spin as old as time - when it's due to policies you like, it's all just random, isolated tragedies. When it's policies you don't like, it's an unavoidable, even deliberate consequence. You may recognize it from the "real communism has never been tried/free healthcare? what's next - gulags??" debate.
> could as well blame this as a necessary consequence of that prior neglect
The endgame for this policy is a Democrat President deporting and detaining abroad January 6th types, and other violent criminals on the right. (Or worse, nonviolent agitators.) Habeas corpus predates the Magna Carta [1] for a reason.
Well done for changing your mind. Most people would find this post impossible to write.
The arguments that changed your mind are important information. If we want to change the minds of fence sitters then focusing on these arguments should be the priority.
You make an interesting “right-wing” case against mass deportation of immigrants.
> This approach diverts resources from pursuing violent offenders, erodes faith in the rule of law, and forces the whole country toward a “papers-please” surveillance culture, where everyone must carry ever-stricter IDs.
There is no evidence of illegals voting in any significant number at all. GOP voter suppression had a far bigger effect than a minuscule number of illegals trying to vote for whatever reason.
They count toward the electoral college in the census. There is some recent analysis that suggests non-citizens give a ~20 seat advantage to 'blue states' in the house and electoral college. I'll see if I can dig up the source.
They don't have to vote to provide an electoral advantage.
Where are these alleged twelve million newcomers? If they really poured in to tilt elections, we’d see a sudden demographic spike, yet officials keep rounding up students on legal visas and parents who’ve lived here for years—exactly the people the article labels “families who had lived in the United States for years and had deep ties to their communities.” So where are the fresh arrivals this narrative depends on?
Feels like this conversation is full of people getting hung up on arguing the technicalities and exact phrasing of this situation. Is that really important to the broader conversation?
There's a poor child that's being withheld access to their medication and to their oncologists, and the adults in the room—adults in uniforms, adults with guns, adults in suits and adults in black robes—all of these adults are doing their adult things with their adult words, and the sum total of all that is the child still is without their cancer medicine.
What good can we be, if *this* result is the sum total of our good intentions?
>There's a poor child that's being withheld access to their medication and to their oncologists, and the adults in the room—adults in uniforms, adults with guns, adults in suits and adults in black robes—all of these adults are doing their adult things with their adult words, and the sum total of all that is the child still is without their cancer medicine.
People like to blame these sort of situations on leadership and systems, but every individual involved in this is making a personal choice to let this happen.
Even if you agree with the general motivations and principles behind these, do you not have the humanity to realize the absurdity and cruelness of what is being done in some of these examples? No special accommodation can be made to get the kid with cancer their medicine while they are in custody?
I genuinely don't know how those questions can be answered any other way than "cruelty is the point" and if that is your response, I don't know how you sleep at night.
> every individual involved in this is making a personal choice to let this happen.
To be fair, you and I are involved. I'm on vacation in Mexico. You're presumably also doing something comfortable. We've had, in the span of days, a judge arrested in her court room and multiple U.S. citizens--children, no less---illegally detained and deported.
It's blowing my mind to say this. But the right is clearly using violence as a political tactic. That means there is not only legitimacy, but necessity, in the opposition to begin deploying violence as a political tactic as well. (By this I mean disrupting infrastructure, interfering with law enforcement, disrupting lawmaking, et cetera. Break their cars. Hack their systems. Block their streets and maybe cause damage to their buildings. Under no circumstances do I mean causing physical harm to anyone.)
ICE "abruptly terminated" a phone call with the detained mother "when her spouse tried to provide legal counsel’s phone number". The brown shirts [1] are here.
Every individual involved in this is doing it because there is something to be gained. The system is basically saying “the more you deport, the more numbers you generate, the more funding you get and the less I will check what you do with it”. We can blame the individuals sure, but if they keep getting showered with money for doing the wrong thing, of course the system has a big responsibility. Why should the people involved not do this if they are being explicitly encouraged by their employer to do it?
Not all of those adults have good intentions. In fact, situation happened because of adults who have bad intentions, managed to execute them and are happy about the result.
And they have been giving benefit of the doubt too many times already. At this point, it is absurd to pretend there are good intentions in the core of this.
The assumption of "good intentions" is not really warranted at this point. This movement is mainly driven by people who feel they have been marginalized by our society, and they want to lash out and see other people get hurt, period.
Regardless of the ways they have been marginalized, and how much marginalization they have done to themselves by failing to engage with the complexity of the world and following malicious leaders instead, this is where we are at. We need to stare this bare reality in the face lest the supporters, enablers, and fence-sitters continue soothing themselves with rationalizations.
When you're a sheltered suburbanite nerd (yeah, even the "rural" ones) who will never have to truly worry about being in this situation, this is just an exciting news story to squabble over and smugly flounder about on your keyboard.
I feel more disgusted by the Americans who know this is wrong but do nothing. I have no patience for evil people, but the truly damned are all the Americans who know and sense better but do not or cannot act properly.
If deporting U.S. CITIZEN CHILDREN does not send you to the streets with fire and fury, you are well and truly lost. So much damn talk over the decades I've been alive about patriotism and liberty from America, but when a moment unquestionably calls for action, it turns out Americans were just unserious cosplayers the whole damn time.
>but the truly damned are all the Americans who know and sense better but do not or cannot act properly.
MLK said it best: "the moderate who is more devoted to order than to justice, who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice"
And even now you have people that think showing up with clever signs around the downtown parks / public areas on the weekend when all the government offices are closed are somehow going to get their message across. It's not enough. It was never enough. It wasn't enough for Vietnam or Iraq. It's definitely not going to be enough now. Americans are going to have to choose to do some uncomfortable and maybe even risky things to demonstrate our disapproval.
Or we have to admit that for many of us, this is who we actually are as a country. It certainly is a good bit of the voting public. I don't think it's a mistake that in basically one generation we lied to the world about Iraq then elected a fascist twice. And at that point I don't think stern dissent is an effective or even morally correct course of action.
I’ve been in the get-out-the-vote space for 25 years, now. I’ve been politically active against gerrymandering nearly as long. My wife was tooth-and-nails in the redistricting fight (in Texas; Texas!) for ~10 years.
Here’s my hands-on experience: at least half the people you meet are defective, to a scary extent, functionally in terms of empathy. Probably two thirds have serious executive functioning deficits. That means they can neither understand the plight of their fellows; and, even if they could, they could not generalize their own situation into a policy to help everyone in the same situation.
EDIT: most people don’t vote. A disproportionate number that do are both empathetic, and high have high levels of executive functioning skills. The flip side of the coin are activated people who are missing one-or-the-other skills, but are voting out of some other errant ideology. I want to be clear that the distribution of voters is “both sides”: there are disgusting and enlightened voters on both sides of the spectrum. We’re all trapped in the box, together.
My FIL has been a conservative his whole life and has never voted. He immediately recognized the nazi talking points from Trump. Said Trump was going full Nazi. But it wasn’t enough to get him to register to vote and vote against a nazi
> MLK said it best: "the moderate who is more devoted to order than to justice, who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice"
Are you a moderate who has a better plan? I ask that sincerely, if I've given up its not because I prefer peace but because I know a losing battle when I see one. We don't have a charismatic leader like MLK. The democratic party is in shambles. They're afraid of fighting the tariffs and alienating the working class. There is no one in the party who is broadly likeable, who has any chance of bringing the voting public together. Voters on the left still cling to their own personal pet peeves and insist they will never vote for anyone who doesn't specifically address whatever they think is the _real_ problem.
The sad reality is that Trump's policies are still really popular and if people are unhappy they are only unhappy with the execution. You see that in this thread. People see the this news story and see it as an unfortunate side effect of a basically good policy. They think illegal immigration is hurting our economy, they think 'anchor babies' are people taking advantage of a loophole that should be closed.
They think this country suffers because of tariffs and maybe they think Trump got carried away but they still support the idea. They are sick of Ukraine and think it's time we walked away. They think DEI means a black women will be hired over a white man under any circumstances. They think DEI in schools means our kids are being taught that the US is full of horrible backwards racists and sexists who need liberal saviors to make it better. They think that government agencies are overpaid and over bloated and full of people who don't do anything but get a fat paycheck.
These beliefs cut across people of all genders, of all colors, of all ages, of all states and cities. We can't even blame the boomers anymore and insist the younger generations will save us. No one will save us.
stop supporting moderate politicians that appeal to no damn person. find someone with charisma like obama. there is no magical moderate voter that the dems keep hoping to appeal to. they already have been the center right party for decades now.
> stop supporting moderate politicians that appeal to no damn person
I think you are right but I think half of democratic voters think the party has gone too left ( abortion, gender politics ) while half thinks it has gone too far right. The democratic party is trying to have it both ways and utterly failing, but in their defense I don't think fully embracing either side will be enough for them to win. The problem is largely the voters who absolutely refuse to compromise on their personal hill to die on. Republican voters will unite on anyone as long as they piss of the left.
> find someone with charisma like Obama
That person does not exist, or if they do they are too smart to support the shambling mess that is the democratic party.
I think the party is gambling that Trump makes such a hopeless mess of things that voters will have no choice but vote blue. I'm not sure they will win that gamble.
1. They don't know what they can do that will be effective.
2. They don't want to be targeted as dissidents or non-loyalists to the regime.
3. They're drained by their individual economic situations and worries.
4. They're drained by severe disappointment in large swaths of the electorate, and in the failure of checks and balances.
5. Events are so upsetting that they're in denial or consciously avoiding it.
It might be reassuring to see huge protests, but I wouldn't encourage individuals to do that anymore, because most of those people will be identified by the various surveillance technologies that we've built. (Half of the surveillance built by techbros, incidentally.) The identified can then be further suppressed with automation, and the barriers to doing that are much lower than mass physical roundups and concentration camps.
It’s worse than that. Far too many of us want this stuff.
I understand the basic idea of how you fight an oppressive regime everyone hates. I have no idea how you go about fighting one that half the country supports. Protests aren’t going to fix that.
Last time around, I could at least soothe myself with the idea that he only won because our electoral system is idiotic, and a lot of voters didn’t understand what they were voting for. This time? He won the most votes, and everyone had every opportunity to see what they were getting. I can only conclude that my countrymen are fucked in the head.
> I understand the basic idea of how you fight an oppressive regime everyone hates. I have no idea how you go about fighting one that half the country supports. Protests aren’t going to fix that.
In reality, around 22% of the US populace (not just voters, but everyone) voted for Trump. Similar voted for Harris.
The rest didn't vote. I refuse to attribute justifications, since they are too numerous.
But that is correct, peaceful protests like 50501 aren't going to do much. Their value is more networking and mutual aid creation/management.
What does work, especially historically, is violence. As a historian, when you look at pivotal points in history, changes were only won after a LOT of violence was applied.
The trick is that groups like 50501 are absolutely needed for a different reason. The governments cannot negotiate with 'terrorists', but can save face by negotiating with 'peaceful groups'. We see this recently with MLK and Malcolm X, Sinn Fein and IRA, Ghandi and dozens of separatist factions.
I'm not publically advocating violence, but the more fascist they become, well, that will be inevitable. Different people and groups have different lines in the sand.
We're already talking about breaching medical records for 'defectives' (autism) list, turning trans folk into non-humans, kidnapping/disappearing people off the street, tattle-tale emails and phone#s to report people, lebensraum (Canada, Greenland, etc), off-country concentration camps (CECOT), and more. And we're only 3 months in of 4 years.
If I had the ability to get out, I would have. But I'm guessing that even the better off here also don't have the ability.
I think you’re counting people who aren’t even eligible to vote. Among eligible voters, it was about 1/3rd to each of Trump, Harris, and staying home.
I don’t give a lot of credit to those who stayed home. They also knew who Trump was and decided to let others make the choice on their behalf.
I’m not confident that even violent action would change things when so many people are in favor of or at least ok with what’s going on. You’re not going to win a fight, so is the idea to win hearts and minds? I don’t see that working.
> I think you’re counting people who aren’t even eligible to vote. Among eligible voters, it was about 1/3rd to each of Trump, Harris, and staying home.
Oh, I absolutely am counting every human in the US, and not registered voters. Total counts are like 45% of the whole population voted.
I chose total counts to get a better idea of density vs political affiliation since we have those at the district level.
> I don’t give a lot of credit to those who stayed home. They also knew who Trump was and decided to let others make the choice on their behalf.
Perhaps. Perhaps not. Usually, the back and forth between statist democrat and statist republican weren't that much diverging, although campaigns would portray the other side as baby-eaters.
This is different. And even just 3 months, I'm seeing apolitical people come out of the woodwork and actually start being political. And even though I do vote, I get the idea of 'as long as politicians do decent, I don't care'.
> I’m not confident that even violent action would change things when so many people are in favor of or at least ok with what’s going on. You’re not going to win a fight, so is the idea to win hearts and minds? I don’t see that working.
I'm not seeing a fight ala lines of militia lining up firing in lines. I'm thinking what we're headed towards is much much more like Luigi. Or more historically, what we saw in France during WW2 - sabotage and hit-n-runs.
And the battle lines are also pretty defined as well. Its going to be a fight between rural and cities.
Like I said, if I had the ability to leave until the situation here comes to some semblance of sanity and stability (along with respect for human decency), I would leave. But at the moment, that is not an option for me. So instead, its a "what can I do to safeguard me and mine, for the foreseeable future?"
(So far, my answer is: grow my own food, get to know local farmers and pay/trade, connect with local mutual aid orgs, become more self-sufficient, canning and food preservation. That sort of stuff. Goal is to just blend in, and help non-violently where I can.)
Answering for myself, I don't see a movement that is strictly for due process, law, and order.
Each side is so encumbered with baggage that I don't want to support them.
One is breaking law and processes in egregious ways. The other thinks that law should not apply to illegal immigrants and even legal deportations are a due process violation.
I think the one who derailed the conversation did not do that on purpose, but yes, throwing in a technicality to us/the HN crowd is like throwing red meat to the lions.
It seems we as technical people give little reason for giving us a leading role in society. I admit that the media doesn't help as they keep the big picture out of frame, but then again, we are very easily cornered with minor details.
Anne Frank's house is not far from where I live. I bet that the term "forcefully" in a sentence like "She was forcefully deported" could have been up for debate too, who knows, but in the end it would not have really helped the girl.
> Is that really important to the broader conversation?
Habeas corpus predates the Magna Carta [1]. A U.S. citizen's right to habeas has been wilfully abrogated by the state. If this stands, I'm absolutely for taking all the pardoned January 6th nutters and sticking them in Guantanamo or wherever come 2028 or 2032.
Our legal system has always depended on vibes to mitigate technically correct unjust or catastrophic outcomes. It's broadly labelled "prosecutorial discretion", and operates at every level of the justice system.
Good vibes, or bad vibes? The technicalities of the law keep both in check. Vibes don't just allow us to "mitigate technically correct unjust...outcomes" - they also let people in power "mitigate technically correct just...outcomes" to achieve their own desired ends.
Prosecutorial discretion hasn’t meant much to me since the Bond got prosecuted for violating a chemical weapons treaty, and Yates got prosecuted for fish-shredding.
Sometimes the vibes are wrong, and things go haywire. This is why zero tolerance policies have to be instituted in schools. That doesnt mean the general idea is wrong. Strict adherence to written law will always fail justice. The world is too nuanced and too fractal to handle every edge case well.
I assume you believe it's important that the federal agents should raid every marijuana dispensary in the US and for the DOJ to prosecute dispensary owners and individuals who smoke and participate in weed consumption in each state. Is that correct? After all, technicalities matter.
The distrust of the press has been cultivated intentionally. A POTUS saying "What you're seeing and what you're reading is not what's happening" would have been seen too farcical for a comedy. And yet here we are.
Absolutely. And this whole idea of demonizing misinformation just makes it worse by implying that true information presented in a way that intentionally and actually misleads readers is somehow OK.
> The distrust of the press has been cultivated intentionally.
Yea, by the press itself, or, do you honestly believe the billionaire owner class of this form of media has done an excellent job reporting truthfully over the past 30 years?
Pull yourself back from your politics and genuinely consider this.
When reading an article, how do I figure out what the “good reporter” is trying to say, and distinguish it from what the “bad owner” is trying to say?
The best way I know is to carefully parse the text in its most literal form. That is what the “good reporter” is saying. The “general idea” of what is being said is probably what the editor wants.
Owners and editors want “wow” articles. Journalists know most of what they report is just “somebody said something.”
The point I'm replying to is that this was "cultivated intentionally." I understand the mechanism we're trying to determine the source.
You also seem to forget that journalists sometimes leave and become owners in their own right. Where does that blurry line begin and end, actually?
Means, motive, opportunity. It's always the same triad and you can't avoid applying to all parties involved.
Given that and the importance of broadcast media I can't imagine why anyone thought they were getting the truth. Or even if they were a highly selected and edited version of it.
But yet, due to the nature of asymmetric warfare, it's so easy to discredit a reputable institution that holds itself to some standards which sometimes are not met. All you need to attack it is to not have any such standards but just flood the zone with shit and when you say something wrong just lie or claim "I never claimed to be an expert, I hate experts, I'm just a comedian/or something like that"
What’s the conversation? Separating kids from parents or deporting them with parents because we don’t want them to be separate? There is no question about breaking the law by parents. Question is do you let children be with their mothers(who apparently asked to do so) or no.
As someone who came legally to Canada and went through thorough screening of 4 years before coming I just don’t get how people are ok with “cheaters” gaming the system.
“Think of the children” works when you are in a super white rich neighborhood, if you never lived in slums you won’t understand the abuse of the system by “think of the children”, you just don’t see it from the other side.
> just don’t get how people are ok with “cheaters” gaming the system.
This is a story about citizens being deported without due process, without access to lawyers, without access to healthcare.
You don't have to be "ok with cheaters" to still want those people to have basic human rights and to see the system have legitimate judicial review.
The punishment here is far worse than the crime, and it's directed at children who didn't commit the crime, and it was doled out in a horrifyingly abusive totalitarian police-state style. Maybe you're not seeing things from the right side?
>I just don’t get how people are ok with “cheaters” gaming the system.
I usually steer clear of talking about these issues but there's something in the framing of this issue that maga has intentionally made people misunderstand: People do not say "I'm going to risk my life crossing a desert, and then when i have kids I'll be untouchable!" The actual "cheaters" are the birth hotel operators, whose clients are wealthy international elites who fly in while pregnant, then immediately leave to raise their US citizen babies abroad:
These instances of people actually and deliberately cheating the system require a completely separate system of enforcement that does not need to target desperate people who happened to get pregnant over the course of living life and making ends meet and whose children for all intents and purposes will grow up as regular English-speaking Americans who will go to school, work and pay taxes just like everyone else. Immigrants on dual-intent visas(e.g forever h1b but not yet green card), asylum seekers, etc do not get pregnant to "cheat the system".
Have you seriously not gone through the thought exercise of why some thoughtful + well-informed people would oppose your opinion on the subject?
(1) in previous centuries, the US accepted as many immigrants as could arrive “on Ellis Island” and it only took a few weeks. All of the immigration barriers that you overcame were added by American legislators many centuries after my ancestors came to America. I don’t view “illegal immigrants” any different than I viewed my own ancestors who came to America in the 1500s.
(2) US law affords legal pathways to residency/ citizenship for refugees and political asylum claimants. Just because you used one slow legal workflow doesn’t mean you should look down on people who used a faster legal workflow. They aren’t “gaming” the system — they are using the fast lane that was installed purposefully. If anything, we should use the legislature to revisit the fast lane (the refugee and political asylum claims)
(3) an infant didn’t have any volition in this situation. Maybe they were born here as an “anchor baby” (which the Trump Admin is trying to redefine as not-a-citizen, breaking with all of the jurisprudence). If they were pushed over the border by their parents or someone else, we have a duty to make sure their life is handled with care, not malice.
(4) there are political and media interests in making “legal immigrants” like you hate other immigrants. It makes native born Americans feel like they have cover for their hatred of immigrants. You should sit with the thought experiment of whether it’s actually relevant to the conversation that you “spent years getting here the hard way” or whether the conversation would be more productive without it.
(5) the reason the “immigration system is broken” is because there are multiple factions in America who can’t agree on what kind of changes to make to it. Famously Obama tried to force Congress to deal with it around 2013, but the “Gang of Eight” couldn’t come up with even broad guidelines for changes that both parties would agree to. There are simply too many people who have strong opinions and yet believe untrue things about American immigration. Are you perhaps in this category?
Re point (5), the "gang of eight" bill would've been the de facto process (illegally entering, having children or marrying, attempting to bring family over via chain migration) the de jure one via advertising to the rest of the word that violating US immigration law does not matter. We ended up running an experiment over the course of the last 4 years to see what that looks like and the results are grim.
>There are simply too many people who have strong opinions and yet believe untrue things about American immigration.
You appear to be operating from a different premise than people who are skeptical of past efforts to "reform" immigration law. "Permanent legal mass migration" is not the bargain the country wants to make, and thus far every attempt to "reform" immigration operates from that initial premise.
> As someone who came legally to Canada and went through thorough screening of 4 years before coming I just don’t get how people are ok with “cheaters” gaming the system
We grew up with the idea that America was a beacon, not a whites-only gated community.
There’s no reason for us to think less of someone just because they want to be here. Our ancestors did exactly the same thing.
It sucks that you’re here complaining about the Statue of Liberty.
A dad of a kid was literally fighting for the kid to stay. He is an American. I read about one case and that was the situation.
Maybe stop making hypotheticals designed to excuse what happened and fake concerns. There was no attempt to keep family together oe do right by the kids.
> dad of a kid was literally fighting for the kid to stay. He is an American
Are you saying he's figuratively American, or that the father is a U.S. citizen. Because VML's petition for writ of habeas [1] doesn't mention the latter.
The broader conversation is impossible to have. “What policies do we need to ensure due process without compromising the effectiveness of immigration enforcement?” Even trying to start the conversation feels like a troll, because when the system looks like it does today who’s going to concede the premise that immigration enforcement shouldn’t be compromised?
This is what HN has felt like for the past ~year ish. Makes me realize this community has a lot of "bike shedding" types who easily miss the forest from the trees.
Slowly stopped looking for insight here on any topic that involves even a small amount of larger picture thinking, really quite sad.
From what research I've seen, the phrasing here should be that non-citizens were deported and chose to bring their US citizen children with them. The children themselves were not deported.
This in no way excuses any of the other issues like not allowing contact with legal advocates / attorneys.
Difficult to describe them as choosing to do anything:
> ICE held the families incommunicado, refusing or failing to respond to multiple attempts by attorneys and family members to contact them. In one instance, a mother was granted less than one minute on the phone before the call was abruptly terminated when her spouse tried to provide legal counsel’s phone number.
What would they do, leave their child in an ICE facility and hope that somehow word gets back to family to go get them?
I can't tell if this is a serious suggestion, or if it's proposed in the same tone as "a modest proposal".
In case you are serious: This is a pretty horrifying proposal. Humans can get microchipped, but these cost money, are very painful to administer, and importantly are RFID only, i.e. not useful for finding ones own children.
Yes, and that was with Obama and 'children in cages'.
Trump is only turning the screws that were firmly installed by all previous presidents and congresses. The only real shock to this immigration action is the blitzkrieg of immediacy, horror, and flaunting violating court orders.
Courts don't have police to enforce judgements. The executive branch does. Hard to enforce finger-wagging. (And well, hello arrested judge day yesterday)
Hn, as a forum for discussion, is fundamentally not equipped to rationally discuss America going this far off the rails.
It is far better suited for less difficult topics, like yet another web framework being developed or some 2% improvements in database access efficiency. For discussing real problems that impact human beings existentially, face-to-face conversation is vastly superior.
They would transfer custody to an individual who was allowed to remain in the US. This had been organized in the case of at least one of the US citizens deported (expelled?) here.
The mother and child were in custody, the father was not, and was prompt in acquiring legal counsel, arranging this, and suing, leading to exceptionally clear circumstances in this case. This is the docket for the lawsuit: https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/69940863/v-m-l-v-harper...
The mother was also technically able to speak with the father, though monitored, for less than a minute, and they were interrupted when the father attempted to give a number for the attorney to the mother.
To be clear, I'm not defending any of ICEs actions here, I'm saying that they kidnapped this child who had arrangements made to remain in the US despite ICEs best (also almost certainly illegal) attempts to prevent that from happening.
> The mother was also technically able to speak with the father, though monitored, for less than a minute, and they were interrupted when the father attempted to give a number for the attorney to the mother.
Based on your wording alone, would it be safe to say the mother was unable to avail herself of counsel before making a decision?
The fact that there's a lawsuit here with briefs describing what happened in detail, and rulings from a judge with detailed timelines, means we have a great deal more accurate information than most news stories provide. If you're not willing to make a judgement off of this information, when it is so unambiguous, you're never going to be able to make a judgement in time to react to anything.
The point of due process is to construct such a record. The fact that due process is being denied in these circumstances is one of the reasons that so much of the public discussion is rumor and innuendo.
And this is actually one of the many things that this executive doesn't seem to grasp about the fundamentals of how this England-inherited, American-modified government functions. Due process doesn't just protect the people. It protects the king from rumors abounding about his tyranny that eventually lead to his beheading, because if there is no record to show then there is no record to justify the actions of the crown either.
The Magna Carta has stood for about a thousand years. But it has stood because every monarch who tried to place themselves above it found themselves much shorter by the end of their reign.
If the mother is not a us citizen is she entitled to counsel? Or entitled to anything else? Curious to know to what parts of US law apply to non citizens and what parts do not.
In noncriminal matters such as deportations, there's no right to counsel at public expense. The broader rights to due process of law and habeas corpus have generally been held by the courts to apply to immigration detention and deportation, and people are certainly free to hire counsel at their own expense in such proceedings.
It gets tricky when a deportation is completed before a court can hear the case. Attempting to prevent a detainee from communicating their location and situation to someone who could bring a legal action on their behalf doesn't appear to be explicitly illegal, but it's certainly an attempt to subvert due process and probably ought to be illegal.
It’s interesting how the administration always talks about these people being here illegally and that they’re all criminals but then leverages the non-criminal aspect of the proceedings to their advantage.
I am arguing by pointing to the most clear and egregious violation of the law and human rights, that isn't meant to excuse any other violations.
I am not asserting that ICE followed any of the parents decisions, so I don't see that I could have possibly accidentally implied that ICEs actions were ok because they made the parents make an impossible choice and then followed it.
The actions by ICE in this and other cases are beyond defensible. If they have a case, let it be heard in open court with adequate counsel. Stop playing the silly reindeer games with people's lives.
That would be one way to make America great again.
> phrasing here should be that non-citizens were deported and chose to bring their US citizen children with them. The children themselves were not deported
This is what ICE alleges. They're a uniquely uncredible witness among government agencies [1][2].
A judge found the father's allegations worthy of meriting "strong suspicion that the Government just deported a
U.S. citizen with no meaningful process," an act which is itself illegal [3]. That is far more credible.
A post elsewhere about the details said ICE found the two-year old was unable to 'describe her status in full, intelligible sentences', so deported, even though her father (not deported and not consenting to his child's expulsion) wanted her left with him.
From my experience with two-tear olds, I guess ICE was technically correct.
The father explicitly did not want the child deported with the mother, had informed ICE of that, and initiated legal proceedings to that effect [1].
The mother and US citizen child were held largely incommunicado. They were not given access to a lawyer, and communication with the father was monitored, and upon the father attempting to give them the phone number for an attorney the phone was taken from the mother. Then promptly put on a flight out of the country
When a judge attempted to contact the mother, while the mother and child were still in US custody: The US did not respond for an hour presumably so that it could remove the mother and child from US custody prior to responding.
> The Government contends that this is all okay because the mother wishes that the child be deported with her. But the Court doesn’t know that. [2]
And that's a quote from the Trump appointed very Trump leaning [3] judge.
All actual evidence we have here is that the child was intentionally deported (expelled?) against the parents wishes. Certainly against one of the parents wishes.
Note that it's advised for a single parent traveling internationally with their children to carry an letter from the other parent granting permission, because it may otherwise be interpreted as an attempt at international kidnapping and you may be prevented from traveling. The US government itself says this: https://www.usa.gov/travel-documents-children
Yet here they are deliberately moving a child internationally against the express wishes of at least one of the parents.
Actually what happened in the US court here is the US court attempted to intercede while the mother and child were still in US custody and ICE ignored the court until they had successfully removed the mother and child from US custody. As a result the court never got to learn the mothers wishes at all.
The habeas petition for VMS (the two year old) indicates the father (who was not detained at the time of the filing) transferred provisional custody rights to a US citizen relative, and that communications with the mother (who was removed along with their US citizen child) were cut off when he tried to share their lawyers contact info
One thing I don’t understand is how this is even a choice the parents have the legal right to make, assuming their US citizen children do not have passports (I don’t know if the answer to that is publicly known). Can a child legally be taken out of the country without a passport and some kind of verifications?
Delay deporting the non-citizen parent at least until the citizen children have reasonable accomodations to remain in the country? "The plan" isn't sacred. Humans rights are sacred.
The government has a duty to protect its citizens. So in this case, that would mean finding suitable childcare for the citizen child before making them an orphan.
Can someone who down voted this comment please explain why? Is this because you do not agree with his general stance or because it simplifies and doesn't contribute to the debate?
Not sure who downvoted, but simply ending jus solis because authoritarians want to make people's lives miserable is an extreme position with an awful BATNA.
That’s a strawman argument that I would never advocate, and completely ignores my question.
Alternatives include arranging legal custody for the child and to stay in the US with a relative (as one family was attempting), or finding a legal way for them to leave the country with their parents.
Instead, it seems the government is rushing to illegally remove these children before the courts can intervene
The same happens to US citizens who have/bear children in other countries. Moreover some will do much as assume the children do not have local citizenship but US citizenship despite being born in that non-US country.
I've known children of US citizens who were presumed Americans though having been born in a south American country. Government kicked them all out for being personae non grata Americans --children not excepted.
That’s because, for a while, the USA has been seen as the main exponent (although obviously not the only one) of western ideals such as freedom, democracy, human rights, etc. So yeah it’s logical that people would expect that the “leader of the free world” does not act like some other random country.
Rather a different interpretation of the XIV. It was intended for slaves and the children of slaves (there were few non-British foreigners in the US) at the time. However, over time, it was interpreted to mean anyone not only the descendants of slaves/ex-slaves). That could very well be re-interpreted.
People born in the Germany made up about 3.5% of the US population (1.11 million) in 1860. While they were one of the largest groups, many states/territories had large percentages of other non-British people like California, where 9% of the population was born in China. Then you have territories like New Mexico where most of the population had been born in Mexico.
Regardless, the debates for the 14th Amendment make it absolutely clear they understood they understood a child born to, say, Chinese parents in the US would get citizenship.
“All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside.”
This seems pretty clear to me. How else could you interpret it?
The entire interpretation of that amendment turns on this phrase:
>and subject to the jurisdiction thereof
And if you go back and read what the drafters of that amendment stated they meant on the floor of congress, they did not intend it to mean Jus soli. The idea was so ridiculous at the time that no one thought it worth writing it down. Pity. The controlling Supreme Court case spends a lot of time talking about English Common Law and what "subject to the jurisdiction of the King" meant. It is not hard to believe, at all, that the current SCOTUS may have a different interpretation than "anyone who happens to be born across this line on the map is a US citizen and is granted all rights, responsibilities, and privileges thereof".
Having read the Senate debate on the amendment to grant citizenship to what would become the 14th amendment, I can't disagree more.
