Unfortunately, the Iceblock App Is Activism Theater
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The article criticizes the ICEBlock app as 'activism theater', sparking a heated discussion on its effectiveness and the ethics of immigration activism.
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A group proposes to build simple, affordable housing and funds it. Then another group comes along and says that people with affordable housing deserve energy-efficient, low-cost-to-run homes, so the plans get upgraded with better windows and walls, and the cost doubles. Then another group comes along and says that affordable housing should be green with solar panels and battery power. And another group says that all affordable housing should be fully accessible, so the size of all doorways is upgraded. And another group says that affordable housing should be ecologically beneficial, so now the housing requires a green roof and rainwater collection. And so on, until the cost is 5x the original cost and the project never gets built, and a bunch of time is wasted.
This is the risk. Each group along the way had noble motives, but by trying to solve every problem at once, nothing gets done and no one gets helped. By contrast, politics that are instead centered on tearing down systems and rules don't have this, because any random action is a step towards the goal.
I feel like this is happening here to a degree. Instead of producing a functional alternative, this well-intentioned person is picking apart all the problems with the current approach. They may be 100% "correct" in their assessments, but politically, they are letting the air out of their own balloon.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Purity_spiral
Author clearly points to a (more) functional alternative—their local group with volunteers verifying all the reports (with 90%+ false positive rates, even before malicious interference, which is strong evidence that this app is probably worse than useless for anyone taking it seriously; after all, the potential number of real reports is bounded by rare events, while the potential number of malicious fake reports is effectively unbounded).
Author and others also offered to help through collaboration with existing groups or through open source audits and code contributions, both of which were promptly refused.
Sure, author didn’t offer a functional alternative in the form of a P2P free-for-all app. Probably because that’s a not viable strategy if you actually want to help.
If I make gas masks, they can be useful even if they aren't resistant to every single chemical out there. But if they are really bad, they may encourage users to take risks without providing adequate protection.
From what I've seen, taking action against ICE can be a risky activity and many people will want to protect their privacy while doing it. This app promises to protect privacy. However, if the Joshua (author of the app) fails to protect privacy (e.g. hosts on an insecure server that someone from ICE can get into, or becomes subject to a warrant with gag order) the app may do harm.
I'm not saying the app is harmful right now, but there are definitely signs that it could become that. If Micah spots issues in that area, and the Joshua fails to respond to criticism, I think it's completely right for Micah to publish their concerns.
Obviously in a polite, constructive way and while specifically pointing out that they believe the app author means no harm. The way I read Micah's article it seems fine.
Often the best work comes out theough competition and revisions. Google didnt sit back and write sniveling blog posts abt how lame altavista was.
To make an analogy, if someone wants to start a taxi service and you say they're not qualified because they don't know about different types of tires and how to change the front lights, that would be gatekeeping. If they don't know you should sometimes change tires and turn the lights on when it's dark you should have doubts about their ability to safely run a taxi service.
You could argue that he doesn't need open source and a warranty canary, but from what Micah says, it sounds like the app author doesn't have the required knowledge to evaluate the option.
Just think of all the societal progress we are potentially missing out on if only more people would think of those who flaunt the laws that a nation has democratically decided upon.
Heh, makes me think of "Full Self Driving"...
> not because there are mythical hard-working Americans in line to do the work
There obviously are, but baby boomers loath paying honest (legal) wages.
Not interested in taking sides on any of this other than to point out that blower noise early in the morning has been made illegal in many places because too many people made the incorrect assumption that such noise was “completely normal.” To some, it’s “completely normal” to beat your wife. That doesn’t make it ok.
As far as I can see there are two possibilities here: 1) ICE is abusing their power and illegally detaining and deporting people who shouldn't be deported, or 2) ICE is deporting illegal immigrants which don't have permission to be in the country so they shouldn't be in the country. In case of (1) can't they be taken to court? In case of (2) aren't immigration laws there for a reason, and surely we don't want to normalize selective application of law like in so many corrupt countries around the world? Isn't the rule of law a thing in the US?
- a general sense of authoritarian policy degrading American democracy
- inhumane treatment of detainees
- illegal deportations happening with no due process (see option 1)
- humanitarian concerns over people being deported to states they’re seeking asylum from for valid and good reasons
- hyperbolic claims of every immigrant being a “rapist criminal” degrading public discourse leading to further profiling of anyone who looks like they might be an immigrant
I could come up with more but you get the point - the pushback is about _far more_ than whatever you’re toeing the line about here.
Sure, everything ultimately exist for some reason, but that doesn't mean everyone agrees with the reasoning :)
I don't know what the answer is (also an outsider), but I think there is a third possibility of people just disagreeing with the move of "Lets forcible check every single potentially illegal immigrant, so we can get rid of the illegal ones" from a purely humanitarian perspective, regardless if ICE might be abusing their power or if they're only removing illegal immigrants.