They were absolutely aware that is what it. Indeed, they stated it outright:
> The proposition before us … relates simply in that respect to the children begotten of Chinese parents in California, and it is proposed to declare that
they shall be citizens. … I am in favor of doing so. … We are entirely ready to
accept the provision proposed in this constitutional amendment, that the children born here of Mongolian parents shall be declared by the Constitution of the United States to be entitled to civil rights and to equal protection before the law with others.
- Senator John Conness (R-CA), May 29, 1866 during Senate debates on citizenship amendment introduced by Senator Jacob Howard (R-MI)
The only real change came when they worried that citizenship would be extended to Indians in tribes we had treaties saying we wouldn't do just that leading to a change that excluded them.
Do you have more info about what they said they meant?
Certainly that clause has weight. It excludes diplomats, members of occupying armies, and members of Native tribes. But it seems strange to apply it to others, unless you’re also going to say that they have immunity from our laws as well.
It's not that they have "immunity", it's about whether the US Government has jurisdiction over them, meaning they can conscript them in time of war, collect taxes and so on, and that there isn't another foreign power that can do or already does this.
Howard, who introduced the Amendment, said this[1]:
>This amendment which I have offered is simply declaratory of what I regard as the law of the land already, that every person born within the limits of the United States, and subject to their jurisdiction, is by virtue of natural law and national law a citizen of the United States. This will not, of course, include persons born in the United States who are foreigners, aliens, who belong to the families of ambassadors or foreign ministers accredited to the Government of the United States, but will include every other class of persons. It settles the great question of citizenship and removes all doubt as to what persons are or are not citizens of the United States.
>Now, all this amendment provides is, that all persons born in the United States and not subject to some foreign Power—for that, no doubt, is the meaning of the committee who have brought the matter before us—shall be considered as citizens of the United States ... If there are to be citizens of the United States entitled everywhere to the character of citizens of the United States, there should be some certain definition of what citizenship is, what has created the character of citizen as between himself and the United States, and the amendment says citizenship may depend upon birth, and I know of no better way to give rise to citizenship than the fact of birth within the territory of the United States, born of parents who at the time were subject to the authority of the United States.
Doubly funny that he added a line in that speech where he thinks all ambiguity is gone.
Thanks. Dude couldn’t even make his own statements unambiguous. And he can’t seem to make up his mind about whether the “subject to the jurisdiction” clause refers to the child or the parents.
Well then it's a good thing historical context matters more than numerical consensus when analyzing why the majority of two continents settled by Europeans in the last 500 years nearly all opted for one broad form of conferring citizenship over another. If you were to redact the name of all 195 countries, but list ten facts about them and draw random names, you could accurately predict which ones will have birthright citizenship just by looking at other properties.
Oh wow, what a choice! Imagine, having a gun to your head and saying "but i had a choice!" In no way can you say that these people, given no legal advocates, chose to bring their children, or at least freely chose.
Being eventually forced to decide whether to leave your child behind or take them with you out of the USA is a direct consequence of the choice to illegally enter the country.
Are you suggesting we never deport parents under any circumstance? Having a citizen child is not some get-out-deportation-free card.
No one is saying parents cannot be deported. Rather that ICE clearly engineered the circumstances to ensure the child and mother were deported without any practical opportunity for the child to stay.
> Entering the United States illegally is not classified as a civil offense; it is a criminal offense. Under U.S. law, specifically under Title 8 of the U.S. Code, unauthorized entry into the country is considered a misdemeanor. The specific statute is 8 U.S.C. § 1325
Conscription was, and probably still is in places around the world, a consequence of illegal entry or for a number of different offenses. It isn't here in the United States so I'm not sure what your point is.
Did a judge rule on this alleged "illegally"? Elon Musk also entered the country illegally to work by pretending to be a student, and somehow he got given the keys to the treasury.
No, that's a step down a terrible return to pre-Civil War policy. We should be actively fighting against enslavement and for due process, not throwing our hands up and saying "well, guess we can't [bring them back from El Salvador, have a sane policy with respect to families, have people's rights to citizenship and legal residence respected]".
> From what research I've seen, the phrasing here should be that non-citizens were deported and chose to bring their US citizen children with them. The children themselves were not deported.
That seems deliberately Orwellian. What's the "not deported" scenario you're imagining? Literally abandoning your child in a jail somewhere?!
It's not like these folks are in hotels, or have access to phones or family.
I mean, yikes. Is that really what we've come to in the discourse on this site? Putting scare quotes around "deported" to pretend that it's only "other issues" that are problems?
Not ironically, yes, that's where we are. I remember when we would say such things about a school of children being gunned down. "Really?? That's where we are now as a society? How did we let this happen?"
We let it happen by not saying "enough" when the last thing happened. If a school of kids gets gunned down and a society lets that slide, that society becomes one more tolerant of violence against children. We said we were powerless to stop that, so here we are now, bringing violence against children as a matter of federal policy.
The US has decided they do not want the mother in US, because she’s not citizen. I don’t understand why it’s Orwellian, it was written all over when she illegally entered the US. And she was given the choice to get separated or keep the child.
The only Orwellian thing is she was lied to by Democrats that she could lead a safe life in the US. That’s on you.
Honest question, does it have to be done this way? Or could they wait maybe 2 extra hours until the child was safe? It seems to me that they are cowards who prey on those weaker than them and are too afraid to face those of their “own size”.
You’re taking the rest of the world hostage with the child.
The crime was that she was allowed here in the first place, whether by the people who made her believe it was possible, or by her breaking the laws as the act of entry in the country.
> The only Orwellian thing is she was lied to by Democrats that she could lead a safe life in the US. That’s on you.
This cannot be overstated. I wish I had a thousand up votes to give you. Democrats made a promise they knew would never hold up just for the votes. Now the chickens are coming home to roost and these people who were lied to by Democrats are the ones paying the price.
It’s OK for a citizen to lose their rights if a political party exists that espouses views you don’t agree with and it’s possible someone related to that citizen may (or may not) have listened to those views?
I think the steelman version would be that the rights in question shouldn't exist. In that world view, the birthright citizenship granted by the 14th amendment is an inconvenience to be worked around; and the business here about forcing a "choice"[1] where the parents will "deport" their own citizen children is in fact the desired policy result and not a humanitarian horror.
[1] Which of course isn't one, thus the Orwellian point upthread.
The tired trope of blaming all bad Republican actions on Democrats because they "let it happen" is lame.
No, the democrats are not secretly worse because they're watching evil happen. The people doing the evil are worse, actually. That's just how that works.
What promise was that, exactly? Do you have a quote?
If not, and you mean “promise by inaction”, then could we say then that Trump made a promise to racists, neo-nazis, crypto criminals, the Russian government, etc?
This is not accurate, though I have found that people who steep in rightwing propaganda tend to repeat these type of talking points.
The Rawlsian veil ethic applies here.
EDIT: RE - the knee-jerk downvotes. I appreciate that people pointing out authoritarianism can be painful if you are embracing it. Cognitive dissonance is never a fun thing to work through, and having done it a few times I sympathize with the struggles you face or may be facing.
I'm not going to downvote you. But Rawls never applies. Rawls is a big scam. At root, it is relativism wrapped up in the august raiment of state-of-nature social contract theory, whatever his protests to the contrary; and the relativism in this case is what "feels right" to him and his fancy neighbors living in Cambridge.
Rawls is just an extension of the golden rule, and anyone who is against treating others how they themselves would wish to be treated is probably someone who shouldn't have authority over others.
"Two Undocumented Families and Their U.S.-Born Accomplices Deported by ICE"
And the following year, you won't need to include the undocumented families anymore. (And they won't be telling anyone about the citizens who were disappeared, so this headline won't get printed anyway and its formulation doesn't matter.)
So the US born children get to come back of their own accord, right? We're going to afford them the rights that every citizen of and person in this country has, like due process, right? We haven't forgotten the promise of the US to the world, to respect rights even when doing things people don't like, right?
This is less accurate. It erases the US citizenship of the children by being born here with the 14th Amendment, and subtly implies that they AREN'T citizens and are just "U.S.-Born" as if the 14th Amendment didn't apply (like Trump wants).
This has literally been declared not the case by the president, and being contested in court, and held as true by a significant percentage of the population. It’s not semantics - it’s become a point of national disagreement.
It also leaves out all mention of process. The issue here isn’t that the parents are choosing to bring their citizen children with them but that they’re being denied all ability to leave their citizen children with their citizen parent. This is the crux of the actual issue here.
It’s not the case already for foreign diplomats on US soil. If the Russian ambassador’s wife gives birth at a US hospital while visiting the embassy, the child does not get citizenship.
Mark my words, Trump is going to win that court case. It’s not far fetched at all to interpret “*
and subject to the jurisdiction thereof*” to mean people that have legally entered the country.
All people in the United States other than consular and other rare carve outs are subject to the jurisdiction of the United States government. Otherwise the government would have no ability to enforce its law on them. I think while you may be right due to political aspects of the Supreme Courts loyalties, it’s hard to find a reading where “jurisdiction” means “parents are citizens a-priori.” There’s no discussion of the parents, just that they’re subject to the laws of the United States, and citizenship and jurisdiction of the United States are concepts that have no intersection.
Notably, Trump's order also applies to people who entered the country legally. Why'd they include that if they think that only people who entered illegally are not "subject to the jurisdiction thereof?"
And it sure seems like the opinion of legal professionals is that it is far fetched.
It's not a matter of rationality and logic. The executive believes the 14th amendment only applies to former slaves. They don't believe it's operable in the 21st century and they don't believe it applies to foreign nationals. They call such children "anchor babies". Courts don't agree with that, but the executive also believes courts don't have the right to limit the executive when it comes to matters of immigration.
I can understand why this level of pedantry is annoying but we are not dealing with good faith arguments here. They are power plays.
> "U.S Born" == "U.S Citizenship" would be the default assumption of any rational, thinking person
Not in trump’s america, not if they have their way, and this nonsense wordplay is part of it. Look at the statements around a third term; those arent jokes
"U.S. Born" and "U.S. Citizen" are the same number of words though, so it just seems like you're deliberately obfuscating. Maybe a better headline would be "Two Undocumented Families and Their American Children Deported by ICE." That way we'd save a word and make it unambiguous: these children are Americans.
Less than half the population of the world live in birthright citizenship countries. Such countries as all of Eurasia except Pakistan, and all but a handful of African countries. Do those countries not have rational thinking people?
You're missing the point here. In the United States, the context of this discussion, birthright citizenship has been the law of the land for generations. It would be abnormal for someone in this context to think someone born in the US isn't a citizen. The right wing wants this to change, but it has not as of yet.
The rule of law requires due process and following court orders.
Declaring a fake 'invasion' and implementing authoritarianism under the guise of emergency powers was already done in Rome, and decidedly is not the rule of law.
February 29th, 2027, the so called "Hacker News" is declared a criminal and illegal site. The wartime powers delegated to the Supreme President allow him to imprison domestic enemies and remove them. Gradus_ad is right in the middle of explaining the difference between "begging" and "panhandling" to the hobo he is harrassing, when disguised agents grab him off the street for commenting on a criminal site. He is whisked off to a correction facility in Hungary (it is now illegal for this publication to call them "gulags") and never heard from again. Luckily the agents who disappeared him say everything was handled legally!
I sincerely hope people like you get sent to a Salvadoran torture gulag the next time you drive over the speed limit. Because we absolutely understand no circumstances can afford a breakdown in the rule of law.
I’m so tired of how when fascists operate in the open, the attempt to throw back their rhetoric to them is always perceived as “weak”, “beta”, and incompetent from the public at large. Feels like some SCP object of right wing reaction exists in this country.
There’s never any kind of “extreme” movement designed to stamp this shit out in the USA. It ends up being kids wearing red who have never done pushups or other hard exercise before, mixed with a healthy dose of spooks making absolutely sure that these organizations never gain any real power.
A whole lot of authoritarian bootlickers in this thread who are ready to sell out their countrymen to CECOT themselves deserve to spend some time in a torture prison like that - because there is nothing else in this world that will convince them of the utter inhumanity of such a place.
But you know, “so much for the tolerant left” and all that. Fuck this stupid, tyrannical, authoritarian, reality.
I seriously doubt you are of sufficient “in group” status to avoid the gulag.
I hope that it is never decided that you are a terrorist/enemy combatant/whatever and shipped off without due process to an American concentration camp. (Auschvits wasn’t in Germany either).
Oh, you are a citizen? “Home Grown” so to speak? Trump explicitly said that he needs five more concentration camps in El Salvador just for people like you.
But for interesting HN discussion... anyone got any juice on why this is happening. Is there orders going down the chain of command from the president to do this sort of thing. Was this behaviour always there but less reported before? Are they more emboldened by the current environment?
The current administration has set targets for numbers of people deported(which ICE is currently behind on). That creates an incentive to skip due process in order to get more people deported more quickly (and the awareness that there will no consequences for doing so probably contributes as well)
The administration has also been "defending" their absence of due process and trying to work around judge orders to stop, shaving as close to the letter of judicial orders as they could when they don't just ignore them entirely.
ICE taking that as carte blanche to smash and grab is perfectly logical given that agency is ICE.
And while trying to meet those numbers, they are being specifically told not to do mass raids of farms and other business in red states that will hurt Trump voters
Yep. Their rabble rousing lies are meeting the hard reality that the country depends on these workers. They can't deliver without destroying the food and construction industries. So it's random German tourists at the border.
Unless it’s Tyson chicken and the undocumented workers are getting a bit “uppitty” about OSHA stuff, then coordinate a raid but when the workers talk about the printed instructions they got from Tyson about how to fill out paperwork if you are undocumented, and what you plan to do about that, “we have no plans to investigate the company”.
Also, businesses caught employing illegal immigrants seemingly don't face any punishment either. Migrants wouldn't enter the US illegally if they couldn't find employment, and they wouldn't find employment if businesses were harshly punished. As it is, everyone is incentivized to keep this cat and mouse game going.
THe FBI/ICE sure cam after a judge that helped an illegal immigrant. I'm sure the FBI/ICE is using the same zeal to go after employers who helped them.
I suspect it's Trump donors they may be looking to spare, at least a bit. I don't get the impression they care about previous Trump voters very much, except to buy merch at this point.
Because it's always been happening. If they didn't already have this sort of abuse practiced they wouldn't be so good at it. The ACLU used to write basically the same exact pieces about the DEA
Maybe it's 10% or 20% more prevalent or worse, I can't say from my vantage point, but it's a difference of degree, not a categorical one. You read these stories and they read exactly like all the other stories of how all sorts of "criminals" have been abused by the system for years, especially when they have a political blank check to do do. Making it hard for people to get a lawyer, moving too fast for people to appeal anything or get outside scrutiny is exactly how these systems have always behaved when they feel like it.
Now it's ICE and not DEA or whatever but this is basically the level of abuse with which the authorities have always treated with.
It's nice that the public is paying attention now, but I have very little hope that it will actually lead to systemic changes.
It has not. We have never previously sent immigrants to foreign concentration camps. There were internment camps which were bad enough during the war, but we're now kidnapping people, sending them to El Salvador, and locking them up for life.
Especially the part about “we imprisoned legal residents of the US in a foreign country without due process and now can’t do anything about it, even though the Supreme Court told us we have to return them to the USA, because, whoops, they are imprisoned in a foreign country!” bit.
I don't like this kind of response because it's basically kind of an assumption, and you don't really give any evidence for it.
On one hand, sure, abuses by people in positions of power have always happened, so if you're just making a general argument that enforcement authorities abuse power, I mean yeah, human nature.
But this article is making some specific points:
1. Those who were deported were given basically zero access to even talk to a lawyer, and that in at least one case a habeas corpus petition was deliberately avoided by deporting the family at 6 AM before courts opened.
2. Multiple US minor citizen children were deported.
So, no, without more evidence, I'm not willing to believe that it's just some minor increase of degree. While yes, I'm sure there have been abuses in the past, the current policy seems hellbent on deporting as many people as possible, due process be damned, and that was not the policy in previous years. I'd also highlight that the current President has said, explicitly, that deporting people without due process is his goal: https://truthout.org/articles/we-cannot-give-everyone-a-tria...
In other words, I don't believe this is just an aberrant, abusive exception to the policy. It very much seems like this is the policy now.
No, this kind of deportation and treatment of prisoners/detainees has been happening forever. This exact behavior has been happening forever, not just a general idea of malfeasance. The current attention on it smacks of politics in a way that is also very inhuman. Remember the "kids in cages" saga?
> No, this kind of deportation and treatment of prisoners/detainees has been happening forever.
Another assertion without any justification or data.
> Remember the "kids in cages" saga?
Yes, of course, and that's the point. There was huge outcry then, and that cruel policy was implemented by the same person responsible for this policy. It doesn't make sense to say "this has been happening forever" and then bring up an example from 2017-2020. We are all well aware of Trump's view on immigration and the rule of law. The whole point is that Trump's policies are a huge aberration from what any other administration, Republican or Democrat, has put forth in the past 50 years.
Much as I detest the current administration, the parent comment is correct. While things under both Trump administrations did get mildly worse than they were under his Democrat predecessors, they were plenty bad under Obama and Biden as well.
> The story featured photos taken by AP’s Ross D. Franklin at a center run by the Customs and Border Protection Agency in Nogales, Arizona. One photo shows two unidentified female detainees sleeping in a holding cell. The caption refers to U.S. efforts to process 47,000 unaccompanied children at the Nogales center and another one in Brownsville, Texas.
I don't know how else you're supposed to handle 47,000 unaccompanied children when there simply aren't the facilities to hold them all, e.g. in foster homes. I think that is fundamentally different than deporting US citizens.
And yes, when it comes to Trump's first term, I don't really see anything wrong with keeping unaccompanied children in detention centers, at least temporarily. The much bigger issue I had was the specific policy of separating families.
My point is more that I'm not sure exactly how much of what ICE does can particularly be attributed to the administration, on account of the same sorts of stuff happening under every administration, and the waters getting muddied by things being presented in false contexts, which is what I was trying to show with the link I posted.
The family separation policy was horrible, but it was yet another piece of cruel dehumanization on the cruel dehumanization pile that was already there. Secretly revoking student visas and then snatching that person off the street by masked plainclothes officers like happened to Rumeysa Ozturk is cruel and awful, but also, the personnel who did that and their attitude did not appear overnight; ICE is has ICE has always been, and all that changes is the length of the leash given by the President.
What I object to is the implicit framing of what was happening pre-Trump as being fine and correct, and it's only what Trump is doing that's beyond the pale. But I am glad that it's opening people's eyes to what is happening and hope that by shining light on it, perhaps post-Trump we can move to something better than pre-Trump.
I almost completely agree with you here. But it is striking that they didn't need to create any new agencies to do this. All the parts of it were in place. They were in place already for trump to use the first time, and they were still in place when he got back into power.
Due process and transparency on border & immigration interactions has been alarmingly bad for a long time now. Has this never happened before, hidden inside this apparatus? I'm not confident of that. This is certainly different in its scale and ferocity. But I see where they are coming from too.
The treatment part has happened for decades, Las Hieleras is one of many examples. But the deporting citizens part hasn’t happened for about 70 years since Operation Wetback which was nearly an identical playbook of today.
Mass visa revocations happened about 50 years ago since the Iran Hostage Crisis. And a few other events over the 20th century reflect well with today like Japanese internment camps. CECOT out does Gitmo and Angel Island, but damn, we just do a lot of fascist and unjust stuff as a nation.
The 1880’s resulted in us switching our attention from Native Americans to immigrants and we never really let off the gas on that front.
>I don't like this kind of response because it's basically kind of an assumption, and you don't really give any evidence for it.
Whether you like it or not, it has indeed been happening for a long time, and under multiple administrations from either party. If you're interested in the tragedy of it all enough to care, then go look these cases up instead of first accusing someone of lying because they might be smearing a politician that you preferred, and who isn't the current orangutan in the White House.
Trump's administration is notably and vocally hostile to illegal immigrants, to migrants and I suspect to immigrants in general, but it's mainly still using the tools and practices that have long since been refined by multiple federal agencies whenever opportunities for heavy-handedness presented themselves.
Because it's Trump's administration, and enough of the major media system is unsupportive of him (still, for now), the matter is gaining more attention. This attention is a good thing, but it shouldn't cloud one from considering the possibility that the bureaucratic defects and authoritarian inertia of federal policing exist beyond the confines of a single type of administration.
This is like the third or fourth response I've seen that keeps making the same assertion with no evidence to back up their position. So I'll be very clear on what I think is new and not just "more of the same":
1. The deliberate attempts to deny due process by scheduling deportations before filed writs can be responded to in court.
2. The deportation of US minor citizen children as a matter of policy.
If you have any evidence of the above by non-Trump administrations, again as a matter of policy, I'm all ears. Everything else is just "feels".
>If you have any evidence of the above by non-Trump administrations, again as a matter of policy, I'm all ears. Everything else is just "feels".
I assume you know how to use the internet, so please go do a few searches, on Google or the search system of your choice, for the sake of informing yourself better. They're there, and if you care about the subject enough to make claims, you should be aware of wider history.
Illegal actions, whether by policy or by bureaucratic inertia towards authoritarian tendencies, have been the case under multiple previous administrations. Under Obama these were even (in a very different context) taken to the level of outright killing American citizens without due process via drone strike. Under Bush II, they involved very illegal and repeated acts of "extraordinary" rendition to black sites. There are more examples, many involving deportations.
Trump getting attention for things that have also been the case since before him poses the risk of making people think that it will all be okay if they just get rid of Trump, even if it's good that the attention is at least being given to this finally.
None of this is to defend the Trump administration or ICE. The cases documented in the link in this post are grotesque, and deserve the full force of censure by other branches of government and the public, and the media, but that doesn't excuse simplistic examinations of a wider injustice.
JFC if someone asks you multiple times for a source then provide a fucking source, instead of continuing to be an obnoxious holier-than-thou "do your own research you ignoramus" asshole.
You are so completely incompetent when it comes to discourse that I have to assume you are purposefully spreading misinformation. Either provide evidence or do everyone else the favor of shutting the fuck up you intolerable asshat.
I guess the question is how frequent it's been. A big part of Trumpism is taking sketchy practices that used to be exceptional and turning them into standard operating procedure, and then claiming "oh look others did this before"
I mean, look at Hillary Clinton's emails, extorting of lawfirms, big tech, etc, his ignoring of court orders, etc. All are things that you can look at and say "he's not the first to do this" and be completely correct, but completely missing the point that he's doing it waay more aggressively.
I actually mentioned this same worry in a previous comment on this post thread, and I don't think that i'm missing the point about Trump doing certain things in way more aggressive and possibly new ways. It's something that should be cause for lots of worry.
However, as I explained above, the deportations of citizens are nothing new and though it's good that they now receive attention, they should be viewed from the wider context of decades of federal overreach and authoritarian practices by certain agencies.
No due process at the borders is a shame both now and before, but hopefully this time there is a willingness to change things. Probably not at the next swing of power.
It is genuinely an extremely difficult challenge to manage illegal crossings if every individual must be processed through the full U.S. legal system which has massive resourcing and backlog problems (3m+ cases).
Voters across the political spectrum have made it unmistakably clear — in poll after poll — that they are deeply dissatisfied with the current rate of illegal and asylum-seeking entries.
Is there a morally permissible way to enact their will?
Immigration courts are already separate from the rest of the legal system so the implication here is wrong.
Going too slow for you? Hire more immigration judges, which are executive employees not full article 3 judges.
Voters across the political spectrum have made it clear in poll after poll the last few weeks that they do not approve of the way this administration is grabbing whoever they can and shipping them out of the country without any check or verification that they are deporting the right people.
If the administration can declare you an illegal immigrant with no due process they can ship anyone they want out of the country. They could grab you off the street, ship you to and El Salvador torture prison intentionally or by mistake (as they have already admitted to) and there’s nothing you can do about it.
Congress could increase funding for the courts enough so that they could do their job. But that would go against the Republican quest for smaller government and lower taxes.
This quest is a fig leaf. The expansion of the government has proceeded equally under both presidents. The republicans just choose to spend the budget on other things and are less willing to raise taxes to fund things. The current tariffs are an interesting PR workaround.
Admit that the current and past efforts to keep people out and quickly deport people failed. And then set up reliable systems of verifying people's citizenship before they can get a job and quickly deport those who should be deported.
Make it easier to work here legally in the US like it used to be in the 90s, and threaten CEOs with jail time if their companies have a pattern of hiring ineligible workers.
And let's be clear, a lot of this border security "crisis" is rooted in racism and Fox news alarmism. The GOP likes having the problem because it keeps the base angry.
If the law exceeds the government's ability to enforce it, relax it. It's de facto relaxed because of the lack of fundamental resources to enforce it... Put the reality on paper.
Stop treating the southern border as a war zone and reopen it. It used to be more open. It was, in fact, more open in that magical America great period that MAGA ostensibly seems to be nostalgic for. Not only did the country survive the openness, it flourished.
If the law is too hard to enforce, have less of it. Lower scrutiny. Hand out day passes. Welcome The stranger with a smile and a friendly wave.
In fact, that process is why deportation courts exist: The theory goes that you're not really punishing anyone, you're just sending them straight back out the door they just came through, therefore, a lower intensity of process is acceptable.
However that rationale becomes evil nonsense the moment a government starts "deporting" arrivals into a damned concentration camp, or back into the hands of people that want to kill them, seizing their property, separating them from their children, etc. since all of that is obviously punitive.
A world where the government gets to say "well it is annoying and expensive to follow the law give people rights so we just won't" is a horror show.
If the people really want a world where people are denied legal process then they can build the popular support for a constitutional amendment. Until then, the government is going to have to pay for this shit.
And we did have a legislative effort to reduce the number of illegal border crossings. Trump scuttled it.
Every day across the world thousands of people are removed from countries around the world for violating immigration laws. Except in cases of where it coincided with criminality, it's always going to be very ugly, because it means somebody had built up a life for themselves somewhere and that is now ended due to them having been born in a different place and then overstayed their permission, or never received such, to stay somewhere else.
Like in this case, what do you propose as an alternative with a precedent that you think could be agreeable to most people? The parents were in the country illegally, and the children's citizenship was solely one of birthright. Any sort of "pleasant" outcome would effectively require turning birthright citizenship into defacto citizenship for the parents as well, at least if they can stay illegally for long enough. That's not only completely unrealistic, but also a complete slap in the face to the millions of people who try to migrate legally and are refused entry.
The phrase "solely one of birthright" suggests the diminishment of the citizenship of certain people. That is not how citizenship works: no one is less of a citizen than anyone else.
The most objectionable part here — by far — is not the deportation of the parents, but the deportation of citizens and the lack of due process.
The alternative being proposed is that if ICE is going to deport the parents of US citizen children, the parents should be given the opportunity to seek legal counsel regarding how they're going to ensure care for their children.
I don't think it was meant to devalue their citizenship, but citizenship doesn't trump their safety or need to be with their parents. The parents are going to be deported for being here illegally, would you have the child be separated and put in a foster/community home? Emotions are important but the only pragmatic solution here is to deport all 3, if your nation's policy is deportation for being here illegally. I agree with that policy in general but not with the US policy of Trump of manhandling illegal aliens or their children. Nor do I agree the lawlessness of what they're doing currently by sending off "suspected gang members" without due process to what amount to torture camps in El Salvador.
What you’re really saying is you want this family broken up for the rage bait. You want the picture of a child crying for their mother as the plane takes off for the views.
US constitution thoughtfully disagrees with you, elevating presence on the land at birth over bloodline wrt citizenship.
“All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the state wherein they reside.” -US Constitution, 14th Amendment
Quite literally, US hospitals do have that magic pixie dust because they are on the land of this country.
Its not a coincidence that Switzerland is the longest-lasting democracy in the world by a factor of 4x, vs USA. Their framers had the foresight to enshrine their communities' common history, values, and culture.... over pixie dust.
> Parents pass on the shared history, values, and national culture to their kids.
Except our nation’s shared history, values, and national culture is that we’re a nation of immigrants, a melting pot of global cultures, a refuge for those in need, and a place where anyone can come to seek their fortune, so obviously American parents haven’t been passing on those values to their children if we’re still having this debate, and I think the only fair response to that is to deport all the children who don’t meet your standards of citizenship, by which I mean the entire cohort that’s arguing all this is OK.
To be blunt, America's children are getting a lot more of their shared cultural values from Bluey than their parents, so I think we could stand to pump the brakes on concern about whether children born in this country are as American as children born in this country to parents who were born in this country.
That way lies a very ugly argument about who is enough on the team. One that almost nobody who thinks themselves American wins, because the real winners of that argument should be the folks stuck into reservations by the alien ancestors of those who see themselves as "true Americans, born of Americans."
For Americans in particular, the best strategy for not having their own legitimacy challenged is definitely not to pull too hard on the legitimacy thread.
Do you really believe this? I've never met anyone opposed to birthright citizenship for the US. Our shared history, values, and national culture are all about immigration so this isn't computing for me. Plus the law seems settled on this issue, or at least was before Trump 2.0. I genuinely don't understand how thinking people can support the current administration's policies on numerous issues. Tried going to r/conservative, watching Fox News, etc. but it hasn't helped much to date.
It’s pretty easy to understand, you only need to look at which subset of immigrants they have a problem with. There’s one commonality with all of them, and it is (so to speak) only skin-deep.
> the children's citizenship was solely one of birthright
Under the US Constitution, this is not a distinction. What you're looking for is just "the children's citizenship" without this qualifier that signifies nothing under the law.
The better alternative is to aggressively enforce employment laws against employers. Immigrants come here and stay here to work.
And then, what? Are citizens beating down the doors to do these jobs but getting out-competed by migrants? Are these the same citizens who are lining up to do sweatshop labor when manufacturing “returns” to the US?
If undocumented workers are finding productive work in an economy with low unemployment then the problem is that the government is not facilitating them gaining legal status.
We do have a chicken and egg problem. I think the idea here is that it's a systemic issue and the enforcement is focussed on individuals. This is analogous to the concept of getting everyday people to recycle when the companies creating the products have greater control over how much garbage is produced.
Employers need to stop taking advantage of undocumented workers at artificially suppressed wages. This has acted like a subsidy keeping these poor business models afloat. This has led us to the situation we are in now, where we've become dependent on undocumented migrants (food production etc), who we are being taking advantage of (lower wages, less rights), and also trying to villanize & deport them (the article above). All simultaneously.
It's possible with careful coordination of industry, legislation, and immagration, we wouldn't be here. But now that we are, we need to either find a way to improve the situation or reverse it.
I don't think it's chicken and egg at all. I think lots of employers employ immigrants illegally, and then the immigrants take all the political heat. Anyone pissed about "all these illegals" should be at least just as pissed about all the businesses illegally employing them.
We should stop letting employers do this, and then we all discover that we still really want to employ immigrants, we should enable that, legally.
The problem would be minimum wage and insurance requirements for employing citizens. There are plenty of citizens that would work those jobs but nobody would hire them because they cost too much. What you are arguing for is to continue allowing people to come here so employers can pay them less than a citizen is legally required to be paid. Once they become legal employers no longer want to employ them for the same reason they don't want to hire citizens.
US citizens by and large don't want to go work in tobacco fields for $15/hr, in a state with $7/hr min wage. But mexican workers coming over legally, getting the work visas and all that... will.
or alternatively that the US doesn't have a guest worker program similar in scope to most of the developed world, and this is at least partially due to political concerns around birthright.
I'm in favor of that too, but I think this insistence on it being step 1 is actually just a resistance to solving the real problem. (Which is that employers are happy to pay below market wages to illegally employ immigrants who are here unlawfully.)
We should go after it all to include implementing E-Verify for all. Republicans are also in favor of the guest worker program to legally meet the demand. But we have to stop the flow
The data seem to show that at the end of Biden's term, ICE enforcement actions were very low. But for some reason, the stats page doesn't show Trump's previous term. https://www.ice.gov/statistics
Looking at the most recent DHS yearbook (apples and oranges, but the best I can find so far) at https://ohss.dhs.gov/topics/immigration/yearbook and scaling to match the curve at the ICE stats page, it looks like illegal immigration was way down at the end of Biden's term.
So maybe the influx was already slowed dramatically. I don't think it's possible to stop people from wanting to go to the US, except by making it worse that the places people are leaving. I don't think that's a worthy goal.
The question we have to ask ourselves is why was ICE not empowered to conduct enforcement ? Why were border crossings up over Biden’s term and then when Trump is elected and comes into office they drop dramatically ?
> Like in this case, what do you propose as an alternative with a precedent that you think could be agreeable to most people?
I like how nobody has actually answered this question yet, and have only harped on your birthright comment.
The parents are in the US illegally, ICE deports people who are in the US illegally. Presumably the parents didn’t want to leave their USC kids behind so they brought them.
I guess possible options are
1. Allow illegal parents to designate USC kids a guardian who has legal US immigration status
2. Dont deport illegal immigrants who have USC kids (basically making birthright transitive to parents)
While plenty of people would prefer 2) there would be a lot less outcry if they were allowing 1) especially in cases where the kid already has a legal USC guardian like the one discussed here where the father couldn't even speak with the mother before her and his child was deported.
No, the father is not. And when trying to get the mother legal help for her situation was cut off from her. Same when the court tried to get information, ICE ignored it, got her on a plane and then shortly after said “sorry, too late”.
The question then is the mother the legal guardian of the kids and was she given a choice to hand off the kids to someone else? If the mother was the legal guardian and she decided to take the USC kids with her, that is her right.
I think the details will matter here, it does seem like ICE skrewed the pooch here in not giving the family recourse to get the kids out of the detainee facility. If the USC kids were involuntarily detained that is a problem (despite it may be legal to do that according to US federal law).
> what do you propose as an alternative with a precedent that you think could be agreeable to most people?
How about real actual fucking due process? Maybe they can NOT cut off communication when the citizen father tried to provide her with a phone number for legal counsel. Anything else is ghoulish. Keep defending it if you really don’t give a shit about your level of humanity.
> and the children's citizenship was solely one of birthright
My citizenship is solely that way too, even though generations of my ancestors were also citizens.
Unless you personally naturalized then your citizenship is solely by birthright. The vast majority of US citizens are this way. Insisting that this is somehow worth less in terms of legal protections is just frankly wrong.
Imagine you said this for other circumstances. "Well, a parent going to prison is always going to be hard for the family - better imprison the whole family!"
First, the US needs to resolve its issue of citizenship. It has been proposed that the US citizenship model was always like the Swiss model - you could only be a citizen if you were born of at least 1 citizen (naturalized or otherwise). For reasons I'm not clear, this has not been strictly enforced for some time. Instead we defaulted to "anyone born in a US hospital is a citizen"
Then, as welfare, lack of law enforcement and border grew, the broken citizenship process became a larger problem that now we have to deal with.
To me, the answer to your question of what is the alternative is as follows: The sole act of breaking laws and cutting the line to come into the country, to then birth babies here for the pusposes of straightjacketing the host's own response seems like should not be allowed, full stop. The premise of becoming a US citizen cannot be grounded in 2 crimes being committed before you are a citizen (1 illegal entry, 1 lying about your asylum petition).
We then have the issue of citizenship. It cannot be that because you come out of a womb that happens to be passing by a US hospital, you are a US citizen. US hospitals do not have magic pixie dust that grant american-ness. The Swiss have the right model that you actually have to come from at least 1 national parent, to foster national unity. The Swiss have the longest-lasting democracy in the world for a reason. Ignoring this seems suicidal. In nature and history, no humans prospered without an organized tribe centered around shared history and values.
Then there are the cases of people that came here, all legally, and found a life worth having by contributing to society. There should be a path for them to be citizens. What that path looks like, I dont know. But that's a conversation worth having soon since they are paying the price for the crimes and abuse committed by the 1st group.
Let's remind ourselves of the text of the 14th amendment:
“All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside.”
> It has been proposed that the US citizenship model was always like the Swiss model - you could only be a citizen if you were born of at least 1 citizen (naturalized or otherwise). For reasons I'm not clear, this has not been strictly enforced for some time.
I think any clear reading of the 14th amendment shows that you are incorrect.
seems critical to make a determination on whether you are correct or not.
Take the act of a random french spy who goes to the UK for the purpose of defecting, without express permission of either government. Does that make him a subject to the UK crown? I think the historical outcome of such situation would be crystal-clear.
SCOTUS ruled on this over a hundred years ago, in the case of a child born in the US of Chinese immigrants who went to China in his 30s, and was denied re-entry. Denial theory: Chinese citizens are subject to the Chinese emperor annd therefore aren’t subject to the jurisdiction of the US.
SCOTUS response: “LOL”. 6-2 (1 abstention) in favor of him being a citizen. The majority assent lays out pretty clearly that the jurisdiction language was to except diplomats and Native American tribespeople who had different treaties and status.
The Wong Kim Ark ruling is super, super, super clear that it would only be in EXTRAORDINARY circumstances that the 14th wouldn’t apply. For instance, two people in an invasion force sent by King George to take back the colonies have a baby with each other on US soil: probably not a citizen. Even then, if those two were in prison and had the baby: probably a citizen. Baby of two diplomats: not a citizen (called out in the ruling).
The dissent says: The 14th was really about Dredd Scott, and giving former slaves born in US soil full citizenship rights, and therefore “jurisdiction” is obviously only for naturalized citizens: Mr. Ark didn’t seek citizenship and therefore didn’t have it, since he wasn’t a former slave or child of a former slave, the 14th doesn’t apply.
The current attempt to reframe the 14th while including the Ark ruling relies on the very novel idea that anyone in the country without permission is not “subject to the jurisdiction of the US”. ICE’s actions clearly bely that take. It’s not a tenable angle to try and get rid of birthright citizenship, full stop.
The 14th amendment discusses who is a citizen. It does not capture who is a subject to US jurisdictions, or not. That part is open to interpretation , likely because it is based in common law.
e: You've now edited your comment to be consistent with what you originally said. Before edit, the commenter said that the jurisdiction clause meant that at least one parent needed to be at least a legal visitor to the US.
Not only is that not in the text of the 14th, it's different from your original proposal two comments ago. If you really want to do this fine-grained reading to try to support your point, you might notice that 1. the subject to the jurisdiction clause is the baby, not the parents, 2. breaking a law does not mean you are not subject to the jurisdiction of the state you reside in.
Please note that the 14th Amendment does not “discuss” who is a citizen, a better word would be “establishes” or “determines” - the “discussion” happened during the drafting and ratification processes and all of those records are available for you to read. Post ratification, the court system uses those discussions as part of their decisions on issues related to clarification of questions that arose after ratification. Those court decisions are also available for you to read.
That's been a fringe legal theory for a while. But historically it's been understood that even if in the country illegally, somebody driving too fast is going to get a ticket, right? If they commit a crime they are thrown in jail. Clearly they are subject to jurisdiction.
but they could very well be deported 1st. There's nothing stopping that, in fact.
The only reason they go to jail is because de-facto that is is fair for the victimm in that he/she gets "Restitution" in the form of jail time for the non-citizen, and presumably, the foreign country may even be able to challenge that.
The dejure interpretation may be he should be banished, although that would be unfair to the victim.
It means that the parents must be immune from the US government actions. For example, if they are diplomats and literally can't be arrested even if they commit a murder in the plain sight.
Why does the birthright status quo need resolving? Why is there magic pixie dust based on who your parents are? None of these are fundamental truths. The US and the Swiss just chose different laws.
Exactly. Same for dual citizenship. I realize there is nothing right or wrong about whether a countries allows dual citizenship -- it's just two different ways of doing things. Although that's a bit of a stretch here.
> It has been proposed that the US citizenship model was always like the Swiss model - you could only be a citizen if you were born of at least 1 citizen (naturalized or otherwise)
I like this a lot. That makes total sense and would take away the incentive to cross the border to give birth.
The people that come here legally don't really build anything of significant value when you compare it to entire immigrant communities. Mexicans, Chinese, Indians, Irish, you name it, they build vast amounts of culture and businesses that get integrated into America. Even if you give me 2 million of the smartest legal immigrants, they will pale in comparison to what large immigrant communities offer to the fabric of America. This is deeply American issue, you either get it or you don't.
Just Apu from the Simpsons is only possible due to our immigration. Just the very fucking iconic cartoon character. This is not from legal immigration. Taco Tuesdays, every Irish pub, like, it sounds silly, but what they offer America is ten fold. I do not care about the best and the brightest, give us your tired and poor.
The American right-wing reeks of elitism (soft language for racist/xenophobic) and it is the antithesis of the American spirit and dream. I'm not with it.
This will be one of my final posts on this topic because I believe we are only in month five, and have 3.5 years to go. I pray the midterms are a landslide, and I pray the next Democrat grants Amnesty. See you all on the other side, because to me this issue is no different than the anit-gay marriage bullshit from the 2000s that we wiped the table clean of once and for all. We are a nation of immigrants and we will be so until eternity.
Common notion, but based in ignorance. I've found that the left wing is more idealistic, but in the sense that they have chosen not to learn from history and rely on immediate emotional values. The right wing sees second order effects and acts on them.
Thus, you get the left calling the right heartless/immoral/racist, and the right calling the left idiots.
No, they gave a list of policy differences - and justified them with an emotional argument: "cruel". They said nothing about the pragmatic justification of them. Which is exactly my point: the left tends to operate on ideological emotional values.
They could have said things like 'reproductive rights leads to X goods for the populace' or 'prohibition was a net positive in Y ways' or 'minimum wage laws are shown to improve GDP by Z amt on average' - but they didn't. They used an emotional argument. Like I said they would.
> The right wing sees second order effects and acts on them.
It’s hard to take this one at good faith. The right wing is very publicly melting down the CDC for glue while the second order effects of a preventable measles epidemic spreads through the country. Is there a more targeted claim you want to make?
The right wing had a big problem with the role the CDC played in the authoritarianism of the COVID era. Now they're melting down a weapon of that authoritarianism. What's more important, preserving civil rights by preventing authoritarianism, or a single epidemic? Gotta think long term here.
I suspect that you merely dislike the authoritarian things the government is currently doing; I dislike that the government is authoritarian. We are not the same.
"Not to learn from history"? We're in the twilight zone now. It's the right wing that is currently enacting tariffs, scapegoating immigrants, pushing for appeasement in Ukraine, etc.
The Republican party traded logic for populism long ago.
You've clearly only paid attention to ragebait. Because "integrated members of our society" is exactly what the right wing is interested in. But this is not what happened in recent years. The entire reason for the deportations is because they are not becoming "integrated members of our society" - it instead became "all crime-like" in places it wasn't before, and the correlation with the alien imports is just too obvious. It happened too fast and too much, and now the correction is just as hard.
"They are simply sick" and you're...... proving my point.
The issue is some ability to fight. For instance, I don’t think the child of a US citizen should be deported without consent of their citizen parent or a ruling against that parent. I’d like some assurance my own child won’t be disappeared to another country without my consent.
If only custody and other issues could have been determined h a court, not ICE ignoring the court while it expedited a flight out of the country then said “sorry, too late”.
> what do you propose as an alternative with a precedent
There is a moral answer, the practical answer, and two popular answers, none of which are particularly satisfying.
The moral answer is open borders. Both capital, which is generally freer than people are, and people should be able to vote with their feet. However, this is unsustainable unless all or a large bloc of countries allow it in reciprocity, or at least countries with an EU-like agreement. It would make a lot of sense for all of North America to have an EU-like agreement, economically, militarily, and legally.
The practical answer: amnesty for parents of children who are born here, conditional on criminality aversion. Like a form of probation.
The right-wing propaganda answer: immigrants somehow took jobs they are unwilling to do and therefore, while we might crack a few eggs making the omelette, all immigrants must go. Authoritarians love this view.
The left-wing propaganda: all immigrants are noble victims of evil capitalist systems, and therefore any control over borders is inherently racist and fascist. This is clearly also unsustainable, and authoritarians love for their opponents to have this view.
To what degree do we let the people decide how their republic is structured?
Voters have rejected this sort of cosmopolitanism at the ballot box, repeatedly. To suggest that governments should open borders over the wishes of their citizens seems to simply be an object-level misunderstanding over the goals of statecraft.
Because voters decided there was a common interest, cultural identity, etc. and mutually agreed on political integration. Voters clearly do not want a unified Americas.
The purpose of a Republic is to be a stable entity that ensures the welfare of its citizens. It is not to have a single-minded obsession with global welfare at the expense of its own sustainability or the desires of its citizens.
> voters decided there was a common interest, cultural identity, etc. and mutually agreed on political integration.
I'm less confident that this was performed in either location due to direct democracy, and more because it made political sense and was expedient at the time that these locale enacted the governance structure.
In other words, it's not a one-and-done-forever type discussion, and things (clearly) evolve over time.
We don't elect an all powerful leader. The people did vote for Trump. But "well they voted for Trump" is not an excuse for him to do literally anything. If the people want legislative changed then they elect people in Congress. If the people want to change the constitution itself then they can seek that too.
But "well Trump won so just have ICE kill them all" (this is what my aunt, a republican lobbyist, wants) is not a thing.
> The moral answer is open borders. Both capital, which is generally freer than people are, and people should be able to vote with their feet. However, this is unsustainable unless ..
A strong no on this being "the moral answer". If people are permitted to vote with their feet maybe people are also permitted to build pickets around communities. That sounds more "moral" to me than entirely ignoring the wishes of the chosen destination's "people". IFF the destination is happy to welcome people who think their community better than their own and want to move over, then fine, that is a much better candidate for "the moral answer".
We already do this between states in the US and in the EU, so clearly it can work in practice. We don't normally look at it that way, but that is precisely how we structured things.
> Any sort of "pleasant" outcome would effectively require turning birthright citizenship into defacto citizenship for the parents as well, at least if they can stay illegally for long enough.
No, there are lots of immigration statuses between "illegal" and "citizen". DAPA, which was the Obama administration's policy, gave parents of US citizens a status where they could get temporary renewable work permits and exemption for deportation. This was not citizenship, or even a status that could allow someone to eventually become a citizen.
Most of those statuses are called "visas" and they have been around for a while. Obama's innovation was giving a weird form of status ("we know you broke the law and we aren't enforcing it") to people who broke the law when crossing the border. Most people with a non-illegal and non-citizen status are supposed to apply for that status before crossing the border.
This gets at another portion of the answer to the "what's your alternative suggestion?" question: I'd suggest Congress pass laws, rather than presidents making stuff up, illegally. This is clearly not a partisan point! Every president in my voting lifetime - Bush, Obama, Trump, Biden - has made up immigration law while Congress sat on its thumbs.
It's not quite that Congress has sat on its thumbs. Individual Congressmen have been (figuratively) screaming at each other. Committees are at each other's throats trying to get some sort of legislation to the table. Nobody can stand the possibility of giving the other side what they want -- at the insistence of their constituents.
The net result, of course, is identical to if they had all stayed home.
There have been many laws passed by Congress addressing immigration. It is against law to cross the border without authorization. This particular case exists as a result of not enforcing those laws. Pretty simple.
Despite past congresses passing laws, the system is not good. A major contributor to the problem of people immigrating illegally is that our legal immigration system is a total mess. This is why there have been a number of efforts at reforms over the past few decades. But none of them have worked, leaving us in this situation where presidents from both parties do all this illegal stuff by executive action.
I think there has to be a reasonable solution that gives legal status to the guy who's been here for 20 years and is making a positive contribution to society, but doesn't allow someone to show up and exploit loopholes to stay forever.
I think a reasonable compromise would look something like this:
* Make it much easier for people to get temporary visas for the kinds of jobs where we need migrant workers.
* Provide a pathway to citizenship for people who have been in this country for a very long time and are contributing to society.
* Make it very difficult for people to come to the US without a visa - e.g. make people apply for asylum outside of the US. Stop issuing temporary protected status to huge blocks of migrants.
Unfortunately, political polarization has basically made it impossible for Congress to solve real problems.
Yep, the solution is pretty clear in broad strokes, as you described, but the bases of both parties advocate for radically opposed policy through executive action, which just makes the situation worse.
Sure, the point is that the poster I was responding to said that the only way to avoid putting US citizen minor children in a position where they have to either leave the country, or stay in the country without their parents, is to effectively grant citizenship to the parents. My point is that that's a false choice, it would be possible to grant the parents a temporary, conditional status that's based on having minor US-citizen children. It's not an ideal solution, but it protects the constitutional rights of US-citizen minor children without granting citizenship to the parents.
How is that any different from granting parents citizenship. In some sense you presume birthright citizenship doesn’t make sense. Let us say an immigrant illegally comes into the country and becomes a robber. He in fact, just mugs people on the street. Clearly he’s a net negative, someone you want to deport. Now he has a child. Now by virtue of him having a child, we can no longer deport him, because then we make the child who’s a citizen less parent less. Also assume in this case the mother is some criminal too, to drive the point home.
The simpler, logically consistent solution would be that the child’s citizenship is only granted if the parents are citizens. (Or at least if parents are not illegal immigrants). Then when you deport the parents, you can legally deport the child too. It still is not a pleasant situation, there is no ideal solution here, except he should have never been let in at all, but once he is, these seem the only choices
It's completely different. A conditional work visa is just that, conditional. If you commit a crime you can lose status and be deported. In fact, DAPA eligibility was dependent on not having a felony record. That is not the same thing as citizenship. There's no reason to believe that because you give a temporary work authorization to someone that you have to then make that person a citizen.
Citizenship by blood creates its own problems. I am eligible for Polish citizenship if I choose to pursue it based on where my ancestors lived. I have never been to Poland, don't speak the language, and don't really know that much about the culture or feel any loyalty or even much affinity to Poland. On the other hand, let's say that someone is born in Poland to immigrant parents. Culturally they are entirely Polish - they lived their whole life there, speak the language, were educated by the Polish school system and consider themselves entirely Polish - they've never lived anywhere else. Yet they would not have the same ability to become a citizen that I have. If I got Polish citizenship, I'd just take whatever benefits I could from it and contribute nothing to Poland. How is it logical that I could be a Polish citizen and this person couldn't be?
> also a complete slap in the face to the millions of people who try to migrate legally and are refused entry.
Yeah, it sounds like a completely unworkable situation.
If only there was some way to make it easier for people to stay in the United States with much relaxed concern about their citizenship status or documentation.
... Oh wait, we could just do that. Because it's our laws, which means it's rules for a game we made up for ourselves. The universe does not care about the lines drawn on a map. People do. If the lines drawn on a map and the separation of human beings across those lines is becoming painful... Maybe we stop hurting ourselves?
We could care less. We did care less in the past. It seemed to work pretty well.
The interesting thing about this parallel, is that the "final solution" in Germany was final because it was not the original solution.
Originally they wanted to, well, deport the undesirables to some far off country, initially to Madagascar if memory serves.
Managing mass incarceration and deportation is a difficult task however, and these people (both then and now) are not exactly competent at anything beyond bravado.
Watching this unfolding from afar is interesting, because I can do so with some healthy detachment. If I lived across the pond I would be pretty desperate right now.
Unfortunately, if this follows history, the safest thing to do is to not do anything, blend in, and wait for external help. Afaik, only a handful of Germans who resisted survived. But, I don’t see any help for us coming anytime soon.
Yeah, there are some possibilities. For example, if a strong resistance leader emerged. But, are there any good candidates for that role? I can't think of any.
Things like this are stopped by movements, not individual heroes. There are almost certainly organizations in your area already working against this. No one is coming to save us. But if anyone does it is the people who were already trying to, bolstered by people like you who see it now. Get in there.
I recognize the optimism, but realistically, without a strong and strategic leader, coordination will collapse into disorganization and infighting. Historical examples like Occupy Wall Street demonstrate that leaderless movements tend to self-sabotage and generate instability without achieving meaningful outcomes.
>Managing mass incarceration and deportation is a difficult task however, and these people (both then and now) are not exactly competent at anything beyond bravado.
The holocaust also required mass incarceration and deportation, except that the huge undertaking of deportation was towards death camps in occupied territories instead of some foreign land. On the first point above, I caution against thinking that it would be much easier; it wasn't really, they just decided that they wanted to kill the people they considered undesirable after all.
On the second point, it's worth noting that the efforts at expulsion partly failed because many other countries, despite knowing of the brutal repression being suffered by the jews (and others but the jews in particular) decided to stonewall most avenues of exit from Nazi domains. Deportation would have still been terrible, but at least it would have put millions of eventual victims outside the reach of gas chambers and death squads. Such as it was, a sort of tacit complicity of indifference didn't allow that to happen, by others who weren't even necessarily supporters of the Nazis.
In either case, be careful about calling evil people practicing evil ends incompetent. In so many ways they were very competent at far more than simple bravado, and underestimating the capabilities of barbaric monsters is always dangerous for future lessons.
> be careful about calling evil people practicing evil ends incompetent.
The Nazi were a mess, plagued with infighting, and completely incapable of measuring the strength of their opponents, which eventually led to their downfall.
Incompetent evil people can still do a lot of harm until they screw up for good. This doesn't stop them being incompetent.
>The Nazi were a mess, plagued with infighting, and completely incapable of measuring the strength of their opponents, which eventually led to their downfall.
no the Nazis weren't entirely a mess or completely incompetent.
There was lots of infighting, partly deliberately designed to be that way by Hitler's tactics for organizing his own subordinate leadership levels, but there was also a massive amount of military, industrial and logistical competence and a robust amount of cohesion and careful, powerful cooperation on fundamental aims.
Had there not been, the Nazi's never would have risen to power so effectively, formed their dictatorship so effectively or managed a colossal war against multiple enemies for so many years so effectively, and only been defeated at such a gargantuan cost in lives and resources. The Nazis underestimated the military strength of their enemies, but not nearly so badly as to not wage very effective war and pose a very, very serious threat to these enemies for several years.
I really suggest a book called "The Wages of Destruction: the making and breaking of the Nazi Economy" by Adam Tooze, as a nice basic primer on how wrong these ideas of supposedly incompetent Nazis are.
The above is all deviating a bit from the topic at hand but with this sidestep into a look at the Nazis, you're working from a simplistic caricature view of a more complex situation with complex evil people, and I fear that this is also all too common when many critics today view the Trump government. It's not staffed entirely by caricaturesque evil idiots. Many of its supporters are intelligent and cohesive in their guiding methodologies. (Also, no, the above isn't to compare the bad actions of Trump's government to the completely unrestrained monstrosities of the Nazis. I'm comparing defects of external analysis)
Seeing as how this article is talking about the deportation of US citizens, I'm going to question what exactly you mean by "here illegally".
Expanding the argument: I've just decided that you are illegally, and will thus be deported. As there is no due process, my word is law, have fun wherever you end up I literally do not care.
Does that seem fair? And before arguing "well this wouldn't happen, I'm not here illegally", again, this is an article about the deportation of US citizens. Children no less.
But their parents aren’t. Parents can be deported. So let’s imagine they did that. We’d have an article how cruel they stole / kidnapped a child from their parents. Would that be better?
Having a child doesn’t automatically provide a legal cover for staying and not getting deported. Maybe that’s a risk the parents didn’t know about?
No, that is a false dilemma. the right (and constitutional) thing to do is give all these people the due process and access to legal representation that they are entitled to, and work out a legal solution to all these conflicting concerns.
read the habeas petition for VMS (the two year old). The child has a US citizen relative and the father seems to have transferred provisional rights of custody to them.
> The child has a US citizen relative and the father seems to have transferred provisional rights of custody to them.
Right, I think that's the issue here it's not that the parents should be automatically allowed to say, it's that they were not given a chance in court to allow for that process - to find a relative.
There is a complication in the case because the provisional custody was canceled then renewed and transferred to Trish Mack.
> Also on April 22, 2025, V.M.L.’s father executed a Provisional Custody by Mandate under Louisiana Revised Statutes § 9:951, temporarily “delegat[ing] the provisional custody of” his two daughters to his U.S. citizen sister-in-law, who also lives in Baton Rouge, LA. The Mandate was notarized by a valid notary public in the state of Louisiana
> On April 24, 2025, the mandatary named in the Provisional Custody by Mandate terminated the agreement for personal reasons,
> V.M.L.’s father and Next Friend Petitioner Trish Mack executed a new notarized Provisional Custody by Mandate, delegating custodial authority to Ms. Mack
That sounds like something where due process is supposed to come into play. The best of a series of bad alternatives are worked out in a steady manner by a court system, rather than a hopped up racist at the border bragging about the president being in their corner.
I'm all right with changing that rule - anchor babies means we get two people and one them is brand new. Considering people are the most valuable resource, I think we should take all the potential anchors possible - let's give both parents citizenship automatically if they are parents of a citizen.
Let's fast track Aunts and Uncles too - maybe we can get the whole family.
> let's give both parents citizenship automatically if they are parents of a citizen.
Yeah that might work. Wonder if there is any legislative effort on that front. I guess with the current congress it won't happen, so perhaps nobody is trying.
What's the point in arguing about what-ifs? The children were deported. In real life. There's no need for hypothetical scenarios, focus on the actual point of the article and thread.
I am not sure what you're arguing for? Take the children away in real life and hand off to a random foster family. Sometimes they can stay with aunts or uncles. Sometimes there are no aunts or uncles.
> There's no need for hypothetical scenarios, focus on the actual point of the article and thread.
Ok, so what should we discuss about the article? To help the conversation move along it's easier to say "here is what I think" as opposed to tell someone "don't think or say that!" and leave it a that.
US citizen father wasn't allowed to take custody of his US citizen child, who was subsequently removed from the country to a place where the child presumably is not a citizen.
That's where court proceedings to establish custody would be necessary. But regardless, it's illegal to deport a citizen, especially to a third country where they are not a citizen.
> What's the point in arguing about what-ifs? The children were deported.
Anyone arguing in what-ifs agrees with the deportation but can't be that blatantly racist on here. Ignoring this specific case allows them to muddy the waters. Anyone playing Devil's Advocate consistently are usually part of the devil's party.
How do you know they are "illegally" shielding people? Was there any kind of process to figure this out?
Also, a few days back, you made the same point and someone furnished you links where legal migrants are being caught in a net. This is not an argument in good faith.
> When Hillary called half the nation "deplorables", that was closer to Hitler rhetoric than anything I've heard out of this administration.
Technically Secretary Clinton called half of her opponent’s supporters a “basket of deplorables.” So 0.25 of the voting population at most.
But if that sounds worse than anything uttered by this administration, you’re not listening closely. I’m Canadian and we’ve been called “one of the nastiest countries.”
> We're not deporting "undesirables", just those who flooded in here illegally.
Ironically you say that in the comments section of a US citizen being held prior to deportation. Maybe those pesky children are flooding in there illegally?
> if we didn't have people trying to illegally shield them from ICE.
If only those annoying people weren't trying to hide Jews from the SS back in the day eh?
> Equating that to Nazi Germany is disingenuous and completely off the mark.
By all means, proceed. I am watching from afar with amusement as the US descends into banana Republic status with a sprinkle of old school European fascism now that the ICE is basically acting like Stasi or Gestapo from years past.
I wonder what you would consider to be enough for the comparison to not be disingenuous anymore. Perhaps when the ovens are burning in some Central American death camp.
Why then are people with legal visas being detained or having their visas revoked if it is just those who "flooded here illegally" under threat?
Clinton said that many Trump voters were deplorables. Trump said that many immigrants are not human. Now I know which sounds more like the Nazis to me.
> "The Democrats say, 'Please don't call them animals. They're humans.' I said, 'No, they're not humans, they're not humans, they're animals,'" said Trump, president from 2017 to 2021.
I agree that "alien" is a fairly dehumanizing term, but this isn't what I am talking about. Trump said "No, they're not humans, they're not humans, they're animals."
>When Hillary called half the nation "deplorables", that was closer to Hitler rhetoric than anything I've heard out of this administration.
Lol. That was three campaigns ago, and she was correct, and you guys are still whining about it like a bunch of snowflakes. Let it go. Hillary Clinton can't hurt you anymore.
> When Hillary called half the nation "deplorables", that was closer to Hitler rhetoric than anything I've heard out of this administration.
Here’s Trump straight-up uding white nationalist rhetoric:
> Nobody has any idea where these people are coming from, and we know they come from prisons. We know they come from mental institutions [and] insane asylums. We know they're terrorists. Nobody has ever seen anything like we're witnessing right now. It is a very sad thing for our country. It's poisoning the blood of our country. It's so bad, and people are coming in with disease. People are coming in with every possible thing that you could have.
Now, it’s telling that you’re pretending not to have heard your guy say things like that while his administration is sending people to concentration camps without due process but are still upset about something from a decade ago which you are misrepresenting.
Here’s the full quote, which is notable because she identified the specific behaviors she considered deplorable AND explicitly called for sympathy for the large group of people who are motivated by problems in their lives rather than bigotry. Also note that she’s talking about half of the third of the country which votes for him.
> You know, to just be grossly generalistic, you could put half of Trump's supporters into what I call the basket of deplorables. (Laughter/applause) Right? (Laughter/applause) They're racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamophobic – you name it. And unfortunately, there are people like that. And he has lifted them up. He has given voice to their websites that used to only have 11,000 people – now have 11 million. He tweets and retweets their offensive hateful mean-spirited rhetoric. Now, some of those folks – they are irredeemable, but thankfully, they are not America.
> But the "other" basket – the other basket – and I know because I look at this crowd I see friends from all over America here: I see friends from Florida and Georgia and South Carolina and Texas and – as well as, you know, New York and California – but that "other" basket of people are people who feel the government has let them down, the economy has let them down, nobody cares about them, nobody worries about what happens to their lives and their futures; and they're just desperate for change. It doesn't really even matter where it comes from. They don't buy everything he says, but – he seems to hold out some hope that their lives will be different. They won't wake up and see their jobs disappear, lose a kid to heroin, feel like they're in a dead-end. Those are people we have to understand and empathize with as well.
That makes quite the contrast where he looks worse the more of his speech you read while her speech looks better in context and makes it clear that while he hates people based on who they are, she reserved judgement based on what they do.
The end goal was world domination, as in owning whole world. So, they would eventually come to Madagascar too.
Majority of Jews killed in Hocaust were not Germans. They were from conquered countries.
So, while there was some Madagascar plans floating and while they tried to deport as many German Jews (majority of who were atheists, considered themselves Germans etc) in first stages, they were aware there is going to be showdown later on anyway.
I too have noticed the same language coming out of folks here, folks that have had accounts for over 10 or 15 years. They were always here, but now they emboldened and they are doing their best to make sure that overton window stays very very open on the right.
I had a friend until recently. Really nice guy. Always looking out for people. Never said a bad word. In the last couple of years he turned into a nasty piece of work jumping on every politicised story out there and treating it as gospel. He alienated everyone around him.
It turns out that some people don't have a mind of their own and are waiting for orders.
Here is no exception. Look at the foaming at the mouth praise of the second coming of Microsoft when Satya took over. And where we are now? Look at the hype as well - blockchain, crypto and AI now. Mindless people slithering all over everything.
In fact I find a lot of the people in the technology sector to either be entirely morally bankrupt or lack any kind of self or societal awareness of their speech of actions. It disgusts me. I've been on HN pretty much since day one but the accounts last perhaps 6 months before I tire of it.
I moved out of the tech-first industry about 10 years ago and into a position of tech as a tool not a reason for a business existing and there are better people here.
I’ve been in tech for about 2 decades now, and the general culture has always been to disregard ethics and social impact. How many times have we heard “We’re just building tools. Tools are apolitical and ethically neutral, it’s how you use them that matters!” It turns out that is actually not the case.
Plus the insistence that we can cordon off an area of life and designate it non political is incredibly common but also pretty naive (and dare I say privileged).
That is to say, we in the tech industry often encourage this sort of moral bankruptcy and like to pretend we’re above it all.
I think a lot of that attitude is self-justification to proceed as they intend without moral compass. Personally I can't do that. Everything we do has a consequence.
I've got a copy of Careless People sitting in front of me I'm scared to read at the moment.
“It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.”
It’s definitely a factor (perhaps the dominant factor) and the easiest place to see it at play is on HN whenever the adtech industry is being criticized.
Since we are quoting, I quote FDR: "Democracy has disappeared in several other great nations--not because the people of those nations disliked democracy, but because they had grown tired of unemployment and insecurity, of seeing their children hungry while they sat helpless in the face of government confusion and government weakness through lack of leadership in government."
True, we are not in bad shape like 1930s Germany or United States but as neoliberalism rot has really set in, people feel economically shaky, and government clearly is not responsive to them. Combined with Social Media warping people brain on what is "success" and "strong man" who will take care of things is clearly appealing. Many of them can also be turned around but it's going to take some doing.
Are you serious? Trump campaigned on spreading cruelty to these people and he's doing it. There's financial incentive to keep people in private prisons, and we're paying to send them to concentration camps, so it's not money. It's just bigotry.
Your last statement is correct. They are just emboldened by the current political environment. Any law enforcement has a problem where all they see is criminals all day everyday, now we know they aren't always criminals, but that's their view point. There should be sufficient checks and balances to ensure that due process is still upheld. What we're seeing now is the lack of checks because law enforcement feels they will never be held accountable for violating due process. This, while likely not a direct order of the president, it is an environment that his rhetoric has fostered. Even in the cases where the supreme court has said, unanimously, that people have been deported improperly this environment causes those in positions to correct it to ignore the courts.
I support the general idea of expedited deportation of those here illegally, those without valid documents to be here, I don't automatically have a problem if there is greater restrictions on entering or issuing new visas, but I have a major problem with violating due process and these kind of mistakes that's are a result of lack of due diligence.
The courts need to get more heavily involved here. It's easy to blame the president but short of some directive telling people to violate the law the blame is misdirected (until it's election time). The blame needs to be on those individuals doing this thing or seeing it and ignoring it. This is where the courts need to totally strip away default qualified immunity, especially for immigration officers. Because qualified immunity allows them to just say they were following orders without them having to evaluate if what they are doing is legal or not.
I believe if qualified immunity was gone a lot of this nonsense would stop. They would make sure that anyone who was deported was meant to be deported.
I have a friend who is here legally awaiting an asylum hearing, been waiting for 5 years. They were stopped by police for a valid reason and, from what was described the police had probable cause, but the charge itself is very minor. Because she's documented waiting asylum they contacted immigration, for no reason. There was no probable cause to think she was in violation of her immigration status, but they still contacted them and they requested she be held. So now she detained and there's probable cause to do so but it's immigration so they can.
This is where no qualified immunity would make these officers think twice. They know they have no probable cause to continue to hold her beyond the initial charge. Without qualified immunity they would understand that continuing to hold someone after a judge has allowed their release means that they would lose their house their life their future. So I really think we need to end to qualified immunity across the board. Have the people who are supposed to protect us and be responsible for their actions.
Without qualified immunity, no one in their right mind would want to work in law enforcement. LE would become an easy target for malicious litigation where the cost/effort to defend would, itself, be the weapon, regardless of whether or not the lawsuits were won.
LE personnel would have to get insurance, like doctors, which would be crazy expensive and, considering their pay scale, unaffordable.
I don't like some of the implications of qualified immunity, but I understand why it's there and needed.
I think the only real solution to LE abuses is criminal accountability and prosecution. We already have the laws and processes in place to make that happen. It's hindered by the tribal nature of the human condition and I'm not sure you get around that very easily, at least, not at scale.
> LE personnel would have to get insurance, like doctors, which would be crazy expensive and, considering their pay scale, unaffordable.
So pay would have to go up?
There'd probably also have to be something where if they were following department policy, then the officer (well, their insurance) can turn around and demand reimbursement from the department.
"Qualified Immunity" comes from the fact Americans have independent judicial branch and can directly bring law enforcement into that judiciary. In most countries, any action against law enforcement for their official duties is limited to government/department so they have large scale defense anyways.
Qualified immunity, as it is today, is far too broad. Because literally any action that an officer takes that has not been specifically ruled on by the courts is a defaulted as being immune to prosecution. Even when that officer is knowingly violating department policy even when they're reasonably aware they are a violating the law. They still retain qualified immunity.
It's nice to live in that dreamland that we can resort to criminal prosecutions for officers who violate the law that does not happen as often as it should. As part of their job, what they are trained to do, is to be able to evaluate a reasonable suspicion and probable cause. Yet you regularly see officers violate those standards with impunity. The problem is when someone violates your rights by arresting you without sufficient probable cause there is nearly no recourse for the average person.
If immigration took you and held you for 2 weeks, how disruptive would that be to your life? Would you lose your house, your job, more than that? If it was found that they had no probable cause to for an arrest what realistic legal recourse do you have, and how many years would it take for that recourse?
So if you want to maintain qualified immunity because you believe it's a requirement for these people to do their jobs then where is the balance to that? Because right now there is no balance. If you don't want officers to be held directly responsible or to have to pay for expensive insurance policies somebody needs to pay because without a financial incentive things don't change. What about something that puts a strict financial incentive on getting things right at the first time. Obviously this would be a burden that the taxpayers share but when the taxpayers realize they're shelling out money for people who are not diligent in their work that will change very quickly. If someone is arrested and the courts find there was no probable cause for the arrest. How about $10,000 a day for every day that that person was held. That puts a meaningful financial burden on getting it right. Because then it becomes readily apparent which officers are problematic and which ones are not.
The situation we're in right now is not working and there doesn't seem to be any plans to fix it. Because literally my friend where there is no probable cause for them to be arrested and held by immigration is being held by immigration. Like most people they live month to month. So if they're not working nobody pays their bills nobody pays for their apartment. If they're held for 2 weeks or a month or God forbid even longer before they're let go where is the actual financial recourse because they lost everything in their life? Because your suggestion doesn't solve for that problem and provides no incentive for immigration to follow the laws or even follow the courts.
Because the interesting thing is with the original arrest they would have been released the next day on their own recognizance. Police that do not care about the constitutions or due process or the rights of individuals proactively contacted immigration and immigration requested that she be turned over to them. No reason given and there's no reason for the police to have suspected that a person with all the proper documentation and identification is in violation of any federal immigration law. So tell me honestly what is your solution if it's not to strip away qualified immunity and if it's not to place a heavy financial burden on these agencies in some way that directs back to the individuals that are willfully violating people's rights?
Previously with the family separation policy it was part of an aggressive campaign led by Stephen Miller personally. There are now a few more people who want to do this as much as he does, all in the administration. It was Trump who hired those people, and then it was Trump who rescinded family separations and fired Neilsen over it, because it made bad media. The public has a template for exactly how to stop it. All that said, this is what the Republican base wants.
The suffering is the point. The current administration thinks that by publicly treating anyone vaguely foreign horribly they will be able to end the allure illegal immigration. I guess the dirty secret is that this sort of stuff has been happening, the difference is that now the government wants everyone to know about it
> No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.
The states are responsible for providing equal protection of the laws to everyone here. The states need to stand up and fight ICE.
We honestly need a Democrat governor to grow a pair and begin arresting ICE agents unlawfully detaining and kidnapping people. Then let the FBI and Bondi escalate it into a full-blown states' rights issue.
I’m so tired of how pussy democrats are. The moderate wing is so dominated by corporate money that they’ll never do it and just let American fascism happen.
The left in America is ran by geriatrics (Bernie) or unelectable young people (AOC). None of them have the guile to do what you’ve said (or rather to pressure and call for the governors to do that).
The left has a pussyfooting problem. The left is beta, and has surrendered the aesthetics of power to the right again and again throught history (and the only times that they keep it they end up becoming as bad or worse than what they are fighting)
Of course they do. The hilarity of the US’s uniquely draconian global taxation system collides with its incomprehensible schizophrenic immigration system.
Except that’s not the situation here and you left a key option out.
D) the child remains with the legally resident / citizen parent or their immediate families
In these cases they have legally resident parents, just not the one who the child was with when snatched without due process. They’re being denied the ability to coordinate the handoff of the child to the other parent or family who can take responsibility. ICE is not allowing the families to coordinate the child’s care - they’re isolating the parent from their broader families, denying due process, access to legal representation, and unilaterally deporting US citizen children who have other options but were denied the ability to access them.
In the United States our constitution assures -all people- due process and basic human rights. There is no carve out that if you’re visiting the country or otherwise not a citizen that you can be summarily detained, deprived of liberty, and handled however the government chooses including extraordinary rendition to third countries for indefinite imprisonment without recourse. Nothing that is happening is allowable, or even defensible because however you feel about immigration - every action being taken could be taken to tourists, students, or other guests if allowed under the premise only citizens enjoy protections.
And in these cases, even citizens are being given no deference - and the fact they’re toddlers should be even more frightening.
Here’s a quote from the release that basically implies ICE is murdering one child summarily:
“””a U.S. citizen child suffering from a rare form of metastatic cancer was deported without medication or the ability to consult with their treating physicians–despite ICE being notified in advance of the child’s urgent medical needs.“””
So, the headline as written dramatically understates the situation, and the proposed dichotomy is false. There are many other options, spelled out in the law and regulation and requirements - even constitutionally - and they’re being ignored as an apparent matter of political policy.
> In these cases they have legally resident parents, just not the one who the child was with when snatched without due process.
Is that true? I re-read the article (but didn’t google for other sources), but nowhere could I see that definitively stated.
It would be interesting if the deportable mother of one of these minors (e.g. the one who is pregnant) decided to leave them with other family in the US rather than stay together as a family, but it is of course her right to make such a decision.
In the case of the two year old who was removed with their mother, they have US citizen family that the father is trying to transfer custody (it seems he doesn’t have legal status, but I haven’t seen a definitive source)
Except it’s not, because it’s not the parents but “a parent” being deported, and b) was phrased fallaciously to imply the child would be left alone without legal care givers.
Why is a) bad? Have you considered d) pass a different law? Why are you pretending the law is some immutable thing that we always need to follow, regardless of the situations an unjust law might place someone in if followed?
Why does the consequence have to be deportation? Can we imagine a form of deterrence that doesn’t necessitate the cruelty of familial separation? Do we at least agree that what is happening right now, to this family and to others, is deeply unjust?
What about the threat of jail? Is the US punitive system not effective? In many ways I'd rather be an immigrant than a citizen if the punishment for crimes is deportation rather than detention... as long as I'm not being sent to country that has also suspended their constitutional right to due process.
First, I don't believe this crime rises to the level of jail. Second, it doesn't make sense here because if the parents are jailed who will take care of the children? I'm also not sold on putting more people into the meat grinder of US judicial system. When they deported at least they will be free. Ironically, compared to the US judicial system, this is the more human approach.
You said "break the rules". If you meant border crossing say it next time. Also they aren't free if they are deported to, like I already said, a country that has also suspended due process.
You have misunderstood what it means to follow the law. The law guarantees liberties, but doesn't guarantee prosecution. Obama has DACA, which gives young illegal immigrants a deferral on their prosecution. More generally there's the concept of prosecutorial discretion. Have you ever for example driven a car badly, been pulled over, but the cop let you off with just a warning?
Surely you understand the difference between a cop declining to issue a speeding ticket and a federal "discretionary" policy that makes it de facto legal to violate standing immigration law at scale.
There is no difference. People often complain during the pandemic that the San Francisco police department has seemingly instituted a "discretionary" policy that makes it de facto legal to violate traffic law at scale, you know, including speeding, not stopping at stop signs, not yielding to pedestrians. https://www.reddit.com/r/sanfrancisco/comments/11nbnxw/san_f...
Maybe you are misunderstanding. A single cop deciding "okay today I'm letting you off with a warning" is quite different from the President directing the entire Federal bureaucracy to not enforce existing immigration law. If for some reason a large jurisdiction, say maybe the state of California, decided that it was policy to let everyone off with a warning for speeding infractions, then, if I squint hard enough and ignore a wide range of second and third order effects, then yeah maybe they are similar.
Or, for that matter, driven a car badly but not been pulled over at all? Surely in the interest of absolute lawfulness they then proceeded to the nearest police station to demand to be ticketed.
Nah, lies, propaganda, and an incoherent strategy for Biden leading to limited window with Harris lost the last election.
There was a perfectly cromulent immigration plan ready to be voted on by Congress before Trump threw a tantrum because it would have hurt his election chances.
A tangent, but a welcome one for sure! NIMBYism has led to some pretty terrible outcomes. I recommend giving the work of the StrongTowns organization a read for a critical review of current policy and upcoming issues associated with it, as well as reasonable recommendations for how we can make stronger communities.
"you don't apply the law" is a really dishonest way of phrasing this, when "hit them with a small financial penalty for the civil immigration violation and fast-track their green cards" is also an option.
Illegally immigrating to the US is a civil violation, not a criminal one, and far less of a threat to US safety than going 5mph over the speed limit or running red lights. It is entirely lawful for the executive and judicial branches to use discretion and compassion in cases when under-18 US citizens are involved.
I understand this is splitting hairs, but that law applies equally to US citizens. And formally people aren't deported for crossing into the US illegally, they are deported for being there without a valid visa/etc. (Informally there is more leeway for overstaying a work visa, of course.)
> c) deport the entire family, including the US minors. Since they have US citizenship, they can always return to the US
I mean sure. But let's let the next Democrat who's in charge determine that kidnapping or maybe even voting wrong are crimes that merit summary deportation. After all, if they're good citizens, they can always return.
The history of suspending habeas corpus is strikingly one way. Maybe we'll be the first society to defy that trend. But the end game we're heading to is mass political violence.
DEPORTING US CITIZENS is the logical choice? Logical to deport children to someplace they have never been and they don't have citizenship to? It's still illogical, evil, unconstitutional, and cruel.
Maybe if your labor is exploited by a capitalist hiring you illegally you should be legalized instead of humiliated and your life destroyed with a possible death sentence in a concentration camp. Meanwhile all the money you paid into this system is repatriated among "good just legal" citizens like yourself.
You benefit from this monstrosity that takes advantage of people and leaves them destitute and you know it deep down. If yall support this don't ever delude yourself into thinking you're a good person.
> "Deports" is wrong word for removing a citizen. "Expels" would be more appropriate.
While this is true, the use of what's technically the wrong word highlights that the wrong action is being applied.
The action is a deportation. The targets are people who must/shall not ever be deported. Therefore the headline immediately gets attention for concisely describing a violation.
I think what happened here is that the parents were here illegally. The children just had to accompany the parents. I find it quite possible that the children will be allowed back in once they no longer have to depend on their parents.
The reports of no due process or little to no due process for citizens[1], that is the main point to my understanding. Due process for [1] would at least include making sure the proper documentation was in order so they could easily return in the future, making sure any health care needs could be meet in Honduras or any other critical needs, (not all the details are in but) the father in [1] wanted the child to stay in the US, but they were deported anyway.
I am not seeing all the details I want, but given the reports of 4 year olds having to defend themselves without representation it is easy to believe these reports of no or little due process for child citizens.
You are correct. People watch too much TV and think this is out of the ordinary. If the children were kept here we'd be weeping about kids being separated from their parents.
Yes, because expelling citizens is illegal, and separating children from their families is tragic. Just being sarcastic and cynical about it doesn't change this.
This just dishonest. In the past, the rule of law applied. The law is not perfect or kind, but there was a process where people could defend themselves and egregious violations of U.S. law like this would be avoided. It wouldn’t be the child being “separated from their parents”, it would be the family choosing to go together OR the family choosing to have their child live with relatives.
The case we heard about yesterday illustrates the difference. A judge Trump appointed raised the alarm not just because due process is being violated but because a two year old’s father was pleading with the court to let his daughter live with him. Prior to this administration, nobody would have blinked an eye at a U.S. citizen switching custody to a U.S. citizen parent, and it’d save the government a lot of money to let that happen.
That's an unfortunate incident. As per my understanding, the father can technically go get the child back while the child is under the age of 16, using just the child's US birth certificate, but only through the land border. I understand that this can be difficult since traveling from Honduras to a US-Mexico land border crossing could not be too easy.
I have to wonder what horrors and shames ones pathway of life must have taken to think a person existing in a space is summarizable as illegal. A person cannot be illegal. They cannot exist in a space illegally. They could enter a space illegally. They could be unauthorized to be in a space. But by simple fact that they exist in the world, if the law makes them illegal to exist, then that law is unjust and should be considered void ab initio based on the very few common similarities among coherent moral frameworks.
From a practical perspective, as parents and tutelaries of children who have citizenship, they should be allowed to stay as guardians and join the US society. We have so many who thumb their nose at culture in the US, whether the right wanting to commit genocide against the outgroup under the guise of MAGA or the left self-shaming because they know the US can be morally better, but of all people, immigrants, especially undocumented and unauthorized immigrants who risk everything and worked outside standard pathways just for the chance to be at the periphery of US society, vulnerable to the predators and outlaws that inhabit that domain, they should be given extraordinary respect and consideration -- which is what we grant all persons who are in the United States and subject to its jurisdiction (which is geographically defined).
I cannot fathom being so far removed from facts on the ground as this comment suggests its commentator is.
1. "respect for the law" requires both due process, for both citizens and people in the geographical jurisdiction of the US, and respect for the courts. Anyone who works around due process and court orders does not respect the law. This is a general statement regarding the treatment by the current regime, using ICE, towards immigrants and anyone they think is associated to it. Literally -- this article is about deporting of US citizens held incommunicado and without legal representation, and people are already protesting judges being arrested and legal residents being exiled without due process.
2. "this is the rhetoric that drove the country to this point" would more appropriately be attributed the othering of immigrants and groups MAGA doesn't agree with - how many Haitians ate dogs and cats in Ohio? Maybe more than 0, but certainly not the unmoored groundswell of false-flag horror that crested at the rightful mocking of Trump's debate performance.[0] Ref: the moral teachings on motes, beams, eyes, Golden Rule, etc. across time and religions of all stripes. I reject the notion that me expressing empathy for immigrants and the xenophobists is rhetoric driving the country apart. It's calling a spade a spade.
3. "If you want more immigration, work to increase legal quotas and update the law." This is sort of one of those feel-good statements that have no meat or content in them. We had a perfectly cromulent immigration reform ready to go until Trump threw a tantrum and got Republican legislators to vote against their own interests because it would hurt his presidential chances. We could go back to that, it had some good political will, instead of the authoritarian nonsense chaotically deployed. Of course, you wouldn't want me to be the authoritarian -- we'd come out of things with an open border and trade agreement across the Americas because that's more efficient and morally justifiable than military intervention at a mis-named "invasion" at the border (almost as poorly named as DOGE). So rather than enabling groups to work towards coherent immigration strategies, we have a tyranny of the majority assumed to be the will of the land.[1]
[1] "It is abundantly clear that many activist judges around the country have been acting politically in order to sabotage President Trump's agenda, and disenfranchise the 77 million Americans that voted for him." - Rep. Derrick Van Orden (R-Wisc.) (This is 100% political grandstanding, since polls show that most people now disagree with Trump's agenda, [1a])
> A person cannot be illegal. They cannot exist in a space illegally.
I don't know if this is true, it seems more like a situational demand that you're making but giving it the tone of a fact that you're pointing out.
If you break into my house, and I shoot you while you're doing it, I won't go to prison. So either you're illegal, or I've become so extraordinarily legal that I can shoot people with impunity. Whatever has happened in that hypothetical, I do not think it is unjust. If you also do not, you don't agree with your own premise.
Maybe if you make it rhyme, it will slip past people's reasoning skills better.
> I have to wonder what horrors and shames ones pathway of life
You don't know anyone here. Your self-regard is off the charts.
> You don't know anyone here. Your self-regard is off the charts.
Ironically, I know myself fairly well and quite a few folks in all political persuasions, and thus remain confident in my priors. But I could see how one could mistake empathy for egomania.
Calling people "illegal" is a hallmark of steeping in rightwing/authoritarian propaganda as it is about "othering" others. Self-abuse should be discouraged whether it is physical (cutting, suicide, etc.) or mental (losing one's capacity and faculties for reasoning to authoritarian propaganda).[0,1,2,3]
In fact I looked this up recently, and “deportation” has historically been used in the sense of “dispossession”, i.e. expelling citizens. For example the notorious deportation of defeated Jews to Babylon.
But nowadays that “deportation” so often connotes “repatriation” we’ll need to make those distinctions. And people seem to be completely unaware: we’re in a Year of Ordinary Jubilee!
There are already words for that: banished, disappeared, forced exiled, concentration camp victim... just reuse terms already used to describe crimes done by nazis and other fascist goverments.
It's 2018. Children are being separated from their parents and kept in cages[1]. It's really important to notice that the pictures in this article are not from reporters, leaks or anything of the sort. They were released by Customs and Border Protection and, no doubt, make things look better than they were.
What has changed since Trump's first term? Yes, there is now a stronger sensitivity to separating children from their parents, among the public at least. One solution is to simply deport child citizens along with non-citizen parents and claim it was by choice.
What solutions are we not seeing in the media though? How many photos are being published about conditions in ICE facilities, Guantanamo bay, etc.? What's going on that we just don't know about this time? If some judge ordered the release of photos of current conditions in ICE facilities, they'd be ignored or even charged with some made-up crime.
I see a lot of people here trying to reason this away, but it's going to be worse than last time and, eventually, the truth will get out. I know it's tough to care about this while Trump is simultaneously tanking the stock market, waging trade wars, threatening multiple countries with invasion or annexation, etc.. That is by design. Even Americans who cannot spare any sympathy for immigrants need to make the time to care about how their government is treating American children.
It's 2000, Bill Clinton is about to wrap up his second term and has deported more people in that term than any president ever at nearly 7,000,000 deportations. Trump barely had 2,000,000 deportations in his first term. Trump's first term was the lowest level of deportations for any administration since Carter. Obama, Reagan, Both Bushes, Clinton and Biden all deported more people every term of their administrations.
This has been going on for a long time. I doubt Trump will beat Clinton's 2nd term. I'd be willing to bet on it if anyone wants to take the other side.
There is so much lack of context in all these discussions. The 'Maryland Man' that everyone is extremely concerned about was first deported by Obama admin in 2009. Remigration is an ugly business, but it has to happen if you want to live in a sovereign nation under the rule of law.
Saying "there is no such thing as a perfect process" when discussing the unconstitutional deportation of LITERAL American citizens on an overnight, including a child with cancer deprived of medication, isn't a reasonable position. It's an attempt to normalize extreme rights violations.
> Remigration is an ugly business, but it has to happen if you want to live in a sovereign nation under the rule of law.
god, what enemies do you have?? I don't know how you go from "give them due process" to "the west has fallen" unless you mean restricting migration by law, which Biden proposed and Trump rejected last year. I'm actually curious - are you aware of that law? Did you hear about it?
>Saying "there is no such thing as a perfect process" when discussing the unconstitutional deportation of LITERAL American citizens on an overnight, including a child with cancer deprived of medication, isn't a reasonable position. It's an attempt to normalize extreme rights violations.
As I've mentioned in other comments non-judicial removals (no immigration hearing) are in fact very common accounting for nearly 75% of all removals. Deportation of American citizens has happened, and it is wrong. It's been happening every year in small numbers for the last 30 years. In the OP case in particular the children were deported with the parents at the parent's request according to a DHS statement. So this was not a mistake.
>I'm actually curious - are you aware of that law? Did you hear about it?
Of course, you're talking about The Emergency National Security Supplemental Appropriations Act. The 'immigration amendment' wasn't really necessary and you could argue the better electronic communications outlined in the bill actually could increase immigration efficiency. It was a very popular lie that legislation was needed to stop millions of illegals from entering the country during the Biden administration. Border crossings have dropped ~95% since the new administration took over. Probably for two main reasons, no more parole while waiting for a hearing and NGO funding drying up.
If you think it's wrong then it certainly does not 'has to happen if you want to live in a sovereign nation under the rule of law'
If you can't criticize the overall objective (large-scale depopulation of America because so-called undesirables don't meet arbitrary legal criteria) then at least criticize the approach - don't call it an ugly but necessary business.
Call it a completely unnecessary violation of civil rights and due process that it is! Don't make up garbage about sovereignty.
My argument was that remigration is never going to be pretty however it is necessary to enforce your immigration laws as a nation to be fully sovereign. Deporting citizens was never part of that argument. It's obviously wrong, it's been happening at a small scale for decades. If that number changes and we see even a 2-3x growth in the number Americans mistakenly deported, I'll be the first in line to call for regime change. It's unacceptable just like the talk of sending US Citizens to foreign prisons, it's just insane.
At this point I mostly agree with you, but I kinda want to keep going on the sovereignty thing. Prosecutorial discretion and state incapacity to prosecute every crime has existed... literally forever. Sovereignty only means "supreme power or authority" - I don't see how migrants threaten it, it's not like they're trying to lead an insurrection or anything.
Best data I can find says it's been on the order of >20 <100 per year over the last ~30 years. Which seems relatively reasonable given the size the denominator. Wrongly deporting legal residents and citizens is obviously awful but there is no such thing as a perfect process.
Hard to tell since the legacy media has historically leaned left (and has tended tend to look the other way on stories that make democrat administrations look bad), but I would not be surprised if, out of 7 million, some % of corner cases slipped through due to human error.
“We’re incompetent and can’t achieve our goals by following the same laws and due process previous administrations used so we’re just going to perform as many random acts of evil and right violations to the people we can grab and hope that makes up the difference “
I know, right? The incompetence is mind blowing. At least they stopped letting people in, but they'll never reach their stated goals. To be fair though 'due process' via a hearing isn't that common in deportations in this country.
"The Obama administration has prioritized speed over fairness in the removal system, sacrificing individualized due process in the pursuit of record removal numbers.
A deportation system that herds 75 percent of people through fast-track, streamlined removal is a system devoid of fairness and individualized due process."[1]
3/4 of Obama era deportations were 'nonjudicial removals' meaning that there was no hearing in front of an immigration judge before removal. People just didn't care as much then I suppose.
Oh cool, horrendous things like this have been done for years. I guess it's fine then, human rights violations aren't real if someone else did them too. /s
Bondi -- an outrageously partisan hack who is destroying the DOJ -- reached peak irony when she stated that "no one is above the law" in talking about that case.
Donald Trump and his administration are on an absolute crime spree[1]. Insider trading, launching shit-coins and engaging in self-dealing, completely disregarding both the constitution and the courts, up to and including the Supreme Court.
The US is currently a lawless banana republic with the dumbest autocrat in history. That's the one saving grace: This herd of absolute imbeciles are so catastrophically stupid -- a cluster of plastic-faced Fox news clowns -- that they are bound to destroy everything so completely that they are overthrown out of necessity. Will the US survive this? Given that it voted for this rapist, charity-stealing moron twice, hopefully not. The fractured nations that come out of this hopefully have a better path.
[1] Ignoring that he is giving the most laughably corrupt pardons in history, to outrageously guilty thieves, fraudsters and human effluence. Trump's grotesque abuse, and quite literal selling, of pardons should be the impetus for whatever husk remains of the dissolved United States to abolish presidential pardons.
> when she stated that "no one is above the law" in talking about that case
My reading is that the judge lied to the FBI in order to help the subject escape, AFAIK this is a felony (obstruction?) and anyone else would be charged - so why isn't it equally applicable to a judge? I think people are assuming the judge has some form of power that she doesn't.
Not going to discuss Bondi or Trump, on a GBA basis.
These were ICE "agents" with an administrative warrant. Nor did she "lie", she refused them entry to an operating courtroom -- which she was 100% right to do.
So nothing you said is accurate.
There is a 100% chance she will be completely exonerated, but of course this clown administration -- full of in-the-open criminals of the worst kind -- doesn't care about that, they just care about intimidation. Which is precisely why they brought up charges without a grand jury, which is basically unprecedented, because a grand jury would never have levied such a charge, and then arrested her in public with a perp walk with a photographer at the ready. And they know it won't stick. But because they're an administration of criminal garbage they just want to put the judiciary in its place, while supplicants and smooth-brains cheer them on.
The agents are described by the FBI agents as "Agents from [DHS], [ICE ERO]" without scare-quotes - are you implying that they weren't legitimate agents? That said, FBI and CBP agents are also described as being present, so the distinction between ICE/FBI, and a judicial/administrative warrant seem unimportant.
> Nor did she "lie", she refused them entry to an operating courtroom
She appeared to co-operate (leading them away to talk to the Chief judge), while actually helping the subject evade arrest (returning and actually instructing them how to escape).
The first part, the deception, is what makes the lie rather than a mere upfront refusal.
> which she was 100% right to do
obstruct the agents? In which case they are right to arrest her.. I'm not sure what your angle here is.
> nothing you said is accurate.
Seems to me your own corrections are just as inaccurate. The above should clarify.
The purpose of this evil is to spread fear, provoke a response and get publicity, push and prod the system for weakness/loyalty, condition their supporters to accept these atrocities as normal and necessary, and to communicate the blueprint by example, as it gets repeatedly acted out in public. The message is this is how we're operating, so if anything looks weird to you, trust the plan because we're on the same team (wink wink). I wouldn't be surprised if we start seeing domestic terrorism and public lawlessness go unpunished if it's directed towards immigrants, journalists, judges, and other 'enemies'.
Yeah the judge pardoned after stealing money meant for a slain officer's memorial and used that money on her own plastic surgery was pardoned by Trump too
I cannot for the life of me understand why Americans have such a problem with other people coming here to seek a better life. Half this country has been tricked into seeing hardworking immigrants as a threat to their safety and livelihood — but by all metrics, immigrants are a net positive to society.
I also take issue with the idea that this extreme exclusionary mindset is somehow new to America. A lot of people frame what’s happening as if it’s the first time this country has gone through this. There is a long and storied tradition of otherizing, deporting, and imprisoning. Going back to our very foundation — America was born out of a process of expelling Native people from their lands. Then there’s the Great Migration period and the intense reaction to it, the Palmer raids, FDR’s internment camps, Eisenhower’s deportations, McCarthy era “anti-communism”, mass incarceration as a reaction to the Civil Rights Act, Islamophobia, and now this aggressively right wing anti-immigration sentiment.
The people of America, unfortunately, are prone to drastically evil actions when they are tricked by opportunistic political actors into believing their way of life is somehow under attack. This cycle has been going on for a long time.
> I cannot for the life of me understand why Americans have such a problem with other people coming here to seek a better life. Half this country has been tricked into seeing hardworking immigrants as a threat to their safety and livelihood — but by all metrics, immigrants are a net positive to society.
I have no issue with legal immigration. Far from it, I’m in favor of attracting the best, brightest, and most hard working.
But knowing people overseas that want to come to the USA but are respectful enough to want to do it legally, I take issue with anyone that enters the country illegally. They’re cheating the system and showing immediate disdain for our system of laws. The second order effects of funneling money to smugglers and coyotes are bad as well.
Every country has a right to decide who can visit or immigrate. That’s the right of any sovereign state.
If the people of America want more immigration then have them petition their representatives to change the laws to all for it.
"Of course, 'It is illegal and unconstitutional to deport, detain for deportation, or recommend deportation of a U.S. citizen.' See Lyttle v. United States, 867 F.Supp.2d 1256 (M.D. Ga. 2012) (citing Tuan Anh Nguyen v. Immigration & Naturalization Serv., 533 U.S. 53, 67 (2001) (affirming that a citizen has the 'absolute right to enter [the United States] borders'); Shapiro v. Thompson, 394 U.S. 618, 629 (1969) ('This Court long ago recognized that the nature of our Federal Union and our constitutional concepts of personal liberty unite to require that all citizens be free to travel throughout the length and breadth of our land uninhibited by statutes, rules, or regulations which unreasonably burden or restrict this movement.')" [1].
To the extent someone is unequivocally cheating, it's ICE.
If you read the complete sentence you’d realize I’m referring to cheating against every other potential immigrant to come to the USA.
> To the extent someone is unequivocally cheating, it's ICE.
So what exactly is ICE supposed to do if they are deporting the illegal alien mother and child is a citizen? Forget the possibility of a deported father. Say a single mother with no legal status is being deported.
Does she not get the option to take her child with her?
If she didn’t take the child the same people would be likely be screaming about ICE separating families.
> you’d realize I’m referring to cheating against every other potential immigrant to come to the USA
I know. I'm pointing out that the mother's illegal immigration is outweighed by ICE's illegal detention, deportation and wilful abrogation of legal and constitutional rights of a U.S. citizen.
> what exactly is ICE supposed to do if they are deporting the illegal alien mother and child is a citizen?
Follow the law. In this case, that would involve transfering the child to her designated custodian [1].
> If she didn’t take the child the same people would be likely be screaming about ICE separating families
> father executed a Provisional Custody by Mandate under Louisiana Revised Statutes
It seems odd that he would give provisional custody to "family friend" then?
Then this doesn't add up then
> Respondent Harper later sent an email further evincing her refusal to release V.M.L. to her custodian, see Exh. 2, and stating that she would instead require V.M.L.’s father to turn himself in for detention and deportation,
So they wanted to deport the US citizen father?
It's possible that I am looking at a different court case perhaps.
In study after study, immigrants actually raise the wages of citizen workers by taking the lower paying jobs while citizens can then be more productive. The idea they suppress wages is just another form of the ‘lump of labor’ fallacy.
You are really twisting things to make your argument sound plausible in the general case. More supply means less wages. Why focus on low paying jobs? Are you seriously suggesting that if we import every software engineer from India that wants to come here that my salary will increase? If so, that's very interesting why tech CEOs are lobbying so hard for this.
Your "more supply equals lower wages" argument is demolished by top economic research. A recent NBER study calculated that "immigration, thanks to native-immigrant complementarity and college skill content of immigrants, had a positive and significant effect between +1.7 to +2.6% on wages of less educated native workers" between 2000-2019.
The economy isn't zero-sum. As Milton Friedman noted, "most economic fallacies derive from the tendency to assume that there is a fixed pie, that one party can gain only at the expense of another." Immigrants create demand for housing, food, education, entertainment, and specialized services that natives often provide.
Historical evidence consistently disproves the fallacy: When women entered the workforce, it didn't cause massive job losses among men. When segregation was abolished, Black workers didn't cause mass unemployment among whites. The vast majority of Americans descend from immigrants who contributed to economic growth.
Research on H-1B visas shows that firms that get immigrant labor end up "hiring more tech workers and paying them more, because they become more efficient and sometimes scale up." In fact, studies show each H-1B worker creates approximately 1.83 jobs for native-born Americans.
The UK's Migration Advisory Committee, after reviewing studies from 2003-2018, concluded that "immigration had little or no impact on average employment or unemployment of existing workers" and "little impact on average wages."
The overwhelming consensus among economists is that immigration grows the economic pie rather than merely redistributing slices. That's why America's most immigrant-rich cities consistently have the highest wages, not the lowest.
PLEASE, I am begging you. Spend 15 minutes reading actual economic research before posting confidently incorrect Econ 101 oversimplifications. The "immigrants take our jobs" fallacy has been debunked by virtually every reputable economic study for the past 30 years. This isn't some fringe academic view. It's the overwhelming consensus of actual economists who study this for a living. Your intuition about "more workers = lower wages" seems logical but falls apart when tested against actual economic data. The real world is more complex than a supply-and-demand graph from an introductory textbook.
Nowhere in the economic research does it explain what you are so confidently stating, that wages are, somehow, the only thing in all of economics where positive supply shocks do not matter. The arguments that tend to be made are that, on a long enough time horizon, mean wages increase because overall economic output goes up, and mean economic output goes up because there is a higher supply of available labor.
You're fundamentally misunderstanding both the economic research and my argument. No one is claiming wages are "the only thing in economics where positive supply shocks don't matter."
The research shows that labor markets aren't simple supply-demand curves because of complementary productivity effects and gains from specialization, selection effects, and, of course, demand generated by the immigrants. If you have general labor size increase, in general equilibrium with a responsive central bank interest rates will lower to keep employment tight.
This isn't about "long enough time horizons" - studies find positive or neutral effects in the short and medium term too. The fundamental issue is that your model assumes a fixed economic pie that immigrants simply divide into smaller slices, when in reality immigrants help grow the pie overall.
Okay. Which other things don't see effects from positive supply shocks? You're just restating my premise about time horizons. The pie grows, with time, if a bunch of other things happen in the right order. Wages haven't grown in two decades in the UK, your original example. So, how are you defining short and medium term? Three decades?
man idk, maybe it was the long conservative rule after the crash? Maybe it was the long austerity? Maybe it was the huge mass of natives that voted to crash out of an agreement with a bloc that handles over 80% of their trade?
More seriously...
- for US: The newest NBER IV estimates put the wage effect of all 2000-19 US immigration at +2 % for non-college natives. Show me a UK study of similar vintage that finds anything near –2 %.
- for UK: UK real wages tracked productivity one-for-one after 2008; BoE and NIESR pin that on capital deepening, Brexit and austerity. Not on immigration, which the MAC finds moved wages by _at most_ –1% (aggregate, not yearly!) and the final report was ~0.1%, basically a null finding.
- We've already been through lump of labor, so I don't know why you've been banging on equilibrium.
And to finally address your time horizons: Short-run? Mariel-style shocks still show null effects. Medium-run? 2009-20 UK data flips positive. Long-run? Productivity wins. Pick your horizon. Immigration is at worst a rounding error next to TFP, which is positively associated with migration.
Happy to dive deeper, but at this point the burden of proof is on anyone claiming large negative wage effects. The best evidence, across multiple methods and countries, just isn’t there.
It's many different things, but scale and time horizon is certainly one of them. The scale of immigration over just the last 30 years is truly unprecedented, and will have political impacts for the next 50. The share of the population that is foreign born is up to 15% (likely much higher, since it's difficult to actually count illegal immigrants), which is the first time since the mid 19th century it's reached that level. Qualitatively, seeing e.g. a childhood neighborhood turn into something that resembles a (very) foreign country is ... jarring. I'd also submit that your brief summary of American history is wrong, and is part of the problem. It very slyly changes the foundation of the nation from something heroic to something that we should be ashamed of, and that mass immigration is the only way to do penance for that sin. It's fine to advocate for people coming here to seek a better life, but it's wrong to describe America as a "nation of immigrants", when the reality is closer to a "nation of settlers" who built up a largely empty country. I also tend to roll my eyes when people invoke "Islamophobia", since the United States is a) not a Muslim country and therefor does not have to defer to Islamic interests, and b) that term is typically invoked in an attempt to bully someone into agreeing with a more extreme position since, well, you don't want to be Islamophobic now do you.
I'm surprised you single out Americans who on the whole still a lot more welcoming than a lot more countries in Europe and Asia. The last few months have torn that reputation apart of course, and there is loud group who would happily shut the borders, but there are a lot of citizens who are happy with legal immigration, sympatric to illegal immigration, and still embrace the melting pot.
My conversations with H-1B visa holders is that whatever aggravations they may have in the US, they can still get into the US. Other countries just don't have that pathway
> The people of America, unfortunately, are prone to drastically evil actions when they are tricked by opportunistic political actors into believing their way of life is somehow under attack.
All people are like this. When the economic prospects for you look bleak, it's very aggravating to see someone you believe is an outsider is succeeding. We see microcosms of this in the bay area where people blame tech workers for driving the cost of living up and making it hard for regular people. In reality, housing policy has done that, but people get mad seeing new outsiders enjoying the life that has become harder and harder for them to afford.
Physics degree. Magna cum laude. Engineer. Homeowner. If you heard me speak you would never guess I was not American. I have been here 30 out of 32 years an I have no legal pathway to residency or citizenship.
I guess I should have helped poison our cities with black tar heroin via a shitty PHP website running in the tor network like Ulbritch, maybe then I could get a pardon from the orange moron.
I think a couple of things are important to remember in a time like this:
1. This behavior, whether legal or not, is profoundly inhumane.
2. No law, statute, or rule requires us to treat anyone inhumanely. The people behaving this way are doing it because they want to. These are not people you want to have access to any power.
I read an article that starts with this proposition [1]
> The real question, however, is not how America lost its way. We know the mechanics of it. It lost its way in large measure because Donald Trump, a Pied Piper of malice, led it astray, though one can’t lay all of that or even most of it on Trump. The American people, nearly half of those who voted, in their infinite wisdom empowered Trump to do so. They were looking for a Trump, yearning for a Trump, to do so.
> They wanted a Trump to destroy the nation. They hoped he would destroy the nation both by sowing chaos and discord and by supervising a demolition of our institutions and values. So the real question we should be asking is why so many of our fellow Americans desired this, and what deep proclivities Trump drew upon to prompt the nation, at least a good part of it, to self-immolate. What does Trump give them?
Having read The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich as a young person, this is reminiscent of a fascist playbook.
Except that it seems that social media are in effect creating a culture of resentment, projection of weakness and failure onto others and driving it for profit with unfiltered echo chambers.
The cause and effect seems to be playing to a vengeful base in order to keep legislators in line until their branch and the judicial branch are rendered impotent.
Exploring the parallels with Nazi Germany, the amassing of data was paramount.
> DOGE is building a master database for immigration enforcement, sources say [2]
Further,
> TRUMP ADMINISTRATION TEXTED COLLEGE PROFESSORS’ PERSONAL PHONES TO ASK IF THEY’RE JEWISH [3]
> The school later told staff it had provided the Trump administration with personal contact information for faculty members.
> The messages, sent to most Barnard professors’ personal cellphones, asked them to complete a voluntary survey about their employment.
> “Please select all that apply,” said the second question in the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, or EEOC, survey.
> The choices followed: (including) “I am Jewish”; “I am Israeli”; “I have shared Jewish/Israeli ancestry”; “I practice Judaism”; and “Other.”
Data?
IBM provided Germany with tabulating equipment to manage "undesirables" [4] [5]
The notion of cultural supremacy resonates with some in Silicon Valley, land of big and targeted data.
When they separate undocumented children from their families in the first Trump term and did not bother to leave a paper trail so that these families could be reunited so it would take years if ever for these children to be returned to their parents, not one person in the entire chain of command was punished for it. When there are zero consequences for doing wrong, we should not be surprised the wrong doing continues. Same with Bush Jr using private servers to hide his administration's emails - now every GOP administration is going to use this tactic with whatever technology permits it like Signal is being used to bypass laws for record keeping today because no one holds them to account and no one will.
I know you mean well and want to save the world from trolls, but this is not a hypothetical. I have a friend who is in this exact situation (previous administration, don't get your hopes up for another story for your bandwagon). The parents had temporary asylum. They had kids in the US. Asylum expired and was not renewed. They've been fighting a court battle for several years now because there's an order to deport the parents and place the kids in foster care. They would prefer to stay in the US, but failing that they would like to leave with their children.
I honestly cannot. There is almost nothing worse than losing your kids. It might be worse than death. The humane solution is to allow a deported parent to keep them.
So basically create a huge incentive to drag very sick kids through the darien gap and cartel land with no real plan for foid and housing of their kids? If i did 1% of that someone would call cps to take my kids.
Valid points. The question is after a judge orders a deportation and the executive is insistent on carrying it out, what would you do with citizen kids after the deportation of their parents?
So you'd create extra incentive for having anchor babies in the US? At least the people doing this now have to wait until their anchors become adults and can petition for them.
Thereby establishing the president that breaking the law will go unpunished so long as you procreate. Doesn't feel very empathic, fair or humane to me, especially when the precedent kicks in.
Due Process is being denied to US citizens, who are being removed from the country without the opportunity for them or their parents to consult an attorney.
> According to a Migration Policy Institute report, the deportation system dramatically changed over the past 19 years - moving from a judicial system prior to 1996 where most people facing deportation had immigration court hearings, to a system during Obama's administration where 75 percent of people removed did not see a judge before being deported.
You have to understand that most what you read about online about this administration is not written in good faith and reported honestly. Everything is unprecedented and a constitutional crisis. Really unforgivable when basic questions in an LLM can provide you meaningful context
Can I point out that this administration has gone out of it's way to flaunt it's disregard for the law and constitutional norms? Is anyone buying that the US can't pressure El Salvador to get back someone it wants? Anyone in doubt that it's a backroom deal in defiance of due process?
There's a reason why trust in the ruling administration is so important, because otherwise the system breaks down. Any time any questions pop up about how the law is being violated, Tom Homan breaks down crying about how the real crime is how children are baking to death in the heat of the sun, that children are being raped by cartel members... like what do you even say to that? Its easy to see why people are able to commit acts of great cruelty if they've convinced themselves that it's a neccesary evil for the greater good.
And it is unprecedented for modern times and it is a constitutional crisis on an almost daily basis.
Dishonest phrasing. The children were the US citizens. Parents were in US illegally. They deported the parents and their kids along with them. Should they go into foster care instead?
First of all, that is not correct. In one of the cases one parent was also a US citizen.
Second, even if in all cases the parents were not citizens it does matter because the US citizen child's due process rights were not respected.
> They deported the parents and their kids along with them. Should they go into foster care instead?
There should be a hearing for the US citizen child to determine what to do with them. Even if both parents have to leave there may be other relatives in the US legally who would be happy to care for the child.
This comment is irrelevant unless you literally believe the person you are responding to is Barack Obama. Maybe ask an ai to write the whole comment for you next time!
I think it's important to know exactly what happens in these cases to not be vulnerable to counterarguments. It seems in addition to the cruelty of selectively enforcing laws, it is clearly illegal - so we can fight these actions in court.
AI is not a reliable source for legal matters. There are so many examples of it making up precedent it’s basically a meme at this point. Posting its response is not helpful. I’d have thought hacker news contributors would understand that.
If what chatgpt said is incorrect, I would love to know. Are you not interested in the legal details of these cases so we know what can be fought under current law and not? The cruelty of the actions should be judged harshly, and in the longer run we need to reform immigration law so they are not possible, but knowing what can currently be fought legally matters to me.
Aside from whether it is correct in this particular case or not, it’s just bizarre to me that you would post what AI told you. It’s like you’re a booster for dead internet theory. So in addition to half the internet consisting of AIs arguing with each other, we now have to deal with people telling us what AI said.
If it's mind boggling to you I would ask chatgpt, it's mind boggling to me that you don't care whether it is correct...
But if you generally think chatGPT produces garbage, I guess that makes sense. I disagree, to me it's a good initial query, replacing google. As with google before, it is not authoritative (e.g AI may hallucinate, or google may land you on some SEO bs page), but I don't tend to dismiss its use outright.
The HN moderators have said that machine generated comments are not welcome on HN: "They're already banned—HN has never allowed bots or generated comments. If we have to, we'll add that explicitly to https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html, but I'd say it already follows from the rules that are in there. We don't want canned responses from humans either! ... " (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33950747)
If I had just said, “from what I can tell after briefly researching” maybe I wouldn’t be taking so much heat on this one - the point wasn’t chatgpt, but to raise a point that hadn’t yet been raised in this discussion- what exactly is legal in this situation. But I will take the L on this one as it seemed to be received as if I was delighted to show the world I could use chatgpt lol.
And underlying all of this is a sense that maybe nobody is in the mood to explore the finer points or these terrible acts. I can accept that.
> If what chatgpt said is incorrect, I would love to know.
Fact checking LLM copypasta takes orders of magnitude more effort than producing it. How about you do the homework rather than making it everyone else's problem.
The point wasn't chatgpt, it was the question I was introducing that hadn't been raised yet. I don't view the output of chatGPT to be likely bullshit, nowadays it surprises me if it is wrong about a factual question like the one I asked it. From the rest of the discussion, its answer appears consistent with what others have found.
I also get if asking the question seems obtuse in the first place. I am interested in exactly what is legal and not so it is clear what can be fought and how. But overall I am very angry about what is happening - apologies if it seemed like I was trying to justify what is happening.
From the article, we don't really know what happened to the children in terms of process. All we know is that the parents were not allowed to communicate.
I am not a lawyer, but as far as I know this is completely wrong.
There is a conspiracy theory that “anchor babies” will help undocumented parents avoid deportation from the US.
As far as I can tell, the usual thing that happens when undocumented parents of a US citizen are deported is that they have to give the child to a citizen relative to raise, or they take the child with them.
It seems to be extremely rare, though “prosecutorial discretion” can allow for a parent to remain in the US. There is no guarantee; an undocumented parent can and is often deported later, sometimes for minor crimes. I couldn’t find any stats about how often this happens but immigration consultants stress to their clients that they can’t rely on it.
If the undocumented parents have been in the country for 10 years they can apply for relief for deportation but that is capped at 4,000 cases annually. If the child remains in the US until they become an adult, and can plausibly sponsor a relative, then they can also apply to reunify with their parent. The deported parent may have to spend a minimum of a decade outside the US.
How come every time I see a headline like this it’s totally wrong? Last time the pitch was some illegal immigrant who was covered in MS-13 tattoos wasn’t MS-13. I wouldn’t be surprised if in a few days we learn neither of their parents are citizens and they’re foreign nationals.
All that aside, this has nothing to do with startups or tech and doesn’t belong here.
"How come every time I see a headline like this it's totally wrong?"
This isn't wrong. It's documented fact. Three U.S. citizen children (ages 2, 4, and 7) were deported by ICE through the New Orleans field office. A federal judge has already scheduled a hearing about this, citing a "strong suspicion" that a 2-year-old U.S. citizen was deported "with no meaningful process."
You're doing exactly what propagandists hope for - spreading doubt about documented human rights abuses without bothering to verify the facts.
"Last time the pitch was some illegal immigrant who was covered in MS-13 tattoos wasn't MS-13."
If you're referring to a case with photoshopped tattoos, you're literally proving my point! You fell for actual fake news and are now using that to dismiss real, verified reporting from multiple sources including federal court records.
"I wouldn't be surprised if in a few days we learn neither of their parents are citizens and they're foreign nationals."
You've already decided what "truth" you want to emerge. Meanwhile, one of these American children has cancer and was deported without their medication despite ICE being notified of their urgent medical needs.
Your cynicism isn't wisdom, it's complicity. You're pre-emptively discrediting reports of government abuses against literal American children because acknowledging them might force you to confront uncomfortable truths about a system you apparently want to defend at all costs.
These aren't anonymous claims! They're documented cases with legal representation, court filings, and federal judicial review already underway. What would it take for you to actually care about American citizens losing their rights?
If these people were all really MS13 then where are the shootouts with ICE? I thought this gang was so ruthless and violent that they had to be declared a terrorist organization?
Once you actually dig in to how to accomplish something you find the devil in the details and complexity in places you didn't realized it exists. I would not believe someone is an experienced programmer unless they understand this idea in their bones.
I think so many people here, with the benefit of hindsight, are accusatory, but they've committed this very same type of error themselves.
I am vehemently against this administration, but feeling like something must be done about border violations is reasonable and thinking there is a way to do that is reasonable. I personally don't think it's the best use of resources, but I think it is reasonable to want some kind of border with meaningful enforcement.
What is not reasonable is thinking this administration would do it in good faith, rather than as a means of power grabs against the legal system, but some people aren't capable of taking heed of warnings, and must experience consequences before they understand. Some people aren't able to think through "where is the public plan that explains this" and realize that if it's not there, if there is only the concept of a plan, then that's someone vying for power, not someone attempting to solve a problem.
When people come back to reality and choose to be grounded in it, that should be celebrated rather than persecuted even if they materially caused damage by their ignorance and lack of thought. Game theory requires punishment/defection against those who don't cooperate, but it also requires forgiveness for those who repent.
When OP says "I was for wide-scale deportations until I saw people I like being deported", it's not a case of unintended consequences, it's a case of "When I voted for the leopard party I didn't think the leopards would eat the faces of people I like!"
Unintended consequences means things like "criminality increased because immigrant communities lost trust in the police".
But come on. "Families swept into jails, plain-clothes officers ambushing people on their way to work or school" is how deportations work. Being surprised by that is like being surprised that the death penalty means people get executed.
This isn't a failure of epistemology, it's a failure of empathy. OP just didn't think that the people getting deported would turn out to be people with moral value.
This isn't a good-faith interpretation of their comment.
There are plenty of illegal immigrants with a criminal record. Trump's pitch was to deport them. There was also a pitch that strongly hinted at deporting basically anyone who isn't white, and I think this appealed to the racist fifth of Americans [1], but plenty of people were messaged the first part with the second being segregated to rallies, NewsMax, Twitter, et cetera.
[1] https://www.splcenter.org/resources/stories/poll-finds-suppo...
An underdiscussed frustrating aspect of this whole era is that there is never any true retrospection. There is no adjustment in the credibility of the people who predicted exactly how things would play out or the people whose predictions ended up being incredibly wrong. If there is a lack of consequence for being wrong, it ends up meaning there won't be any consequences for maliciously lying in the moment knowing it's only a matter of time until they are proven wrong because when that day comes, they have already moved onto some other lie and the cycle continues.
Here is the thing: hard and complex problems require hard and complex solutions, but you chose to put in power the people who like easy solutions. I hope it’s never late to learn a lesson.
There's actually a simple solution to illegal immigration: go after the employers. We don't because we want to have our cake and eat it too. (Same reason these raids aren't happening on farms in red states.)
The fun part is that they are allowed to work with their student Visa, and they pay the tuition fees normally, which is spicy.
So basically we have a huge gang problem right now, but instead of deporting gang criminals, we’re deporting honest Pakistani young people who are actually working legally for the country’s companies. But guess how many companies ever got in trouble for this?
Why? Because that's how the system was legally designed to work. You want them to stay here, because some % cases are valid (a lot surrender at ports of entry). So then you must ask yourself, what went wrong? Cartels figured out they could break the system by overwhelming it, yet we had a clear cut way to solve it.
The parties politicized the topic by not doing anything about it... and now here we are.
Question: When Obama/Biden supported legislation to hire more immigration judges to work through the backlog of cases, did you support the legislation as well?
There are for more just ways to handle this. These people are tyrant oligarchs, and need to be treated as such. Today's it's "those people", tomorrow it will be "your people".
https://immigrationimpact.com/2015/05/21/bi-partisan-house-b...
https://www.axios.com/2024/12/31/biden-immigration-courts-de...
We also publicize these injustices widely, but when e.g. Meloni released the video of a migrant committing rape, the whole journalistic world called it an outrage and impermissible (then promptly returned to plastering the covers with the picture of a drowned child. A treatment the Southport children didn't get, nor does, e.g., Bernard Fowler's death [1] get the "well how did you think immigration would play out?" treatment).
A spin as old as time - when it's due to policies you like, it's all just random, isolated tragedies. When it's policies you don't like, it's an unavoidable, even deliberate consequence. You may recognize it from the "real communism has never been tried/free healthcare? what's next - gulags??" debate.
[1] https://news.sky.com/story/man-given-indefinite-hospital-ord...
The endgame for this policy is a Democrat President deporting and detaining abroad January 6th types, and other violent criminals on the right. (Or worse, nonviolent agitators.) Habeas corpus predates the Magna Carta [1] for a reason.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Habeas_corpus#Origins_in_Engla...
The arguments that changed your mind are important information. If we want to change the minds of fence sitters then focusing on these arguments should be the priority.
You make an interesting “right-wing” case against mass deportation of immigrants.
> This approach diverts resources from pursuing violent offenders, erodes faith in the rule of law, and forces the whole country toward a “papers-please” surveillance culture, where everyone must carry ever-stricter IDs.
They don't have to vote to provide an electoral advantage.
[citation needed]
C-f "metastatic cancer"—1
There's a poor child that's being withheld access to their medication and to their oncologists, and the adults in the room—adults in uniforms, adults with guns, adults in suits and adults in black robes—all of these adults are doing their adult things with their adult words, and the sum total of all that is the child still is without their cancer medicine.
What good can we be, if *this* result is the sum total of our good intentions?
People like to blame these sort of situations on leadership and systems, but every individual involved in this is making a personal choice to let this happen.
Even if you agree with the general motivations and principles behind these, do you not have the humanity to realize the absurdity and cruelness of what is being done in some of these examples? No special accommodation can be made to get the kid with cancer their medicine while they are in custody?
I genuinely don't know how those questions can be answered any other way than "cruelty is the point" and if that is your response, I don't know how you sleep at night.
To be fair, you and I are involved. I'm on vacation in Mexico. You're presumably also doing something comfortable. We've had, in the span of days, a judge arrested in her court room and multiple U.S. citizens--children, no less---illegally detained and deported.
It's blowing my mind to say this. But the right is clearly using violence as a political tactic. That means there is not only legitimacy, but necessity, in the opposition to begin deploying violence as a political tactic as well. (By this I mean disrupting infrastructure, interfering with law enforcement, disrupting lawmaking, et cetera. Break their cars. Hack their systems. Block their streets and maybe cause damage to their buildings. Under no circumstances do I mean causing physical harm to anyone.)
ICE "abruptly terminated" a phone call with the detained mother "when her spouse tried to provide legal counsel’s phone number". The brown shirts [1] are here.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sturmabteilung
https://www.oig.dhs.gov/sites/default/files/assets/2024-08/O...
And they have been giving benefit of the doubt too many times already. At this point, it is absurd to pretend there are good intentions in the core of this.
This IS the point, the goal, and the purpose.
Regardless of the ways they have been marginalized, and how much marginalization they have done to themselves by failing to engage with the complexity of the world and following malicious leaders instead, this is where we are at. We need to stare this bare reality in the face lest the supporters, enablers, and fence-sitters continue soothing themselves with rationalizations.
Deplorable.
If deporting U.S. CITIZEN CHILDREN does not send you to the streets with fire and fury, you are well and truly lost. So much damn talk over the decades I've been alive about patriotism and liberty from America, but when a moment unquestionably calls for action, it turns out Americans were just unserious cosplayers the whole damn time.
MLK said it best: "the moderate who is more devoted to order than to justice, who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice"
And even now you have people that think showing up with clever signs around the downtown parks / public areas on the weekend when all the government offices are closed are somehow going to get their message across. It's not enough. It was never enough. It wasn't enough for Vietnam or Iraq. It's definitely not going to be enough now. Americans are going to have to choose to do some uncomfortable and maybe even risky things to demonstrate our disapproval.
Or we have to admit that for many of us, this is who we actually are as a country. It certainly is a good bit of the voting public. I don't think it's a mistake that in basically one generation we lied to the world about Iraq then elected a fascist twice. And at that point I don't think stern dissent is an effective or even morally correct course of action.
Here’s my hands-on experience: at least half the people you meet are defective, to a scary extent, functionally in terms of empathy. Probably two thirds have serious executive functioning deficits. That means they can neither understand the plight of their fellows; and, even if they could, they could not generalize their own situation into a policy to help everyone in the same situation.
EDIT: most people don’t vote. A disproportionate number that do are both empathetic, and high have high levels of executive functioning skills. The flip side of the coin are activated people who are missing one-or-the-other skills, but are voting out of some other errant ideology. I want to be clear that the distribution of voters is “both sides”: there are disgusting and enlightened voters on both sides of the spectrum. We’re all trapped in the box, together.
Are you a moderate who has a better plan? I ask that sincerely, if I've given up its not because I prefer peace but because I know a losing battle when I see one. We don't have a charismatic leader like MLK. The democratic party is in shambles. They're afraid of fighting the tariffs and alienating the working class. There is no one in the party who is broadly likeable, who has any chance of bringing the voting public together. Voters on the left still cling to their own personal pet peeves and insist they will never vote for anyone who doesn't specifically address whatever they think is the _real_ problem.
The sad reality is that Trump's policies are still really popular and if people are unhappy they are only unhappy with the execution. You see that in this thread. People see the this news story and see it as an unfortunate side effect of a basically good policy. They think illegal immigration is hurting our economy, they think 'anchor babies' are people taking advantage of a loophole that should be closed.
They think this country suffers because of tariffs and maybe they think Trump got carried away but they still support the idea. They are sick of Ukraine and think it's time we walked away. They think DEI means a black women will be hired over a white man under any circumstances. They think DEI in schools means our kids are being taught that the US is full of horrible backwards racists and sexists who need liberal saviors to make it better. They think that government agencies are overpaid and over bloated and full of people who don't do anything but get a fat paycheck.
These beliefs cut across people of all genders, of all colors, of all ages, of all states and cities. We can't even blame the boomers anymore and insist the younger generations will save us. No one will save us.
stop supporting moderate politicians that appeal to no damn person. find someone with charisma like obama. there is no magical moderate voter that the dems keep hoping to appeal to. they already have been the center right party for decades now.
I think you are right but I think half of democratic voters think the party has gone too left ( abortion, gender politics ) while half thinks it has gone too far right. The democratic party is trying to have it both ways and utterly failing, but in their defense I don't think fully embracing either side will be enough for them to win. The problem is largely the voters who absolutely refuse to compromise on their personal hill to die on. Republican voters will unite on anyone as long as they piss of the left.
> find someone with charisma like Obama
That person does not exist, or if they do they are too smart to support the shambling mess that is the democratic party.
I think the party is gambling that Trump makes such a hopeless mess of things that voters will have no choice but vote blue. I'm not sure they will win that gamble.
1. They don't know what they can do that will be effective.
2. They don't want to be targeted as dissidents or non-loyalists to the regime.
3. They're drained by their individual economic situations and worries.
4. They're drained by severe disappointment in large swaths of the electorate, and in the failure of checks and balances.
5. Events are so upsetting that they're in denial or consciously avoiding it.
It might be reassuring to see huge protests, but I wouldn't encourage individuals to do that anymore, because most of those people will be identified by the various surveillance technologies that we've built. (Half of the surveillance built by techbros, incidentally.) The identified can then be further suppressed with automation, and the barriers to doing that are much lower than mass physical roundups and concentration camps.
I understand the basic idea of how you fight an oppressive regime everyone hates. I have no idea how you go about fighting one that half the country supports. Protests aren’t going to fix that.
Last time around, I could at least soothe myself with the idea that he only won because our electoral system is idiotic, and a lot of voters didn’t understand what they were voting for. This time? He won the most votes, and everyone had every opportunity to see what they were getting. I can only conclude that my countrymen are fucked in the head.
In reality, around 22% of the US populace (not just voters, but everyone) voted for Trump. Similar voted for Harris.
The rest didn't vote. I refuse to attribute justifications, since they are too numerous.
But that is correct, peaceful protests like 50501 aren't going to do much. Their value is more networking and mutual aid creation/management.
What does work, especially historically, is violence. As a historian, when you look at pivotal points in history, changes were only won after a LOT of violence was applied.
The trick is that groups like 50501 are absolutely needed for a different reason. The governments cannot negotiate with 'terrorists', but can save face by negotiating with 'peaceful groups'. We see this recently with MLK and Malcolm X, Sinn Fein and IRA, Ghandi and dozens of separatist factions.
I'm not publically advocating violence, but the more fascist they become, well, that will be inevitable. Different people and groups have different lines in the sand.
We're already talking about breaching medical records for 'defectives' (autism) list, turning trans folk into non-humans, kidnapping/disappearing people off the street, tattle-tale emails and phone#s to report people, lebensraum (Canada, Greenland, etc), off-country concentration camps (CECOT), and more. And we're only 3 months in of 4 years.
If I had the ability to get out, I would have. But I'm guessing that even the better off here also don't have the ability.
I don’t give a lot of credit to those who stayed home. They also knew who Trump was and decided to let others make the choice on their behalf.
I’m not confident that even violent action would change things when so many people are in favor of or at least ok with what’s going on. You’re not going to win a fight, so is the idea to win hearts and minds? I don’t see that working.
Oh, I absolutely am counting every human in the US, and not registered voters. Total counts are like 45% of the whole population voted.
I chose total counts to get a better idea of density vs political affiliation since we have those at the district level.
> I don’t give a lot of credit to those who stayed home. They also knew who Trump was and decided to let others make the choice on their behalf.
Perhaps. Perhaps not. Usually, the back and forth between statist democrat and statist republican weren't that much diverging, although campaigns would portray the other side as baby-eaters.
This is different. And even just 3 months, I'm seeing apolitical people come out of the woodwork and actually start being political. And even though I do vote, I get the idea of 'as long as politicians do decent, I don't care'.
> I’m not confident that even violent action would change things when so many people are in favor of or at least ok with what’s going on. You’re not going to win a fight, so is the idea to win hearts and minds? I don’t see that working.
I'm not seeing a fight ala lines of militia lining up firing in lines. I'm thinking what we're headed towards is much much more like Luigi. Or more historically, what we saw in France during WW2 - sabotage and hit-n-runs.
And the battle lines are also pretty defined as well. Its going to be a fight between rural and cities.
Like I said, if I had the ability to leave until the situation here comes to some semblance of sanity and stability (along with respect for human decency), I would leave. But at the moment, that is not an option for me. So instead, its a "what can I do to safeguard me and mine, for the foreseeable future?"
(So far, my answer is: grow my own food, get to know local farmers and pay/trade, connect with local mutual aid orgs, become more self-sufficient, canning and food preservation. That sort of stuff. Goal is to just blend in, and help non-violently where I can.)
Each side is so encumbered with baggage that I don't want to support them.
One is breaking law and processes in egregious ways. The other thinks that law should not apply to illegal immigrants and even legal deportations are a due process violation.
Where? Who? You're just making this up.
What do you think? Should all illegal immigrants be deported?
It seems we as technical people give little reason for giving us a leading role in society. I admit that the media doesn't help as they keep the big picture out of frame, but then again, we are very easily cornered with minor details.
Anne Frank's house is not far from where I live. I bet that the term "forcefully" in a sentence like "She was forcefully deported" could have been up for debate too, who knows, but in the end it would not have really helped the girl.
Habeas corpus predates the Magna Carta [1]. A U.S. citizen's right to habeas has been wilfully abrogated by the state. If this stands, I'm absolutely for taking all the pardoned January 6th nutters and sticking them in Guantanamo or wherever come 2028 or 2032.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Habeas_corpus#Origins_in_Engla...
IMHO, it's essential.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bond_v._United_States_(2014)
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yates_v._United_States_(2015...
Jury trials do. Administrative trials never have.
> It's broadly labelled "prosecutorial discretion",
Federal DAs win 98% of their cases. This discretion is not what you think it is.
> IMHO, it's essential.
Well, unless they're J6 defendants, or any other group labeled by the media as undesirable.
A lot of these technicalities are parsing “what did the press actually say” which is the first step in dealing with an untrustworthy source of truth.
Parsing out what the article says is necessary.
It’s how articles are written, and how reporters and editors ask they be read.
“John Doe committed a terrible crime, the FBI said” does not mean the press is reporting the John Doe committed a terrible crime.
I wish the press would respond to cultivated mistrust by committing to high standards, but they have not.
Yea, by the press itself, or, do you honestly believe the billionaire owner class of this form of media has done an excellent job reporting truthfully over the past 30 years?
Pull yourself back from your politics and genuinely consider this.
The best way I know is to carefully parse the text in its most literal form. That is what the “good reporter” is saying. The “general idea” of what is being said is probably what the editor wants.
Owners and editors want “wow” articles. Journalists know most of what they report is just “somebody said something.”
You also seem to forget that journalists sometimes leave and become owners in their own right. Where does that blurry line begin and end, actually?
Means, motive, opportunity. It's always the same triad and you can't avoid applying to all parties involved.
Given that and the importance of broadcast media I can't imagine why anyone thought they were getting the truth. Or even if they were a highly selected and edited version of it.
As someone who came legally to Canada and went through thorough screening of 4 years before coming I just don’t get how people are ok with “cheaters” gaming the system.
“Think of the children” works when you are in a super white rich neighborhood, if you never lived in slums you won’t understand the abuse of the system by “think of the children”, you just don’t see it from the other side.
This is a story about citizens being deported without due process, without access to lawyers, without access to healthcare.
You don't have to be "ok with cheaters" to still want those people to have basic human rights and to see the system have legitimate judicial review.
The punishment here is far worse than the crime, and it's directed at children who didn't commit the crime, and it was doled out in a horrifyingly abusive totalitarian police-state style. Maybe you're not seeing things from the right side?
I usually steer clear of talking about these issues but there's something in the framing of this issue that maga has intentionally made people misunderstand: People do not say "I'm going to risk my life crossing a desert, and then when i have kids I'll be untouchable!" The actual "cheaters" are the birth hotel operators, whose clients are wealthy international elites who fly in while pregnant, then immediately leave to raise their US citizen babies abroad:
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/feds-raid-l-maternity-h...
These instances of people actually and deliberately cheating the system require a completely separate system of enforcement that does not need to target desperate people who happened to get pregnant over the course of living life and making ends meet and whose children for all intents and purposes will grow up as regular English-speaking Americans who will go to school, work and pay taxes just like everyone else. Immigrants on dual-intent visas(e.g forever h1b but not yet green card), asylum seekers, etc do not get pregnant to "cheat the system".
(1) in previous centuries, the US accepted as many immigrants as could arrive “on Ellis Island” and it only took a few weeks. All of the immigration barriers that you overcame were added by American legislators many centuries after my ancestors came to America. I don’t view “illegal immigrants” any different than I viewed my own ancestors who came to America in the 1500s.
(2) US law affords legal pathways to residency/ citizenship for refugees and political asylum claimants. Just because you used one slow legal workflow doesn’t mean you should look down on people who used a faster legal workflow. They aren’t “gaming” the system — they are using the fast lane that was installed purposefully. If anything, we should use the legislature to revisit the fast lane (the refugee and political asylum claims)
(3) an infant didn’t have any volition in this situation. Maybe they were born here as an “anchor baby” (which the Trump Admin is trying to redefine as not-a-citizen, breaking with all of the jurisprudence). If they were pushed over the border by their parents or someone else, we have a duty to make sure their life is handled with care, not malice.
(4) there are political and media interests in making “legal immigrants” like you hate other immigrants. It makes native born Americans feel like they have cover for their hatred of immigrants. You should sit with the thought experiment of whether it’s actually relevant to the conversation that you “spent years getting here the hard way” or whether the conversation would be more productive without it.
(5) the reason the “immigration system is broken” is because there are multiple factions in America who can’t agree on what kind of changes to make to it. Famously Obama tried to force Congress to deal with it around 2013, but the “Gang of Eight” couldn’t come up with even broad guidelines for changes that both parties would agree to. There are simply too many people who have strong opinions and yet believe untrue things about American immigration. Are you perhaps in this category?
>There are simply too many people who have strong opinions and yet believe untrue things about American immigration.
You appear to be operating from a different premise than people who are skeptical of past efforts to "reform" immigration law. "Permanent legal mass migration" is not the bargain the country wants to make, and thus far every attempt to "reform" immigration operates from that initial premise.
We grew up with the idea that America was a beacon, not a whites-only gated community.
There’s no reason for us to think less of someone just because they want to be here. Our ancestors did exactly the same thing.
It sucks that you’re here complaining about the Statue of Liberty.
Maybe stop making hypotheticals designed to excuse what happened and fake concerns. There was no attempt to keep family together oe do right by the kids.
Are you saying he's figuratively American, or that the father is a U.S. citizen. Because VML's petition for writ of habeas [1] doesn't mention the latter.
[1] https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/69940863/1/v-m-l-v-harp...
Slowly stopped looking for insight here on any topic that involves even a small amount of larger picture thinking, really quite sad.
This in no way excuses any of the other issues like not allowing contact with legal advocates / attorneys.
> ICE held the families incommunicado, refusing or failing to respond to multiple attempts by attorneys and family members to contact them. In one instance, a mother was granted less than one minute on the phone before the call was abruptly terminated when her spouse tried to provide legal counsel’s phone number.
What would they do, leave their child in an ICE facility and hope that somehow word gets back to family to go get them?
"Leave your 2-year-old with the angry government man who will totes ensure they are reunited with your spouse" is not a choice that exists.
[0] https://www.hrw.org/news/2024/12/16/us-lasting-harm-family-s...
In case you are serious: This is a pretty horrifying proposal. Humans can get microchipped, but these cost money, are very painful to administer, and importantly are RFID only, i.e. not useful for finding ones own children.
Trump is only turning the screws that were firmly installed by all previous presidents and congresses. The only real shock to this immigration action is the blitzkrieg of immediacy, horror, and flaunting violating court orders.
Courts don't have police to enforce judgements. The executive branch does. Hard to enforce finger-wagging. (And well, hello arrested judge day yesterday)
It is far better suited for less difficult topics, like yet another web framework being developed or some 2% improvements in database access efficiency. For discussing real problems that impact human beings existentially, face-to-face conversation is vastly superior.
The mother was also technically able to speak with the father, though monitored, for less than a minute, and they were interrupted when the father attempted to give a number for the attorney to the mother.
To be clear, I'm not defending any of ICEs actions here, I'm saying that they kidnapped this child who had arrangements made to remain in the US despite ICEs best (also almost certainly illegal) attempts to prevent that from happening.
Based on your wording alone, would it be safe to say the mother was unable to avail herself of counsel before making a decision?
We only really have the father's and judge's account of events here.
Given that, then this whole thread is pointless. I just assumed people were more informed based on what they’re claiming.
And this is actually one of the many things that this executive doesn't seem to grasp about the fundamentals of how this England-inherited, American-modified government functions. Due process doesn't just protect the people. It protects the king from rumors abounding about his tyranny that eventually lead to his beheading, because if there is no record to show then there is no record to justify the actions of the crown either.
The Magna Carta has stood for about a thousand years. But it has stood because every monarch who tried to place themselves above it found themselves much shorter by the end of their reign.
It gets tricky when a deportation is completed before a court can hear the case. Attempting to prevent a detainee from communicating their location and situation to someone who could bring a legal action on their behalf doesn't appear to be explicitly illegal, but it's certainly an attempt to subvert due process and probably ought to be illegal.
It’s interesting how the administration always talks about these people being here illegally and that they’re all criminals but then leverages the non-criminal aspect of the proceedings to their advantage.
I am arguing by pointing to the most clear and egregious violation of the law and human rights, that isn't meant to excuse any other violations.
I am not asserting that ICE followed any of the parents decisions, so I don't see that I could have possibly accidentally implied that ICEs actions were ok because they made the parents make an impossible choice and then followed it.
The actions by ICE in this and other cases are beyond defensible. If they have a case, let it be heard in open court with adequate counsel. Stop playing the silly reindeer games with people's lives.
That would be one way to make America great again.
Being right handed, you choose your left, and he lops it off.
Was it really your choice to have your left hand cut off?
This is what ICE alleges. They're a uniquely uncredible witness among government agencies [1][2].
A judge found the father's allegations worthy of meriting "strong suspicion that the Government just deported a U.S. citizen with no meaningful process," an act which is itself illegal [3]. That is far more credible.
[1] https://www.aclu.org/court-cases?issue=ice-and-border-patrol...
[2] https://apnews.com/article/ice-immigration-arrest-trial-cont...
[3] https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.lawd.21...
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/25/us/politics/us-citizen-de...
A post elsewhere about the details said ICE found the two-year old was unable to 'describe her status in full, intelligible sentences', so deported, even though her father (not deported and not consenting to his child's expulsion) wanted her left with him.
From my experience with two-tear olds, I guess ICE was technically correct.
edit - typo
The father explicitly did not want the child deported with the mother, had informed ICE of that, and initiated legal proceedings to that effect [1].
The mother and US citizen child were held largely incommunicado. They were not given access to a lawyer, and communication with the father was monitored, and upon the father attempting to give them the phone number for an attorney the phone was taken from the mother. Then promptly put on a flight out of the country
When a judge attempted to contact the mother, while the mother and child were still in US custody: The US did not respond for an hour presumably so that it could remove the mother and child from US custody prior to responding.
> The Government contends that this is all okay because the mother wishes that the child be deported with her. But the Court doesn’t know that. [2]
And that's a quote from the Trump appointed very Trump leaning [3] judge.
All actual evidence we have here is that the child was intentionally deported (expelled?) against the parents wishes. Certainly against one of the parents wishes.
[1] https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.lawd.21...
[2] https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.lawd.21...
[3] See prior rulings: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terry_A._Doughty#Notable_rulin...
Yet here they are deliberately moving a child internationally against the express wishes of at least one of the parents.
(Also not true, but that's besides the point)
Or at least that is what some reports say. It’s confusing. Fortunately we have a system to due process to figure these issues out.
Unfortunately the current regime has decided that all due process is subject to their discretion.
But ICE hid the evidence and prevented the courts from looking into it.
PDF: https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.lawd.21...
But ideally we wouldn't be making them orphans.
There ya go, the humane solution to this.
Alternatives include arranging legal custody for the child and to stay in the US with a relative (as one family was attempting), or finding a legal way for them to leave the country with their parents.
Instead, it seems the government is rushing to illegally remove these children before the courts can intervene
That's the last 4 months really.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jus_soli
Or, in population: 13%.
People born in the Germany made up about 3.5% of the US population (1.11 million) in 1860. While they were one of the largest groups, many states/territories had large percentages of other non-British people like California, where 9% of the population was born in China. Then you have territories like New Mexico where most of the population had been born in Mexico.
Regardless, the debates for the 14th Amendment make it absolutely clear they understood they understood a child born to, say, Chinese parents in the US would get citizenship.
This seems pretty clear to me. How else could you interpret it?
>and subject to the jurisdiction thereof
And if you go back and read what the drafters of that amendment stated they meant on the floor of congress, they did not intend it to mean Jus soli. The idea was so ridiculous at the time that no one thought it worth writing it down. Pity. The controlling Supreme Court case spends a lot of time talking about English Common Law and what "subject to the jurisdiction of the King" meant. It is not hard to believe, at all, that the current SCOTUS may have a different interpretation than "anyone who happens to be born across this line on the map is a US citizen and is granted all rights, responsibilities, and privileges thereof".
They were absolutely aware that is what it. Indeed, they stated it outright:
> The proposition before us … relates simply in that respect to the children begotten of Chinese parents in California, and it is proposed to declare that they shall be citizens. … I am in favor of doing so. … We are entirely ready to accept the provision proposed in this constitutional amendment, that the children born here of Mongolian parents shall be declared by the Constitution of the United States to be entitled to civil rights and to equal protection before the law with others.
- Senator John Conness (R-CA), May 29, 1866 during Senate debates on citizenship amendment introduced by Senator Jacob Howard (R-MI)
The only real change came when they worried that citizenship would be extended to Indians in tribes we had treaties saying we wouldn't do just that leading to a change that excluded them.
Certainly that clause has weight. It excludes diplomats, members of occupying armies, and members of Native tribes. But it seems strange to apply it to others, unless you’re also going to say that they have immunity from our laws as well.
Howard, who introduced the Amendment, said this[1]:
>This amendment which I have offered is simply declaratory of what I regard as the law of the land already, that every person born within the limits of the United States, and subject to their jurisdiction, is by virtue of natural law and national law a citizen of the United States. This will not, of course, include persons born in the United States who are foreigners, aliens, who belong to the families of ambassadors or foreign ministers accredited to the Government of the United States, but will include every other class of persons. It settles the great question of citizenship and removes all doubt as to what persons are or are not citizens of the United States.
>Now, all this amendment provides is, that all persons born in the United States and not subject to some foreign Power—for that, no doubt, is the meaning of the committee who have brought the matter before us—shall be considered as citizens of the United States ... If there are to be citizens of the United States entitled everywhere to the character of citizens of the United States, there should be some certain definition of what citizenship is, what has created the character of citizen as between himself and the United States, and the amendment says citizenship may depend upon birth, and I know of no better way to give rise to citizenship than the fact of birth within the territory of the United States, born of parents who at the time were subject to the authority of the United States.
Doubly funny that he added a line in that speech where he thinks all ambiguity is gone.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacob_M._Howard#Speech_on_the_...
[2] https://archive.org/details/the-congressional-globe-39th-con...
Are you suggesting we never deport parents under any circumstance? Having a citizen child is not some get-out-deportation-free card.
> Entering the United States illegally is not classified as a civil offense; it is a criminal offense. Under U.S. law, specifically under Title 8 of the U.S. Code, unauthorized entry into the country is considered a misdemeanor. The specific statute is 8 U.S.C. § 1325
So is their life forfeit now, and the respective goverment absolved of responsibility?
The real solution to this is to end jus solis.
Separating children from parents is incredibly cruel, inhumane, even.
No, that's a step down a terrible return to pre-Civil War policy. We should be actively fighting against enslavement and for due process, not throwing our hands up and saying "well, guess we can't [bring them back from El Salvador, have a sane policy with respect to families, have people's rights to citizenship and legal residence respected]".
That seems deliberately Orwellian. What's the "not deported" scenario you're imagining? Literally abandoning your child in a jail somewhere?!
It's not like these folks are in hotels, or have access to phones or family.
I mean, yikes. Is that really what we've come to in the discourse on this site? Putting scare quotes around "deported" to pretend that it's only "other issues" that are problems?
We let it happen by not saying "enough" when the last thing happened. If a school of kids gets gunned down and a society lets that slide, that society becomes one more tolerant of violence against children. We said we were powerless to stop that, so here we are now, bringing violence against children as a matter of federal policy.
The only Orwellian thing is she was lied to by Democrats that she could lead a safe life in the US. That’s on you.
Representing that as a "choice" is precisely the Orwellian part. I'm guessing you don't have kids.
The crime was that she was allowed here in the first place, whether by the people who made her believe it was possible, or by her breaking the laws as the act of entry in the country.
This cannot be overstated. I wish I had a thousand up votes to give you. Democrats made a promise they knew would never hold up just for the votes. Now the chickens are coming home to roost and these people who were lied to by Democrats are the ones paying the price.
It’s OK for a citizen to lose their rights if a political party exists that espouses views you don’t agree with and it’s possible someone related to that citizen may (or may not) have listened to those views?
[1] Which of course isn't one, thus the Orwellian point upthread.
No, the democrats are not secretly worse because they're watching evil happen. The people doing the evil are worse, actually. That's just how that works.
If not, and you mean “promise by inaction”, then could we say then that Trump made a promise to racists, neo-nazis, crypto criminals, the Russian government, etc?
The Rawlsian veil ethic applies here.
EDIT: RE - the knee-jerk downvotes. I appreciate that people pointing out authoritarianism can be painful if you are embracing it. Cognitive dissonance is never a fun thing to work through, and having done it a few times I sympathize with the struggles you face or may be facing.
"Two Undocumented Families and Their U.S.-Born Accomplices Deported by ICE"
And the following year, you won't need to include the undocumented families anymore. (And they won't be telling anyone about the citizens who were disappeared, so this headline won't get printed anyway and its formulation doesn't matter.)
Because if we have, that's an unmitigated bad.
You can add more words to say the same thing but it only ends up being annoying.
It also leaves out all mention of process. The issue here isn’t that the parents are choosing to bring their citizen children with them but that they’re being denied all ability to leave their citizen children with their citizen parent. This is the crux of the actual issue here.
Mark my words, Trump is going to win that court case. It’s not far fetched at all to interpret “* and subject to the jurisdiction thereof*” to mean people that have legally entered the country.
And it sure seems like the opinion of legal professionals is that it is far fetched.
I can understand why this level of pedantry is annoying but we are not dealing with good faith arguments here. They are power plays.
Not in trump’s america, not if they have their way, and this nonsense wordplay is part of it. Look at the statements around a third term; those arent jokes
Declaring a fake 'invasion' and implementing authoritarianism under the guise of emergency powers was already done in Rome, and decidedly is not the rule of law.
There’s never any kind of “extreme” movement designed to stamp this shit out in the USA. It ends up being kids wearing red who have never done pushups or other hard exercise before, mixed with a healthy dose of spooks making absolutely sure that these organizations never gain any real power.
A whole lot of authoritarian bootlickers in this thread who are ready to sell out their countrymen to CECOT themselves deserve to spend some time in a torture prison like that - because there is nothing else in this world that will convince them of the utter inhumanity of such a place.
But you know, “so much for the tolerant left” and all that. Fuck this stupid, tyrannical, authoritarian, reality.
You're literally calling "the left...beta" in this thread [1]!
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=Der_Einzige
I hope that it is never decided that you are a terrorist/enemy combatant/whatever and shipped off without due process to an American concentration camp. (Auschvits wasn’t in Germany either).
Oh, you are a citizen? “Home Grown” so to speak? Trump explicitly said that he needs five more concentration camps in El Salvador just for people like you.
But for interesting HN discussion... anyone got any juice on why this is happening. Is there orders going down the chain of command from the president to do this sort of thing. Was this behaviour always there but less reported before? Are they more emboldened by the current environment?
ICE taking that as carte blanche to smash and grab is perfectly logical given that agency is ICE.
So in principle not that different from a biker gang that claims they "just want to talk to" someone who just finished being a witness.
Maybe it's 10% or 20% more prevalent or worse, I can't say from my vantage point, but it's a difference of degree, not a categorical one. You read these stories and they read exactly like all the other stories of how all sorts of "criminals" have been abused by the system for years, especially when they have a political blank check to do do. Making it hard for people to get a lawyer, moving too fast for people to appeal anything or get outside scrutiny is exactly how these systems have always behaved when they feel like it.
Now it's ICE and not DEA or whatever but this is basically the level of abuse with which the authorities have always treated with.
It's nice that the public is paying attention now, but I have very little hope that it will actually lead to systemic changes.
Here's a riddle for everyone. What do you call a prison where people go in without trial, never come out, and there's always room for more?
I don't like this kind of response because it's basically kind of an assumption, and you don't really give any evidence for it.
On one hand, sure, abuses by people in positions of power have always happened, so if you're just making a general argument that enforcement authorities abuse power, I mean yeah, human nature.
But this article is making some specific points:
1. Those who were deported were given basically zero access to even talk to a lawyer, and that in at least one case a habeas corpus petition was deliberately avoided by deporting the family at 6 AM before courts opened.
2. Multiple US minor citizen children were deported.
So, no, without more evidence, I'm not willing to believe that it's just some minor increase of degree. While yes, I'm sure there have been abuses in the past, the current policy seems hellbent on deporting as many people as possible, due process be damned, and that was not the policy in previous years. I'd also highlight that the current President has said, explicitly, that deporting people without due process is his goal: https://truthout.org/articles/we-cannot-give-everyone-a-tria...
In other words, I don't believe this is just an aberrant, abusive exception to the policy. It very much seems like this is the policy now.
Another assertion without any justification or data.
> Remember the "kids in cages" saga?
Yes, of course, and that's the point. There was huge outcry then, and that cruel policy was implemented by the same person responsible for this policy. It doesn't make sense to say "this has been happening forever" and then bring up an example from 2017-2020. We are all well aware of Trump's view on immigration and the rule of law. The whole point is that Trump's policies are a huge aberration from what any other administration, Republican or Democrat, has put forth in the past 50 years.
You're talking about bringing up examples from 2017-2020; it turns out, plenty of the examples that were brought up back then, were in fact from the Obama years. Example: https://apnews.com/article/a98f26f7c9424b44b7fa927ea1acd4d4
> The story featured photos taken by AP’s Ross D. Franklin at a center run by the Customs and Border Protection Agency in Nogales, Arizona. One photo shows two unidentified female detainees sleeping in a holding cell. The caption refers to U.S. efforts to process 47,000 unaccompanied children at the Nogales center and another one in Brownsville, Texas.
I don't know how else you're supposed to handle 47,000 unaccompanied children when there simply aren't the facilities to hold them all, e.g. in foster homes. I think that is fundamentally different than deporting US citizens.
And yes, when it comes to Trump's first term, I don't really see anything wrong with keeping unaccompanied children in detention centers, at least temporarily. The much bigger issue I had was the specific policy of separating families.
My point is more that I'm not sure exactly how much of what ICE does can particularly be attributed to the administration, on account of the same sorts of stuff happening under every administration, and the waters getting muddied by things being presented in false contexts, which is what I was trying to show with the link I posted.
The family separation policy was horrible, but it was yet another piece of cruel dehumanization on the cruel dehumanization pile that was already there. Secretly revoking student visas and then snatching that person off the street by masked plainclothes officers like happened to Rumeysa Ozturk is cruel and awful, but also, the personnel who did that and their attitude did not appear overnight; ICE is has ICE has always been, and all that changes is the length of the leash given by the President.
What I object to is the implicit framing of what was happening pre-Trump as being fine and correct, and it's only what Trump is doing that's beyond the pale. But I am glad that it's opening people's eyes to what is happening and hope that by shining light on it, perhaps post-Trump we can move to something better than pre-Trump.
Due process and transparency on border & immigration interactions has been alarmingly bad for a long time now. Has this never happened before, hidden inside this apparatus? I'm not confident of that. This is certainly different in its scale and ferocity. But I see where they are coming from too.
Mass visa revocations happened about 50 years ago since the Iran Hostage Crisis. And a few other events over the 20th century reflect well with today like Japanese internment camps. CECOT out does Gitmo and Angel Island, but damn, we just do a lot of fascist and unjust stuff as a nation.
The 1880’s resulted in us switching our attention from Native Americans to immigrants and we never really let off the gas on that front.
Whether you like it or not, it has indeed been happening for a long time, and under multiple administrations from either party. If you're interested in the tragedy of it all enough to care, then go look these cases up instead of first accusing someone of lying because they might be smearing a politician that you preferred, and who isn't the current orangutan in the White House.
Trump's administration is notably and vocally hostile to illegal immigrants, to migrants and I suspect to immigrants in general, but it's mainly still using the tools and practices that have long since been refined by multiple federal agencies whenever opportunities for heavy-handedness presented themselves.
Because it's Trump's administration, and enough of the major media system is unsupportive of him (still, for now), the matter is gaining more attention. This attention is a good thing, but it shouldn't cloud one from considering the possibility that the bureaucratic defects and authoritarian inertia of federal policing exist beyond the confines of a single type of administration.
1. The deliberate attempts to deny due process by scheduling deportations before filed writs can be responded to in court.
2. The deportation of US minor citizen children as a matter of policy.
If you have any evidence of the above by non-Trump administrations, again as a matter of policy, I'm all ears. Everything else is just "feels".
I assume you know how to use the internet, so please go do a few searches, on Google or the search system of your choice, for the sake of informing yourself better. They're there, and if you care about the subject enough to make claims, you should be aware of wider history.
Illegal actions, whether by policy or by bureaucratic inertia towards authoritarian tendencies, have been the case under multiple previous administrations. Under Obama these were even (in a very different context) taken to the level of outright killing American citizens without due process via drone strike. Under Bush II, they involved very illegal and repeated acts of "extraordinary" rendition to black sites. There are more examples, many involving deportations.
Trump getting attention for things that have also been the case since before him poses the risk of making people think that it will all be okay if they just get rid of Trump, even if it's good that the attention is at least being given to this finally.
None of this is to defend the Trump administration or ICE. The cases documented in the link in this post are grotesque, and deserve the full force of censure by other branches of government and the public, and the media, but that doesn't excuse simplistic examinations of a wider injustice.
You are so completely incompetent when it comes to discourse that I have to assume you are purposefully spreading misinformation. Either provide evidence or do everyone else the favor of shutting the fuck up you intolerable asshat.
I mean, look at Hillary Clinton's emails, extorting of lawfirms, big tech, etc, his ignoring of court orders, etc. All are things that you can look at and say "he's not the first to do this" and be completely correct, but completely missing the point that he's doing it waay more aggressively.
When did that happen previously?
However, as I explained above, the deportations of citizens are nothing new and though it's good that they now receive attention, they should be viewed from the wider context of decades of federal overreach and authoritarian practices by certain agencies.
my other comment similar to what you mention https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43803664
No due process at the borders is a shame both now and before, but hopefully this time there is a willingness to change things. Probably not at the next swing of power.
Voters across the political spectrum have made it unmistakably clear — in poll after poll — that they are deeply dissatisfied with the current rate of illegal and asylum-seeking entries.
Is there a morally permissible way to enact their will?
Going too slow for you? Hire more immigration judges, which are executive employees not full article 3 judges.
Voters across the political spectrum have made it clear in poll after poll the last few weeks that they do not approve of the way this administration is grabbing whoever they can and shipping them out of the country without any check or verification that they are deporting the right people.
If the administration can declare you an illegal immigrant with no due process they can ship anyone they want out of the country. They could grab you off the street, ship you to and El Salvador torture prison intentionally or by mistake (as they have already admitted to) and there’s nothing you can do about it.
Make it easier to work here legally in the US like it used to be in the 90s, and threaten CEOs with jail time if their companies have a pattern of hiring ineligible workers.
And let's be clear, a lot of this border security "crisis" is rooted in racism and Fox news alarmism. The GOP likes having the problem because it keeps the base angry.
If the law exceeds the government's ability to enforce it, relax it. It's de facto relaxed because of the lack of fundamental resources to enforce it... Put the reality on paper.
Stop treating the southern border as a war zone and reopen it. It used to be more open. It was, in fact, more open in that magical America great period that MAGA ostensibly seems to be nostalgic for. Not only did the country survive the openness, it flourished.
If the law is too hard to enforce, have less of it. Lower scrutiny. Hand out day passes. Welcome The stranger with a smile and a friendly wave.
However that rationale becomes evil nonsense the moment a government starts "deporting" arrivals into a damned concentration camp, or back into the hands of people that want to kill them, seizing their property, separating them from their children, etc. since all of that is obviously punitive.
A world where the government gets to say "well it is annoying and expensive to follow the law give people rights so we just won't" is a horror show.
If the people really want a world where people are denied legal process then they can build the popular support for a constitutional amendment. Until then, the government is going to have to pay for this shit.
And we did have a legislative effort to reduce the number of illegal border crossings. Trump scuttled it.
Like in this case, what do you propose as an alternative with a precedent that you think could be agreeable to most people? The parents were in the country illegally, and the children's citizenship was solely one of birthright. Any sort of "pleasant" outcome would effectively require turning birthright citizenship into defacto citizenship for the parents as well, at least if they can stay illegally for long enough. That's not only completely unrealistic, but also a complete slap in the face to the millions of people who try to migrate legally and are refused entry.
The most objectionable part here — by far — is not the deportation of the parents, but the deportation of citizens and the lack of due process.
The alternative being proposed is that if ICE is going to deport the parents of US citizen children, the parents should be given the opportunity to seek legal counsel regarding how they're going to ensure care for their children.
This is not true - a citizen by birth can become the president, a naturalized citizen cannot.
Unless of course your lack empathy and de-humanize people by calling them "aliens".
This is why birthright as a legal concept is a diminishment of citizenship for all those who hold it.
Parents pass on the shared history, values, and national culture to their kids. Parents are those who give value to US citizenship.
Not coming out of a belly, that happens to be inside a US hospital.
“All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the state wherein they reside.” -US Constitution, 14th Amendment
Quite literally, US hospitals do have that magic pixie dust because they are on the land of this country.
Will need to be resolved.
Its not a coincidence that Switzerland is the longest-lasting democracy in the world by a factor of 4x, vs USA. Their framers had the foresight to enshrine their communities' common history, values, and culture.... over pixie dust.
If you don’t know US history, why bother to show your ignorance so visibly?
Except our nation’s shared history, values, and national culture is that we’re a nation of immigrants, a melting pot of global cultures, a refuge for those in need, and a place where anyone can come to seek their fortune, so obviously American parents haven’t been passing on those values to their children if we’re still having this debate, and I think the only fair response to that is to deport all the children who don’t meet your standards of citizenship, by which I mean the entire cohort that’s arguing all this is OK.
That way lies a very ugly argument about who is enough on the team. One that almost nobody who thinks themselves American wins, because the real winners of that argument should be the folks stuck into reservations by the alien ancestors of those who see themselves as "true Americans, born of Americans."
For Americans in particular, the best strategy for not having their own legitimacy challenged is definitely not to pull too hard on the legitimacy thread.
Wax poetic about nativism all you like, it won’t change the truth.
Under the US Constitution, this is not a distinction. What you're looking for is just "the children's citizenship" without this qualifier that signifies nothing under the law.
The better alternative is to aggressively enforce employment laws against employers. Immigrants come here and stay here to work.
If undocumented workers are finding productive work in an economy with low unemployment then the problem is that the government is not facilitating them gaining legal status.
Employers need to stop taking advantage of undocumented workers at artificially suppressed wages. This has acted like a subsidy keeping these poor business models afloat. This has led us to the situation we are in now, where we've become dependent on undocumented migrants (food production etc), who we are being taking advantage of (lower wages, less rights), and also trying to villanize & deport them (the article above). All simultaneously.
It's possible with careful coordination of industry, legislation, and immagration, we wouldn't be here. But now that we are, we need to either find a way to improve the situation or reverse it.
We should stop letting employers do this, and then we all discover that we still really want to employ immigrants, we should enable that, legally.
It would be a forcing function.
Looking at the most recent DHS yearbook (apples and oranges, but the best I can find so far) at https://ohss.dhs.gov/topics/immigration/yearbook and scaling to match the curve at the ICE stats page, it looks like illegal immigration was way down at the end of Biden's term.
So maybe the influx was already slowed dramatically. I don't think it's possible to stop people from wanting to go to the US, except by making it worse that the places people are leaving. I don't think that's a worthy goal.
I like how nobody has actually answered this question yet, and have only harped on your birthright comment.
The parents are in the US illegally, ICE deports people who are in the US illegally. Presumably the parents didn’t want to leave their USC kids behind so they brought them.
I guess possible options are
1. Allow illegal parents to designate USC kids a guardian who has legal US immigration status
2. Dont deport illegal immigrants who have USC kids (basically making birthright transitive to parents)
Birthright is somewhat transitive. US citizens can sponsor family members for a green card once they’re 18.
No, the father is not. And when trying to get the mother legal help for her situation was cut off from her. Same when the court tried to get information, ICE ignored it, got her on a plane and then shortly after said “sorry, too late”.
I think the details will matter here, it does seem like ICE skrewed the pooch here in not giving the family recourse to get the kids out of the detainee facility. If the USC kids were involuntarily detained that is a problem (despite it may be legal to do that according to US federal law).
How about real actual fucking due process? Maybe they can NOT cut off communication when the citizen father tried to provide her with a phone number for legal counsel. Anything else is ghoulish. Keep defending it if you really don’t give a shit about your level of humanity.
Is father a US citizen?
Based on https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.lawd.21... assuming that's the right case it doesn't seem like he is
It doesn't have to be as ugly as what is described in the article.
My citizenship is solely that way too, even though generations of my ancestors were also citizens.
Unless you personally naturalized then your citizenship is solely by birthright. The vast majority of US citizens are this way. Insisting that this is somehow worth less in terms of legal protections is just frankly wrong.
Imagine you said this for other circumstances. "Well, a parent going to prison is always going to be hard for the family - better imprison the whole family!"
Then, as welfare, lack of law enforcement and border grew, the broken citizenship process became a larger problem that now we have to deal with.
To me, the answer to your question of what is the alternative is as follows: The sole act of breaking laws and cutting the line to come into the country, to then birth babies here for the pusposes of straightjacketing the host's own response seems like should not be allowed, full stop. The premise of becoming a US citizen cannot be grounded in 2 crimes being committed before you are a citizen (1 illegal entry, 1 lying about your asylum petition).
We then have the issue of citizenship. It cannot be that because you come out of a womb that happens to be passing by a US hospital, you are a US citizen. US hospitals do not have magic pixie dust that grant american-ness. The Swiss have the right model that you actually have to come from at least 1 national parent, to foster national unity. The Swiss have the longest-lasting democracy in the world for a reason. Ignoring this seems suicidal. In nature and history, no humans prospered without an organized tribe centered around shared history and values.
Then there are the cases of people that came here, all legally, and found a life worth having by contributing to society. There should be a path for them to be citizens. What that path looks like, I dont know. But that's a conversation worth having soon since they are paying the price for the crimes and abuse committed by the 1st group.
“All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside.”
> It has been proposed that the US citizenship model was always like the Swiss model - you could only be a citizen if you were born of at least 1 citizen (naturalized or otherwise). For reasons I'm not clear, this has not been strictly enforced for some time.
I think any clear reading of the 14th amendment shows that you are incorrect.
"and subject to the jurisdiction thereof"
seems critical to make a determination on whether you are correct or not.
Take the act of a random french spy who goes to the UK for the purpose of defecting, without express permission of either government. Does that make him a subject to the UK crown? I think the historical outcome of such situation would be crystal-clear.
SCOTUS response: “LOL”. 6-2 (1 abstention) in favor of him being a citizen. The majority assent lays out pretty clearly that the jurisdiction language was to except diplomats and Native American tribespeople who had different treaties and status.
The Wong Kim Ark ruling is super, super, super clear that it would only be in EXTRAORDINARY circumstances that the 14th wouldn’t apply. For instance, two people in an invasion force sent by King George to take back the colonies have a baby with each other on US soil: probably not a citizen. Even then, if those two were in prison and had the baby: probably a citizen. Baby of two diplomats: not a citizen (called out in the ruling).
The dissent says: The 14th was really about Dredd Scott, and giving former slaves born in US soil full citizenship rights, and therefore “jurisdiction” is obviously only for naturalized citizens: Mr. Ark didn’t seek citizenship and therefore didn’t have it, since he wasn’t a former slave or child of a former slave, the 14th doesn’t apply.
The current attempt to reframe the 14th while including the Ark ruling relies on the very novel idea that anyone in the country without permission is not “subject to the jurisdiction of the US”. ICE’s actions clearly bely that take. It’s not a tenable angle to try and get rid of birthright citizenship, full stop.
The 14th amendment discusses who is a citizen. It does not capture who is a subject to US jurisdictions, or not. That part is open to interpretation , likely because it is based in common law.
Not only is that not in the text of the 14th, it's different from your original proposal two comments ago. If you really want to do this fine-grained reading to try to support your point, you might notice that 1. the subject to the jurisdiction clause is the baby, not the parents, 2. breaking a law does not mean you are not subject to the jurisdiction of the state you reside in.
The only reason they go to jail is because de-facto that is is fair for the victimm in that he/she gets "Restitution" in the form of jail time for the non-citizen, and presumably, the foreign country may even be able to challenge that.
The dejure interpretation may be he should be banished, although that would be unfair to the victim.
It means that the parents must be immune from the US government actions. For example, if they are diplomats and literally can't be arrested even if they commit a murder in the plain sight.
I like this a lot. That makes total sense and would take away the incentive to cross the border to give birth.
Just Apu from the Simpsons is only possible due to our immigration. Just the very fucking iconic cartoon character. This is not from legal immigration. Taco Tuesdays, every Irish pub, like, it sounds silly, but what they offer America is ten fold. I do not care about the best and the brightest, give us your tired and poor.
The American right-wing reeks of elitism (soft language for racist/xenophobic) and it is the antithesis of the American spirit and dream. I'm not with it.
This will be one of my final posts on this topic because I believe we are only in month five, and have 3.5 years to go. I pray the midterms are a landslide, and I pray the next Democrat grants Amnesty. See you all on the other side, because to me this issue is no different than the anit-gay marriage bullshit from the 2000s that we wiped the table clean of once and for all. We are a nation of immigrants and we will be so until eternity.
Common notion, but based in ignorance. I've found that the left wing is more idealistic, but in the sense that they have chosen not to learn from history and rely on immediate emotional values. The right wing sees second order effects and acts on them.
Thus, you get the left calling the right heartless/immoral/racist, and the right calling the left idiots.
Slavery, segregation, women’s suffrage, child labor protections, labor rights, Social Security, interracial marriage, homosexuality, civil rights legislation, same-sex marriage, the Vietnam War, the Iraq War, prohibition, environmental protections, public education expansion, healthcare reform, voting rights expansion, immigration rights, disability rights, reproductive rights, minimum wage laws, workers’ compensation laws.
> considered unspeakably cruel
You're not disagreeing on any pragmatic basis, just the emotional one. Like I said.
They could have said things like 'reproductive rights leads to X goods for the populace' or 'prohibition was a net positive in Y ways' or 'minimum wage laws are shown to improve GDP by Z amt on average' - but they didn't. They used an emotional argument. Like I said they would.
It’s hard to take this one at good faith. The right wing is very publicly melting down the CDC for glue while the second order effects of a preventable measles epidemic spreads through the country. Is there a more targeted claim you want to make?
I suspect that you merely dislike the authoritarian things the government is currently doing; I dislike that the government is authoritarian. We are not the same.
The Republican party traded logic for populism long ago.
You've clearly only paid attention to ragebait. Because "integrated members of our society" is exactly what the right wing is interested in. But this is not what happened in recent years. The entire reason for the deportations is because they are not becoming "integrated members of our society" - it instead became "all crime-like" in places it wasn't before, and the correlation with the alien imports is just too obvious. It happened too fast and too much, and now the correction is just as hard.
"They are simply sick" and you're...... proving my point.
Think it should depend on custody. US courts don't just always favor the custody of the citizen parent.
I don't see how it's unrealistic.
A fair trial in court for a start.
There is a moral answer, the practical answer, and two popular answers, none of which are particularly satisfying.
The moral answer is open borders. Both capital, which is generally freer than people are, and people should be able to vote with their feet. However, this is unsustainable unless all or a large bloc of countries allow it in reciprocity, or at least countries with an EU-like agreement. It would make a lot of sense for all of North America to have an EU-like agreement, economically, militarily, and legally.
The practical answer: amnesty for parents of children who are born here, conditional on criminality aversion. Like a form of probation.
The right-wing propaganda answer: immigrants somehow took jobs they are unwilling to do and therefore, while we might crack a few eggs making the omelette, all immigrants must go. Authoritarians love this view.
The left-wing propaganda: all immigrants are noble victims of evil capitalist systems, and therefore any control over borders is inherently racist and fascist. This is clearly also unsustainable, and authoritarians love for their opponents to have this view.
Voters have rejected this sort of cosmopolitanism at the ballot box, repeatedly. To suggest that governments should open borders over the wishes of their citizens seems to simply be an object-level misunderstanding over the goals of statecraft.
The purpose of a Republic is to be a stable entity that ensures the welfare of its citizens. It is not to have a single-minded obsession with global welfare at the expense of its own sustainability or the desires of its citizens.
I'm less confident that this was performed in either location due to direct democracy, and more because it made political sense and was expedient at the time that these locale enacted the governance structure.
In other words, it's not a one-and-done-forever type discussion, and things (clearly) evolve over time.
But "well Trump won so just have ICE kill them all" (this is what my aunt, a republican lobbyist, wants) is not a thing.
A strong no on this being "the moral answer". If people are permitted to vote with their feet maybe people are also permitted to build pickets around communities. That sounds more "moral" to me than entirely ignoring the wishes of the chosen destination's "people". IFF the destination is happy to welcome people who think their community better than their own and want to move over, then fine, that is a much better candidate for "the moral answer".
Is there an acceptable way for POC to get citizenship anymore, if it's not by inheritance and it's not by being born in the US?
No, there are lots of immigration statuses between "illegal" and "citizen". DAPA, which was the Obama administration's policy, gave parents of US citizens a status where they could get temporary renewable work permits and exemption for deportation. This was not citizenship, or even a status that could allow someone to eventually become a citizen.
The net result, of course, is identical to if they had all stayed home.
I think there has to be a reasonable solution that gives legal status to the guy who's been here for 20 years and is making a positive contribution to society, but doesn't allow someone to show up and exploit loopholes to stay forever.
I think a reasonable compromise would look something like this:
* Make it much easier for people to get temporary visas for the kinds of jobs where we need migrant workers.
* Provide a pathway to citizenship for people who have been in this country for a very long time and are contributing to society.
* Make it very difficult for people to come to the US without a visa - e.g. make people apply for asylum outside of the US. Stop issuing temporary protected status to huge blocks of migrants.
Unfortunately, political polarization has basically made it impossible for Congress to solve real problems.
The simpler, logically consistent solution would be that the child’s citizenship is only granted if the parents are citizens. (Or at least if parents are not illegal immigrants). Then when you deport the parents, you can legally deport the child too. It still is not a pleasant situation, there is no ideal solution here, except he should have never been let in at all, but once he is, these seem the only choices
Citizenship by blood creates its own problems. I am eligible for Polish citizenship if I choose to pursue it based on where my ancestors lived. I have never been to Poland, don't speak the language, and don't really know that much about the culture or feel any loyalty or even much affinity to Poland. On the other hand, let's say that someone is born in Poland to immigrant parents. Culturally they are entirely Polish - they lived their whole life there, speak the language, were educated by the Polish school system and consider themselves entirely Polish - they've never lived anywhere else. Yet they would not have the same ability to become a citizen that I have. If I got Polish citizenship, I'd just take whatever benefits I could from it and contribute nothing to Poland. How is it logical that I could be a Polish citizen and this person couldn't be?
Yeah, it sounds like a completely unworkable situation.
If only there was some way to make it easier for people to stay in the United States with much relaxed concern about their citizenship status or documentation.
... Oh wait, we could just do that. Because it's our laws, which means it's rules for a game we made up for ourselves. The universe does not care about the lines drawn on a map. People do. If the lines drawn on a map and the separation of human beings across those lines is becoming painful... Maybe we stop hurting ourselves?
We could care less. We did care less in the past. It seemed to work pretty well.
- sloppiness and seeming cruelty of the process, intentional or not
- disregard for judicial rulings
- pushing boundaries with regards to who (those with legal status) and how (sending people to foreign prisons)
Their skin color and national origin is offensive to the president and the percentage of the country that voted for him.
”Do you think the nazis appeared out of thin air? No they were everywhere just waiting for someone to enable them with a label and an ideology.”
I suspect something analogous is happening here and it’s similarly not pretty. Hopefully it’ll get nipped in the bud quickly.
My fellow citizens scare me more than the government does.
Originally they wanted to, well, deport the undesirables to some far off country, initially to Madagascar if memory serves.
Managing mass incarceration and deportation is a difficult task however, and these people (both then and now) are not exactly competent at anything beyond bravado.
Watching this unfolding from afar is interesting, because I can do so with some healthy detachment. If I lived across the pond I would be pretty desperate right now.
I recognize the optimism, but realistically, without a strong and strategic leader, coordination will collapse into disorganization and infighting. Historical examples like Occupy Wall Street demonstrate that leaderless movements tend to self-sabotage and generate instability without achieving meaningful outcomes.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thought-terminating_cliché
The holocaust also required mass incarceration and deportation, except that the huge undertaking of deportation was towards death camps in occupied territories instead of some foreign land. On the first point above, I caution against thinking that it would be much easier; it wasn't really, they just decided that they wanted to kill the people they considered undesirable after all.
On the second point, it's worth noting that the efforts at expulsion partly failed because many other countries, despite knowing of the brutal repression being suffered by the jews (and others but the jews in particular) decided to stonewall most avenues of exit from Nazi domains. Deportation would have still been terrible, but at least it would have put millions of eventual victims outside the reach of gas chambers and death squads. Such as it was, a sort of tacit complicity of indifference didn't allow that to happen, by others who weren't even necessarily supporters of the Nazis.
In either case, be careful about calling evil people practicing evil ends incompetent. In so many ways they were very competent at far more than simple bravado, and underestimating the capabilities of barbaric monsters is always dangerous for future lessons.
The Nazi were a mess, plagued with infighting, and completely incapable of measuring the strength of their opponents, which eventually led to their downfall.
Incompetent evil people can still do a lot of harm until they screw up for good. This doesn't stop them being incompetent.
no the Nazis weren't entirely a mess or completely incompetent.
There was lots of infighting, partly deliberately designed to be that way by Hitler's tactics for organizing his own subordinate leadership levels, but there was also a massive amount of military, industrial and logistical competence and a robust amount of cohesion and careful, powerful cooperation on fundamental aims.
Had there not been, the Nazi's never would have risen to power so effectively, formed their dictatorship so effectively or managed a colossal war against multiple enemies for so many years so effectively, and only been defeated at such a gargantuan cost in lives and resources. The Nazis underestimated the military strength of their enemies, but not nearly so badly as to not wage very effective war and pose a very, very serious threat to these enemies for several years.
I really suggest a book called "The Wages of Destruction: the making and breaking of the Nazi Economy" by Adam Tooze, as a nice basic primer on how wrong these ideas of supposedly incompetent Nazis are.
The above is all deviating a bit from the topic at hand but with this sidestep into a look at the Nazis, you're working from a simplistic caricature view of a more complex situation with complex evil people, and I fear that this is also all too common when many critics today view the Trump government. It's not staffed entirely by caricaturesque evil idiots. Many of its supporters are intelligent and cohesive in their guiding methodologies. (Also, no, the above isn't to compare the bad actions of Trump's government to the completely unrestrained monstrosities of the Nazis. I'm comparing defects of external analysis)
Expanding the argument: I've just decided that you are illegally, and will thus be deported. As there is no due process, my word is law, have fun wherever you end up I literally do not care.
Does that seem fair? And before arguing "well this wouldn't happen, I'm not here illegally", again, this is an article about the deportation of US citizens. Children no less.
But their parents aren’t. Parents can be deported. So let’s imagine they did that. We’d have an article how cruel they stole / kidnapped a child from their parents. Would that be better?
Having a child doesn’t automatically provide a legal cover for staying and not getting deported. Maybe that’s a risk the parents didn’t know about?
read the habeas petition for VMS (the two year old). The child has a US citizen relative and the father seems to have transferred provisional rights of custody to them.
PDF: https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.lawd.21...
Right, I think that's the issue here it's not that the parents should be automatically allowed to say, it's that they were not given a chance in court to allow for that process - to find a relative.
There is a complication in the case because the provisional custody was canceled then renewed and transferred to Trish Mack.
> Also on April 22, 2025, V.M.L.’s father executed a Provisional Custody by Mandate under Louisiana Revised Statutes § 9:951, temporarily “delegat[ing] the provisional custody of” his two daughters to his U.S. citizen sister-in-law, who also lives in Baton Rouge, LA. The Mandate was notarized by a valid notary public in the state of Louisiana
> On April 24, 2025, the mandatary named in the Provisional Custody by Mandate terminated the agreement for personal reasons,
> V.M.L.’s father and Next Friend Petitioner Trish Mack executed a new notarized Provisional Custody by Mandate, delegating custodial authority to Ms. Mack
Let's fast track Aunts and Uncles too - maybe we can get the whole family.
Yeah that might work. Wonder if there is any legislative effort on that front. I guess with the current congress it won't happen, so perhaps nobody is trying.
I am not sure what you're arguing for? Take the children away in real life and hand off to a random foster family. Sometimes they can stay with aunts or uncles. Sometimes there are no aunts or uncles.
> There's no need for hypothetical scenarios, focus on the actual point of the article and thread.
Ok, so what should we discuss about the article? To help the conversation move along it's easier to say "here is what I think" as opposed to tell someone "don't think or say that!" and leave it a that.
Anyone arguing in what-ifs agrees with the deportation but can't be that blatantly racist on here. Ignoring this specific case allows them to muddy the waters. Anyone playing Devil's Advocate consistently are usually part of the devil's party.
Also, a few days back, you made the same point and someone furnished you links where legal migrants are being caught in a net. This is not an argument in good faith.
Technically Secretary Clinton called half of her opponent’s supporters a “basket of deplorables.” So 0.25 of the voting population at most.
But if that sounds worse than anything uttered by this administration, you’re not listening closely. I’m Canadian and we’ve been called “one of the nastiest countries.”
Ironically you say that in the comments section of a US citizen being held prior to deportation. Maybe those pesky children are flooding in there illegally?
> if we didn't have people trying to illegally shield them from ICE.
If only those annoying people weren't trying to hide Jews from the SS back in the day eh?
> Equating that to Nazi Germany is disingenuous and completely off the mark.
By all means, proceed. I am watching from afar with amusement as the US descends into banana Republic status with a sprinkle of old school European fascism now that the ICE is basically acting like Stasi or Gestapo from years past.
I wonder what you would consider to be enough for the comparison to not be disingenuous anymore. Perhaps when the ovens are burning in some Central American death camp.
Clinton said that many Trump voters were deplorables. Trump said that many immigrants are not human. Now I know which sounds more like the Nazis to me.
I am very much not a Trump fan, but I need to see a source for that claim.
> "The Democrats say, 'Please don't call them animals. They're humans.' I said, 'No, they're not humans, they're not humans, they're animals,'" said Trump, president from 2017 to 2021.
The first I heard it was in the debate with Harris (that she "wants to do transgender operations on illegal aliens that are in jail").
This isn't a quibble about technical language.
Lol. That was three campaigns ago, and she was correct, and you guys are still whining about it like a bunch of snowflakes. Let it go. Hillary Clinton can't hurt you anymore.
Here’s Trump straight-up uding white nationalist rhetoric:
> Nobody has any idea where these people are coming from, and we know they come from prisons. We know they come from mental institutions [and] insane asylums. We know they're terrorists. Nobody has ever seen anything like we're witnessing right now. It is a very sad thing for our country. It's poisoning the blood of our country. It's so bad, and people are coming in with disease. People are coming in with every possible thing that you could have.
(https://thenationalpulse.com/analysis-post/watch-the-nationa...)
Now, it’s telling that you’re pretending not to have heard your guy say things like that while his administration is sending people to concentration camps without due process but are still upset about something from a decade ago which you are misrepresenting.
Here’s the full quote, which is notable because she identified the specific behaviors she considered deplorable AND explicitly called for sympathy for the large group of people who are motivated by problems in their lives rather than bigotry. Also note that she’s talking about half of the third of the country which votes for him.
> You know, to just be grossly generalistic, you could put half of Trump's supporters into what I call the basket of deplorables. (Laughter/applause) Right? (Laughter/applause) They're racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamophobic – you name it. And unfortunately, there are people like that. And he has lifted them up. He has given voice to their websites that used to only have 11,000 people – now have 11 million. He tweets and retweets their offensive hateful mean-spirited rhetoric. Now, some of those folks – they are irredeemable, but thankfully, they are not America.
> But the "other" basket – the other basket – and I know because I look at this crowd I see friends from all over America here: I see friends from Florida and Georgia and South Carolina and Texas and – as well as, you know, New York and California – but that "other" basket of people are people who feel the government has let them down, the economy has let them down, nobody cares about them, nobody worries about what happens to their lives and their futures; and they're just desperate for change. It doesn't really even matter where it comes from. They don't buy everything he says, but – he seems to hold out some hope that their lives will be different. They won't wake up and see their jobs disappear, lose a kid to heroin, feel like they're in a dead-end. Those are people we have to understand and empathize with as well.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PCHJVE9trSM
That makes quite the contrast where he looks worse the more of his speech you read while her speech looks better in context and makes it clear that while he hates people based on who they are, she reserved judgement based on what they do.
Majority of Jews killed in Hocaust were not Germans. They were from conquered countries.
So, while there was some Madagascar plans floating and while they tried to deport as many German Jews (majority of who were atheists, considered themselves Germans etc) in first stages, they were aware there is going to be showdown later on anyway.
It turns out that some people don't have a mind of their own and are waiting for orders.
Here is no exception. Look at the foaming at the mouth praise of the second coming of Microsoft when Satya took over. And where we are now? Look at the hype as well - blockchain, crypto and AI now. Mindless people slithering all over everything.
In fact I find a lot of the people in the technology sector to either be entirely morally bankrupt or lack any kind of self or societal awareness of their speech of actions. It disgusts me. I've been on HN pretty much since day one but the accounts last perhaps 6 months before I tire of it.
I moved out of the tech-first industry about 10 years ago and into a position of tech as a tool not a reason for a business existing and there are better people here.
Plus the insistence that we can cordon off an area of life and designate it non political is incredibly common but also pretty naive (and dare I say privileged).
That is to say, we in the tech industry often encourage this sort of moral bankruptcy and like to pretend we’re above it all.
I've got a copy of Careless People sitting in front of me I'm scared to read at the moment.
It’s definitely a factor (perhaps the dominant factor) and the easiest place to see it at play is on HN whenever the adtech industry is being criticized.
True, we are not in bad shape like 1930s Germany or United States but as neoliberalism rot has really set in, people feel economically shaky, and government clearly is not responsive to them. Combined with Social Media warping people brain on what is "success" and "strong man" who will take care of things is clearly appealing. Many of them can also be turned around but it's going to take some doing.
I support the general idea of expedited deportation of those here illegally, those without valid documents to be here, I don't automatically have a problem if there is greater restrictions on entering or issuing new visas, but I have a major problem with violating due process and these kind of mistakes that's are a result of lack of due diligence.
The courts need to get more heavily involved here. It's easy to blame the president but short of some directive telling people to violate the law the blame is misdirected (until it's election time). The blame needs to be on those individuals doing this thing or seeing it and ignoring it. This is where the courts need to totally strip away default qualified immunity, especially for immigration officers. Because qualified immunity allows them to just say they were following orders without them having to evaluate if what they are doing is legal or not.
I believe if qualified immunity was gone a lot of this nonsense would stop. They would make sure that anyone who was deported was meant to be deported.
I have a friend who is here legally awaiting an asylum hearing, been waiting for 5 years. They were stopped by police for a valid reason and, from what was described the police had probable cause, but the charge itself is very minor. Because she's documented waiting asylum they contacted immigration, for no reason. There was no probable cause to think she was in violation of her immigration status, but they still contacted them and they requested she be held. So now she detained and there's probable cause to do so but it's immigration so they can.
This is where no qualified immunity would make these officers think twice. They know they have no probable cause to continue to hold her beyond the initial charge. Without qualified immunity they would understand that continuing to hold someone after a judge has allowed their release means that they would lose their house their life their future. So I really think we need to end to qualified immunity across the board. Have the people who are supposed to protect us and be responsible for their actions.
LE personnel would have to get insurance, like doctors, which would be crazy expensive and, considering their pay scale, unaffordable.
I don't like some of the implications of qualified immunity, but I understand why it's there and needed.
I think the only real solution to LE abuses is criminal accountability and prosecution. We already have the laws and processes in place to make that happen. It's hindered by the tribal nature of the human condition and I'm not sure you get around that very easily, at least, not at scale.
So pay would have to go up?
There'd probably also have to be something where if they were following department policy, then the officer (well, their insurance) can turn around and demand reimbursement from the department.
"Qualified Immunity" comes from the fact Americans have independent judicial branch and can directly bring law enforcement into that judiciary. In most countries, any action against law enforcement for their official duties is limited to government/department so they have large scale defense anyways.
It's nice to live in that dreamland that we can resort to criminal prosecutions for officers who violate the law that does not happen as often as it should. As part of their job, what they are trained to do, is to be able to evaluate a reasonable suspicion and probable cause. Yet you regularly see officers violate those standards with impunity. The problem is when someone violates your rights by arresting you without sufficient probable cause there is nearly no recourse for the average person.
If immigration took you and held you for 2 weeks, how disruptive would that be to your life? Would you lose your house, your job, more than that? If it was found that they had no probable cause to for an arrest what realistic legal recourse do you have, and how many years would it take for that recourse?
So if you want to maintain qualified immunity because you believe it's a requirement for these people to do their jobs then where is the balance to that? Because right now there is no balance. If you don't want officers to be held directly responsible or to have to pay for expensive insurance policies somebody needs to pay because without a financial incentive things don't change. What about something that puts a strict financial incentive on getting things right at the first time. Obviously this would be a burden that the taxpayers share but when the taxpayers realize they're shelling out money for people who are not diligent in their work that will change very quickly. If someone is arrested and the courts find there was no probable cause for the arrest. How about $10,000 a day for every day that that person was held. That puts a meaningful financial burden on getting it right. Because then it becomes readily apparent which officers are problematic and which ones are not.
The situation we're in right now is not working and there doesn't seem to be any plans to fix it. Because literally my friend where there is no probable cause for them to be arrested and held by immigration is being held by immigration. Like most people they live month to month. So if they're not working nobody pays their bills nobody pays for their apartment. If they're held for 2 weeks or a month or God forbid even longer before they're let go where is the actual financial recourse because they lost everything in their life? Because your suggestion doesn't solve for that problem and provides no incentive for immigration to follow the laws or even follow the courts.
Because the interesting thing is with the original arrest they would have been released the next day on their own recognizance. Police that do not care about the constitutions or due process or the rights of individuals proactively contacted immigration and immigration requested that she be turned over to them. No reason given and there's no reason for the police to have suspected that a person with all the proper documentation and identification is in violation of any federal immigration law. So tell me honestly what is your solution if it's not to strip away qualified immunity and if it's not to place a heavy financial burden on these agencies in some way that directs back to the individuals that are willfully violating people's rights?
You can't really claim that something is absolutely necessary when there are countries that don't have it.
Because Trump is an abject racist with a white nationalist policy who ran on deporting what he finds to be undesirable. It's not hard.
The states are responsible for providing equal protection of the laws to everyone here. The states need to stand up and fight ICE.
We honestly need a Democrat governor to grow a pair and begin arresting ICE agents unlawfully detaining and kidnapping people. Then let the FBI and Bondi escalate it into a full-blown states' rights issue.
The left in America is ran by geriatrics (Bernie) or unelectable young people (AOC). None of them have the guile to do what you’ve said (or rather to pressure and call for the governors to do that).
The left has a pussyfooting problem. The left is beta, and has surrendered the aesthetics of power to the right again and again throught history (and the only times that they keep it they end up becoming as bad or worse than what they are fighting)
Basically we are fked.
Complexity is the root of all evil.
That means you have the following options:
a) deport nobody, i.e. you don't apply the law
b) deport just the parents. What do you do with the minor children? Separating them from their parents (different countries) would be cruel.
c) deport the entire family, including the US minors. Since they have US citizenship, they can always return to the US.
D) the child remains with the legally resident / citizen parent or their immediate families
In these cases they have legally resident parents, just not the one who the child was with when snatched without due process. They’re being denied the ability to coordinate the handoff of the child to the other parent or family who can take responsibility. ICE is not allowing the families to coordinate the child’s care - they’re isolating the parent from their broader families, denying due process, access to legal representation, and unilaterally deporting US citizen children who have other options but were denied the ability to access them.
In the United States our constitution assures -all people- due process and basic human rights. There is no carve out that if you’re visiting the country or otherwise not a citizen that you can be summarily detained, deprived of liberty, and handled however the government chooses including extraordinary rendition to third countries for indefinite imprisonment without recourse. Nothing that is happening is allowable, or even defensible because however you feel about immigration - every action being taken could be taken to tourists, students, or other guests if allowed under the premise only citizens enjoy protections.
And in these cases, even citizens are being given no deference - and the fact they’re toddlers should be even more frightening.
Here’s a quote from the release that basically implies ICE is murdering one child summarily:
“””a U.S. citizen child suffering from a rare form of metastatic cancer was deported without medication or the ability to consult with their treating physicians–despite ICE being notified in advance of the child’s urgent medical needs.“””
So, the headline as written dramatically understates the situation, and the proposed dichotomy is false. There are many other options, spelled out in the law and regulation and requirements - even constitutionally - and they’re being ignored as an apparent matter of political policy.
Is that true? I re-read the article (but didn’t google for other sources), but nowhere could I see that definitively stated.
It would be interesting if the deportable mother of one of these minors (e.g. the one who is pregnant) decided to leave them with other family in the US rather than stay together as a family, but it is of course her right to make such a decision.
PDF: https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.lawd.21...
Having deportation as an actual threat, reduces the amount of people who attempt to break the rules since they know there are consequences.
e) Amnesty if living here for awhile and not causing a ruckus.[0] US is huge, it needs more people not less.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Immigration_Reform_and_Control...
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Immigration_Reform_and_Contr...
There was a perfectly cromulent immigration plan ready to be voted on by Congress before Trump threw a tantrum because it would have hurt his election chances.
Would be nice if we had more housing for that.
Illegally immigrating to the US is a civil violation, not a criminal one, and far less of a threat to US safety than going 5mph over the speed limit or running red lights. It is entirely lawful for the executive and judicial branches to use discretion and compassion in cases when under-18 US citizens are involved.
It can be both, depending on the situation:
• First-time illegal entry into the U.S. (like crossing the border without inspection) is a criminal misdemeanor under federal law (8 U.S.C. § 1325).
• Unlawful presence (like overstaying a visa) is usually a civil violation, not criminal. It can lead to deportation but not criminal charges.
I mean sure. But let's let the next Democrat who's in charge determine that kidnapping or maybe even voting wrong are crimes that merit summary deportation. After all, if they're good citizens, they can always return.
The history of suspending habeas corpus is strikingly one way. Maybe we'll be the first society to defy that trend. But the end game we're heading to is mass political violence.
You benefit from this monstrosity that takes advantage of people and leaves them destitute and you know it deep down. If yall support this don't ever delude yourself into thinking you're a good person.
While this is true, the use of what's technically the wrong word highlights that the wrong action is being applied.
The action is a deportation. The targets are people who must/shall not ever be deported. Therefore the headline immediately gets attention for concisely describing a violation.
I am not seeing all the details I want, but given the reports of 4 year olds having to defend themselves without representation it is easy to believe these reports of no or little due process for child citizens.
[1] https://www.politico.com/news/2025/04/25/us-citizen-deportat...
The case we heard about yesterday illustrates the difference. A judge Trump appointed raised the alarm not just because due process is being violated but because a two year old’s father was pleading with the court to let his daughter live with him. Prior to this administration, nobody would have blinked an eye at a U.S. citizen switching custody to a U.S. citizen parent, and it’d save the government a lot of money to let that happen.
https://www.politico.com/news/2025/04/25/us-citizen-deportat...
I have to wonder what horrors and shames ones pathway of life must have taken to think a person existing in a space is summarizable as illegal. A person cannot be illegal. They cannot exist in a space illegally. They could enter a space illegally. They could be unauthorized to be in a space. But by simple fact that they exist in the world, if the law makes them illegal to exist, then that law is unjust and should be considered void ab initio based on the very few common similarities among coherent moral frameworks.
From a practical perspective, as parents and tutelaries of children who have citizenship, they should be allowed to stay as guardians and join the US society. We have so many who thumb their nose at culture in the US, whether the right wanting to commit genocide against the outgroup under the guise of MAGA or the left self-shaming because they know the US can be morally better, but of all people, immigrants, especially undocumented and unauthorized immigrants who risk everything and worked outside standard pathways just for the chance to be at the periphery of US society, vulnerable to the predators and outlaws that inhabit that domain, they should be given extraordinary respect and consideration -- which is what we grant all persons who are in the United States and subject to its jurisdiction (which is geographically defined).
Respect for law is critical, and valorizing the breaking it undermines the very concept of society.
If you want more immigration, work to increase legal quotas and update the law.
1. "respect for the law" requires both due process, for both citizens and people in the geographical jurisdiction of the US, and respect for the courts. Anyone who works around due process and court orders does not respect the law. This is a general statement regarding the treatment by the current regime, using ICE, towards immigrants and anyone they think is associated to it. Literally -- this article is about deporting of US citizens held incommunicado and without legal representation, and people are already protesting judges being arrested and legal residents being exiled without due process.
2. "this is the rhetoric that drove the country to this point" would more appropriately be attributed the othering of immigrants and groups MAGA doesn't agree with - how many Haitians ate dogs and cats in Ohio? Maybe more than 0, but certainly not the unmoored groundswell of false-flag horror that crested at the rightful mocking of Trump's debate performance.[0] Ref: the moral teachings on motes, beams, eyes, Golden Rule, etc. across time and religions of all stripes. I reject the notion that me expressing empathy for immigrants and the xenophobists is rhetoric driving the country apart. It's calling a spade a spade.
3. "If you want more immigration, work to increase legal quotas and update the law." This is sort of one of those feel-good statements that have no meat or content in them. We had a perfectly cromulent immigration reform ready to go until Trump threw a tantrum and got Republican legislators to vote against their own interests because it would hurt his presidential chances. We could go back to that, it had some good political will, instead of the authoritarian nonsense chaotically deployed. Of course, you wouldn't want me to be the authoritarian -- we'd come out of things with an open border and trade agreement across the Americas because that's more efficient and morally justifiable than military intervention at a mis-named "invasion" at the border (almost as poorly named as DOGE). So rather than enabling groups to work towards coherent immigration strategies, we have a tyranny of the majority assumed to be the will of the land.[1]
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vNbhpkJ69ts
[1] "It is abundantly clear that many activist judges around the country have been acting politically in order to sabotage President Trump's agenda, and disenfranchise the 77 million Americans that voted for him." - Rep. Derrick Van Orden (R-Wisc.) (This is 100% political grandstanding, since polls show that most people now disagree with Trump's agenda, [1a])
[1a] https://archive.ph/T7yVp, especially the immigration section is now underwater
I don't know if this is true, it seems more like a situational demand that you're making but giving it the tone of a fact that you're pointing out.
If you break into my house, and I shoot you while you're doing it, I won't go to prison. So either you're illegal, or I've become so extraordinarily legal that I can shoot people with impunity. Whatever has happened in that hypothetical, I do not think it is unjust. If you also do not, you don't agree with your own premise.
Maybe if you make it rhyme, it will slip past people's reasoning skills better.
> I have to wonder what horrors and shames ones pathway of life
You don't know anyone here. Your self-regard is off the charts.
Ironically, I know myself fairly well and quite a few folks in all political persuasions, and thus remain confident in my priors. But I could see how one could mistake empathy for egomania.
Calling people "illegal" is a hallmark of steeping in rightwing/authoritarian propaganda as it is about "othering" others. Self-abuse should be discouraged whether it is physical (cutting, suicide, etc.) or mental (losing one's capacity and faculties for reasoning to authoritarian propaganda).[0,1,2,3]
[0] https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3934064
[1] https://www.taylorfrancis.com/chapters/edit/10.4324/97810031...
[2] https://www.biblio.com/book/fox-effect-how-roger-ailes-turne...
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Brainwashing_of_My_Dad
In fact I looked this up recently, and “deportation” has historically been used in the sense of “dispossession”, i.e. expelling citizens. For example the notorious deportation of defeated Jews to Babylon.
But nowadays that “deportation” so often connotes “repatriation” we’ll need to make those distinctions. And people seem to be completely unaware: we’re in a Year of Ordinary Jubilee!
It's 2018. Children are being separated from their parents and kept in cages[1]. It's really important to notice that the pictures in this article are not from reporters, leaks or anything of the sort. They were released by Customs and Border Protection and, no doubt, make things look better than they were.
What has changed since Trump's first term? Yes, there is now a stronger sensitivity to separating children from their parents, among the public at least. One solution is to simply deport child citizens along with non-citizen parents and claim it was by choice.
What solutions are we not seeing in the media though? How many photos are being published about conditions in ICE facilities, Guantanamo bay, etc.? What's going on that we just don't know about this time? If some judge ordered the release of photos of current conditions in ICE facilities, they'd be ignored or even charged with some made-up crime.
I see a lot of people here trying to reason this away, but it's going to be worse than last time and, eventually, the truth will get out. I know it's tough to care about this while Trump is simultaneously tanking the stock market, waging trade wars, threatening multiple countries with invasion or annexation, etc.. That is by design. Even Americans who cannot spare any sympathy for immigrants need to make the time to care about how their government is treating American children.
[1]https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-44518942
It's 2000, Bill Clinton is about to wrap up his second term and has deported more people in that term than any president ever at nearly 7,000,000 deportations. Trump barely had 2,000,000 deportations in his first term. Trump's first term was the lowest level of deportations for any administration since Carter. Obama, Reagan, Both Bushes, Clinton and Biden all deported more people every term of their administrations.
This has been going on for a long time. I doubt Trump will beat Clinton's 2nd term. I'd be willing to bet on it if anyone wants to take the other side.
There is so much lack of context in all these discussions. The 'Maryland Man' that everyone is extremely concerned about was first deported by Obama admin in 2009. Remigration is an ugly business, but it has to happen if you want to live in a sovereign nation under the rule of law.
> Remigration is an ugly business, but it has to happen if you want to live in a sovereign nation under the rule of law.
god, what enemies do you have?? I don't know how you go from "give them due process" to "the west has fallen" unless you mean restricting migration by law, which Biden proposed and Trump rejected last year. I'm actually curious - are you aware of that law? Did you hear about it?
As I've mentioned in other comments non-judicial removals (no immigration hearing) are in fact very common accounting for nearly 75% of all removals. Deportation of American citizens has happened, and it is wrong. It's been happening every year in small numbers for the last 30 years. In the OP case in particular the children were deported with the parents at the parent's request according to a DHS statement. So this was not a mistake.
>I'm actually curious - are you aware of that law? Did you hear about it?
Of course, you're talking about The Emergency National Security Supplemental Appropriations Act. The 'immigration amendment' wasn't really necessary and you could argue the better electronic communications outlined in the bill actually could increase immigration efficiency. It was a very popular lie that legislation was needed to stop millions of illegals from entering the country during the Biden administration. Border crossings have dropped ~95% since the new administration took over. Probably for two main reasons, no more parole while waiting for a hearing and NGO funding drying up.
If you can't criticize the overall objective (large-scale depopulation of America because so-called undesirables don't meet arbitrary legal criteria) then at least criticize the approach - don't call it an ugly but necessary business.
Call it a completely unnecessary violation of civil rights and due process that it is! Don't make up garbage about sovereignty.
"The Obama administration has prioritized speed over fairness in the removal system, sacrificing individualized due process in the pursuit of record removal numbers.
A deportation system that herds 75 percent of people through fast-track, streamlined removal is a system devoid of fairness and individualized due process."[1]
3/4 of Obama era deportations were 'nonjudicial removals' meaning that there was no hearing in front of an immigration judge before removal. People just didn't care as much then I suppose.
[1] https://www.aclu.org/news/immigrants-rights/speed-over-fairn...
Donald Trump and his administration are on an absolute crime spree[1]. Insider trading, launching shit-coins and engaging in self-dealing, completely disregarding both the constitution and the courts, up to and including the Supreme Court.
The US is currently a lawless banana republic with the dumbest autocrat in history. That's the one saving grace: This herd of absolute imbeciles are so catastrophically stupid -- a cluster of plastic-faced Fox news clowns -- that they are bound to destroy everything so completely that they are overthrown out of necessity. Will the US survive this? Given that it voted for this rapist, charity-stealing moron twice, hopefully not. The fractured nations that come out of this hopefully have a better path.
[1] Ignoring that he is giving the most laughably corrupt pardons in history, to outrageously guilty thieves, fraudsters and human effluence. Trump's grotesque abuse, and quite literal selling, of pardons should be the impetus for whatever husk remains of the dissolved United States to abolish presidential pardons.
My reading is that the judge lied to the FBI in order to help the subject escape, AFAIK this is a felony (obstruction?) and anyone else would be charged - so why isn't it equally applicable to a judge? I think people are assuming the judge has some form of power that she doesn't.
Not going to discuss Bondi or Trump, on a GBA basis.
These were ICE "agents" with an administrative warrant. Nor did she "lie", she refused them entry to an operating courtroom -- which she was 100% right to do.
So nothing you said is accurate.
There is a 100% chance she will be completely exonerated, but of course this clown administration -- full of in-the-open criminals of the worst kind -- doesn't care about that, they just care about intimidation. Which is precisely why they brought up charges without a grand jury, which is basically unprecedented, because a grand jury would never have levied such a charge, and then arrested her in public with a perp walk with a photographer at the ready. And they know it won't stick. But because they're an administration of criminal garbage they just want to put the judiciary in its place, while supplicants and smooth-brains cheer them on.
"Obstructing or impeding a proceeding before a department or agency of the US"
-- https://www.washingtonpost.com/documents/d62bd73e-a370-40e4-...
My understanding is that even in the case of an ICE agent, can also be a felony:
https://www.birdsall-law.com/legal-implications-of-interferi...
The agents are described by the FBI agents as "Agents from [DHS], [ICE ERO]" without scare-quotes - are you implying that they weren't legitimate agents? That said, FBI and CBP agents are also described as being present, so the distinction between ICE/FBI, and a judicial/administrative warrant seem unimportant.
> Nor did she "lie", she refused them entry to an operating courtroom
She appeared to co-operate (leading them away to talk to the Chief judge), while actually helping the subject evade arrest (returning and actually instructing them how to escape).
The first part, the deception, is what makes the lie rather than a mere upfront refusal.
> which she was 100% right to do
obstruct the agents? In which case they are right to arrest her.. I'm not sure what your angle here is.
> nothing you said is accurate.
Seems to me your own corrections are just as inaccurate. The above should clarify.
I also take issue with the idea that this extreme exclusionary mindset is somehow new to America. A lot of people frame what’s happening as if it’s the first time this country has gone through this. There is a long and storied tradition of otherizing, deporting, and imprisoning. Going back to our very foundation — America was born out of a process of expelling Native people from their lands. Then there’s the Great Migration period and the intense reaction to it, the Palmer raids, FDR’s internment camps, Eisenhower’s deportations, McCarthy era “anti-communism”, mass incarceration as a reaction to the Civil Rights Act, Islamophobia, and now this aggressively right wing anti-immigration sentiment.
The people of America, unfortunately, are prone to drastically evil actions when they are tricked by opportunistic political actors into believing their way of life is somehow under attack. This cycle has been going on for a long time.
I have no issue with legal immigration. Far from it, I’m in favor of attracting the best, brightest, and most hard working.
But knowing people overseas that want to come to the USA but are respectful enough to want to do it legally, I take issue with anyone that enters the country illegally. They’re cheating the system and showing immediate disdain for our system of laws. The second order effects of funneling money to smugglers and coyotes are bad as well.
Every country has a right to decide who can visit or immigrate. That’s the right of any sovereign state.
If the people of America want more immigration then have them petition their representatives to change the laws to all for it.
"Of course, 'It is illegal and unconstitutional to deport, detain for deportation, or recommend deportation of a U.S. citizen.' See Lyttle v. United States, 867 F.Supp.2d 1256 (M.D. Ga. 2012) (citing Tuan Anh Nguyen v. Immigration & Naturalization Serv., 533 U.S. 53, 67 (2001) (affirming that a citizen has the 'absolute right to enter [the United States] borders'); Shapiro v. Thompson, 394 U.S. 618, 629 (1969) ('This Court long ago recognized that the nature of our Federal Union and our constitutional concepts of personal liberty unite to require that all citizens be free to travel throughout the length and breadth of our land uninhibited by statutes, rules, or regulations which unreasonably burden or restrict this movement.')" [1].
To the extent someone is unequivocally cheating, it's ICE.
[1] https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.lawd.21...
> To the extent someone is unequivocally cheating, it's ICE.
So what exactly is ICE supposed to do if they are deporting the illegal alien mother and child is a citizen? Forget the possibility of a deported father. Say a single mother with no legal status is being deported.
Does she not get the option to take her child with her?
If she didn’t take the child the same people would be likely be screaming about ICE separating families.
Kids are not a get out of jail free card.
I know. I'm pointing out that the mother's illegal immigration is outweighed by ICE's illegal detention, deportation and wilful abrogation of legal and constitutional rights of a U.S. citizen.
> what exactly is ICE supposed to do if they are deporting the illegal alien mother and child is a citizen?
Follow the law. In this case, that would involve transfering the child to her designated custodian [1].
> If she didn’t take the child the same people would be likely be screaming about ICE separating families
Not an excuse for breaking the law!
[1] https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/69940863/1/v-m-l-v-harp...
If that’s the sort of way that you believe we should treat legal immigrants, you have no basis to claim any support for them.
Is that true?
If this is the correct case link it doesn't seem like the father is a US citizen?
https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.lawd.21...
> father executed a Provisional Custody by Mandate under Louisiana Revised Statutes
It seems odd that he would give provisional custody to "family friend" then?
Then this doesn't add up then
> Respondent Harper later sent an email further evincing her refusal to release V.M.L. to her custodian, see Exh. 2, and stating that she would instead require V.M.L.’s father to turn himself in for detention and deportation,
So they wanted to deport the US citizen father?
It's possible that I am looking at a different court case perhaps.
What about wage suppression?
https://www.jstor.org/stable/41426727
https://www.dagliano.unimi.it/media/12-Ottaviano-Peri-2008.p...
The economy isn't zero-sum. As Milton Friedman noted, "most economic fallacies derive from the tendency to assume that there is a fixed pie, that one party can gain only at the expense of another." Immigrants create demand for housing, food, education, entertainment, and specialized services that natives often provide.
Historical evidence consistently disproves the fallacy: When women entered the workforce, it didn't cause massive job losses among men. When segregation was abolished, Black workers didn't cause mass unemployment among whites. The vast majority of Americans descend from immigrants who contributed to economic growth.
Research on H-1B visas shows that firms that get immigrant labor end up "hiring more tech workers and paying them more, because they become more efficient and sometimes scale up." In fact, studies show each H-1B worker creates approximately 1.83 jobs for native-born Americans.
The UK's Migration Advisory Committee, after reviewing studies from 2003-2018, concluded that "immigration had little or no impact on average employment or unemployment of existing workers" and "little impact on average wages."
The overwhelming consensus among economists is that immigration grows the economic pie rather than merely redistributing slices. That's why America's most immigrant-rich cities consistently have the highest wages, not the lowest.
PLEASE, I am begging you. Spend 15 minutes reading actual economic research before posting confidently incorrect Econ 101 oversimplifications. The "immigrants take our jobs" fallacy has been debunked by virtually every reputable economic study for the past 30 years. This isn't some fringe academic view. It's the overwhelming consensus of actual economists who study this for a living. Your intuition about "more workers = lower wages" seems logical but falls apart when tested against actual economic data. The real world is more complex than a supply-and-demand graph from an introductory textbook.
The research shows that labor markets aren't simple supply-demand curves because of complementary productivity effects and gains from specialization, selection effects, and, of course, demand generated by the immigrants. If you have general labor size increase, in general equilibrium with a responsive central bank interest rates will lower to keep employment tight.
This isn't about "long enough time horizons" - studies find positive or neutral effects in the short and medium term too. The fundamental issue is that your model assumes a fixed economic pie that immigrants simply divide into smaller slices, when in reality immigrants help grow the pie overall.
More seriously...
- for US: The newest NBER IV estimates put the wage effect of all 2000-19 US immigration at +2 % for non-college natives. Show me a UK study of similar vintage that finds anything near –2 %.
- for UK: UK real wages tracked productivity one-for-one after 2008; BoE and NIESR pin that on capital deepening, Brexit and austerity. Not on immigration, which the MAC finds moved wages by _at most_ –1% (aggregate, not yearly!) and the final report was ~0.1%, basically a null finding.
- We've already been through lump of labor, so I don't know why you've been banging on equilibrium.
And to finally address your time horizons: Short-run? Mariel-style shocks still show null effects. Medium-run? 2009-20 UK data flips positive. Long-run? Productivity wins. Pick your horizon. Immigration is at worst a rounding error next to TFP, which is positively associated with migration.
Happy to dive deeper, but at this point the burden of proof is on anyone claiming large negative wage effects. The best evidence, across multiple methods and countries, just isn’t there.
My conversations with H-1B visa holders is that whatever aggravations they may have in the US, they can still get into the US. Other countries just don't have that pathway
They do not come legally. That's the problem. Plain and simple.
All people are like this. When the economic prospects for you look bleak, it's very aggravating to see someone you believe is an outsider is succeeding. We see microcosms of this in the bay area where people blame tech workers for driving the cost of living up and making it hard for regular people. In reality, housing policy has done that, but people get mad seeing new outsiders enjoying the life that has become harder and harder for them to afford.
This is the richest nation on earth with a roughly 4% unemployment rate we’re talking about here.
Physics degree. Magna cum laude. Engineer. Homeowner. If you heard me speak you would never guess I was not American. I have been here 30 out of 32 years an I have no legal pathway to residency or citizenship.
I guess I should have helped poison our cities with black tar heroin via a shitty PHP website running in the tor network like Ulbritch, maybe then I could get a pardon from the orange moron.
1. This behavior, whether legal or not, is profoundly inhumane.
2. No law, statute, or rule requires us to treat anyone inhumanely. The people behaving this way are doing it because they want to. These are not people you want to have access to any power.
First they came for the terrorists, then they came for the dual citizenship lesser criminals.
We're getting a glimpse of who's next. The Dutch government wanted to strip citizenship from people convicted of a crime with an "antisemitic element"
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/apr/26/how-idea-of-st...
Of course it’s impossible to know who “really” is a critical mastermind. (Comic book lives) /s
Everyone should pay attention and amplify these stories of targeted non-criminal families, because the “radical left” is next. Joking/not-Joking
Here’s another family in Washington state,
“A high schooler stays back as his family, separated by deportation, returns to Guatemala”
APRIL 26, 2025 WEEKEND EDITION SATURDAY
https://www.npr.org/2025/04/26/nx-s1-5330896/a-high-schooler...
I read an article that starts with this proposition [1]
> The real question, however, is not how America lost its way. We know the mechanics of it. It lost its way in large measure because Donald Trump, a Pied Piper of malice, led it astray, though one can’t lay all of that or even most of it on Trump. The American people, nearly half of those who voted, in their infinite wisdom empowered Trump to do so. They were looking for a Trump, yearning for a Trump, to do so.
> They wanted a Trump to destroy the nation. They hoped he would destroy the nation both by sowing chaos and discord and by supervising a demolition of our institutions and values. So the real question we should be asking is why so many of our fellow Americans desired this, and what deep proclivities Trump drew upon to prompt the nation, at least a good part of it, to self-immolate. What does Trump give them?
Having read The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich as a young person, this is reminiscent of a fascist playbook.
Except that it seems that social media are in effect creating a culture of resentment, projection of weakness and failure onto others and driving it for profit with unfiltered echo chambers.
The cause and effect seems to be playing to a vengeful base in order to keep legislators in line until their branch and the judicial branch are rendered impotent.
Exploring the parallels with Nazi Germany, the amassing of data was paramount.
> DOGE is building a master database for immigration enforcement, sources say [2]
Further,
> TRUMP ADMINISTRATION TEXTED COLLEGE PROFESSORS’ PERSONAL PHONES TO ASK IF THEY’RE JEWISH [3]
> The school later told staff it had provided the Trump administration with personal contact information for faculty members.
> The messages, sent to most Barnard professors’ personal cellphones, asked them to complete a voluntary survey about their employment.
> “Please select all that apply,” said the second question in the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, or EEOC, survey.
> The choices followed: (including) “I am Jewish”; “I am Israeli”; “I have shared Jewish/Israeli ancestry”; “I practice Judaism”; and “Other.”
Data?
IBM provided Germany with tabulating equipment to manage "undesirables" [4] [5]
The notion of cultural supremacy resonates with some in Silicon Valley, land of big and targeted data.
'Reboot' Revealed: Elon Musk's CEO-Dictator Playbook [6]
Silicon Valley Whistleblowers Warn Elon Musk 'Hijacking' Republicans to Control Entire US Government [7]
PDF of their letter. [8] 630K
[1] https://whowhatwhy.org/culture/the-agonizing-work-of-art-tha...
[2] https://www.yahoo.com/news/doge-building-master-database-imm...
[3] https://theintercept.com/2025/04/23/trump-eeoc-barnard-colum...
[4] https://allthatsinteresting.com/ibm-nazis-ww2/3
[5] https://allthatsinteresting.com/ibm-nazis-ww2
[6] https://www.thenerdreich.com/reboot-elon-musk-ceo-dictator-d...
[7] https://bylinetimes.com/2025/02/07/silicon-valley-whistleblo...
[8] https://america2.news/content/files/2025/02/Musk-NRx-Memo-Fe...
> The families, who had lived in the United States for years and had deep ties to their communities
> Both families have possible immigration relief
The current actions did not make sense and didn't make anything better or solve any problems.
> According to a Migration Policy Institute report, the deportation system dramatically changed over the past 19 years - moving from a judicial system prior to 1996 where most people facing deportation had immigration court hearings, to a system during Obama's administration where 75 percent of people removed did not see a judge before being deported.
You have to understand that most what you read about online about this administration is not written in good faith and reported honestly. Everything is unprecedented and a constitutional crisis. Really unforgivable when basic questions in an LLM can provide you meaningful context
https://www.aclu.org/news/immigrants-rights/speed-over-fairn...
There's a reason why trust in the ruling administration is so important, because otherwise the system breaks down. Any time any questions pop up about how the law is being violated, Tom Homan breaks down crying about how the real crime is how children are baking to death in the heat of the sun, that children are being raped by cartel members... like what do you even say to that? Its easy to see why people are able to commit acts of great cruelty if they've convinced themselves that it's a neccesary evil for the greater good.
And it is unprecedented for modern times and it is a constitutional crisis on an almost daily basis.
Nope, America has become so weak under the new rule that now when El Salvador says something America has to shut up and obey… It is what it is… :)
Second, even if in all cases the parents were not citizens it does matter because the US citizen child's due process rights were not respected.
> They deported the parents and their kids along with them. Should they go into foster care instead?
There should be a hearing for the US citizen child to determine what to do with them. Even if both parents have to leave there may be other relatives in the US legally who would be happy to care for the child.
If it's mind boggling to you I would ask chatgpt, it's mind boggling to me that you don't care whether it is correct...
But if you generally think chatGPT produces garbage, I guess that makes sense. I disagree, to me it's a good initial query, replacing google. As with google before, it is not authoritative (e.g AI may hallucinate, or google may land you on some SEO bs page), but I don't tend to dismiss its use outright.
> I googled and these are the results (…)
and then copy pasting the first page of results.
And underlying all of this is a sense that maybe nobody is in the mood to explore the finer points or these terrible acts. I can accept that.
Fact checking LLM copypasta takes orders of magnitude more effort than producing it. How about you do the homework rather than making it everyone else's problem.
"Everyone else do my work for me, and by default I'm right!!!!"
You cannot be serious. Bullshit-asymmetry principle on grand display right here.
I also get if asking the question seems obtuse in the first place. I am interested in exactly what is legal and not so it is clear what can be fought and how. But overall I am very angry about what is happening - apologies if it seemed like I was trying to justify what is happening.
There is a conspiracy theory that “anchor babies” will help undocumented parents avoid deportation from the US.
As far as I can tell, the usual thing that happens when undocumented parents of a US citizen are deported is that they have to give the child to a citizen relative to raise, or they take the child with them.
It seems to be extremely rare, though “prosecutorial discretion” can allow for a parent to remain in the US. There is no guarantee; an undocumented parent can and is often deported later, sometimes for minor crimes. I couldn’t find any stats about how often this happens but immigration consultants stress to their clients that they can’t rely on it.
If the undocumented parents have been in the country for 10 years they can apply for relief for deportation but that is capped at 4,000 cases annually. If the child remains in the US until they become an adult, and can plausibly sponsor a relative, then they can also apply to reunify with their parent. The deported parent may have to spend a minimum of a decade outside the US.
All that aside, this has nothing to do with startups or tech and doesn’t belong here.
This isn't wrong. It's documented fact. Three U.S. citizen children (ages 2, 4, and 7) were deported by ICE through the New Orleans field office. A federal judge has already scheduled a hearing about this, citing a "strong suspicion" that a 2-year-old U.S. citizen was deported "with no meaningful process."
You're doing exactly what propagandists hope for - spreading doubt about documented human rights abuses without bothering to verify the facts.
"Last time the pitch was some illegal immigrant who was covered in MS-13 tattoos wasn't MS-13."
If you're referring to a case with photoshopped tattoos, you're literally proving my point! You fell for actual fake news and are now using that to dismiss real, verified reporting from multiple sources including federal court records.
"I wouldn't be surprised if in a few days we learn neither of their parents are citizens and they're foreign nationals."
You've already decided what "truth" you want to emerge. Meanwhile, one of these American children has cancer and was deported without their medication despite ICE being notified of their urgent medical needs.
Your cynicism isn't wisdom, it's complicity. You're pre-emptively discrediting reports of government abuses against literal American children because acknowledging them might force you to confront uncomfortable truths about a system you apparently want to defend at all costs.
These aren't anonymous claims! They're documented cases with legal representation, court filings, and federal judicial review already underway. What would it take for you to actually care about American citizens losing their rights?
The guidelines explicitly say HN is not just for that. It’s right at the top.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
> On-Topic: (…) That includes more than hacking and startups.