Edit: I'm wondering if positing two options like that is actually engagement bait of sorts, already we have two confident commentators saying "It's N of course" where N is both 1 and 2, and I myself fell into the trap of thinking of the third missing one :)
Okay, so bear with me, what does "forcibly" entail here? I'm an immigrant too, I also get "forcibly" (as in: I can't refuse) checked whether I'm legal or not based on how I look, which essentially boils down to spending a minute of my time taking my immigrant card (which shows that I'm legal) out of my wallet, showing it to the police officer (or whatever other government official is asking), and then going my way. This is totally not a problem. Doesn't the US have a way for immigrants to easily and unambiguously identify themselves as legal immigrants?
Sounds like you have a mild case of Stockholm syndrome, if you happily accept that you get more attention from law enforcement due to your physical traits.
Source?
Also, the supreme court has ruled that asking for ID at stops is constitutional.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hiibel_v._Sixth_Judicial_Distr...
>asking for ID
The same supreme court ruling you named stated the reason why they could even demand ID was because there was no expectation it would implicate them in a crime. Demanding immigration papers in an immigration investigation would reasonably be asking someone to incriminate themselves if not having them is an element of that crime (for the same reason, if a minor is stopped for say having booze, generally they are not required to give DOB even if the stop-and-ID statute requires it).
The bit you are interested in googling is "general warrants" as one of the things colonists were quite angry about.
Does that officer have a badge number? Do they wear a uniform? Are they accountable to the law and the courts in some fashion? Do they actually look at and honor your paperwork? Are there any consequences if they abuse their power, or ignore regulations? Can they send you to a foreign prison without holding any kind of trial, and in direct disobedience to a court order?
There's a key difference between "police", who are identifiable and answerable to the law, and "secret police" with masks and unmarked vans and a tendancy to ignore the courts.
Second, it doesn't matter if you show valid right to live in the US. They'll still lock you up and attempt to send you to an overseas prison camp and then argue they or the courts have no jurisdiction to return or release you.
Re: ways to easily identify yourself with documents on you: this isn't always true, especially if you're stuck waiting for the American immigration bureaucracy to get you to nice and neat documents (e.g. the immigration agency, which is between months and years [0], and immigration courts, which is years if you're waiting on an asylum case [1]).
For example, green cards are (mostly) eligible for renewal 90 days before their expiry – but renewals take longer than that; so you get a paper letter that extends your expired green card for 3 extra years. [2] Does carrying around a paper letter count as easy, especially if you're stopped at a dragnet, or you're detained and get separated from your belongings while things are "verified"? I don't think so.
[0] https://egov.uscis.gov/processing-times/historic-pt
[1] https://tracreports.org/whatsnew/email.250320.html#:~:text=(...
[2] https://www.cbp.gov/sites/default/files/2024-10/LPR%20Extent...
ICE does not behave like a well mannered cop that will check your papers and let you go. They're an unregulated fascist militia that will blow up your door while your children are sleeping because you stopped their car two days ago, and will take you away simply because you're being too brown for their liking today.
However, the greater evil isn’t that ICE is enforcing the law. It’s that they’re doing it in a reckless way that reeks of violating any sort of due process.
that while they are there illegally, they can also vote illegally for one particular party (the same party that doesn't like voter ID laws).
Fixed it for you.
>>It’s that they’re doing it in a reckless way that reeks of violating any sort of due process.
Due to the massive volume of uncontrolled immigration under Biden, "due process" as envisaged by activists would take 10's of years to complete which is obviously not practical.
The first is weak because it is driven by fear, not facts. Does that actually happen in any meaningful volume at all, or would any answer just be a link in a "it's a big conspiracy chain!"
The second is weak because it exposes an ignorance, to one's own peril, of a system fundamentally designed to protect them. It's embarrassingly un-American to believe that due process is optional when it's too inconvenient. It begs the question, who gets to judge when that is? The Executive branch? That betrays one's lack of basic understanding of their own governmental system. But I think that's why this kind of thinking appears to be so sticky. It's not something one can be reasoned out of because it's not founded in rational thought. If someone possessed the capacity to be disabused of this idea, without having to first experience the leopards eating their face, they would have been by now.
The courts can then decide if legal or not.
Actually, it was ~22% of the electorate that voted for Trump/Vance. So about 1/5 of the electorate.
Non-zero? yes. A few thousand cases of voter fraud over the past 40+ years.
During that time more than 1.5 billion votes were cast.
See the above link which is run by the party other than the one you falsely maligned.
The real fear in my mind is not what this circus of an administration does for the next three - four years but that the next administrations will continue these practices just by sheer inertia (same with tariffs).
First of all, the immigration laws aren't rational. The states aren't "legal" and "illegal", but "documented" and "undocumented". It's often the case that The Official Way To Do Things can cause you to transition from a "documented" state to an "undocumented" state and back again while in the country. Part of what people like the author are trying to do is to help people who made the documented -> undocumented transition to complete their undocumented -> documented transition before ICE an export them somewhere.
Secondly, ICE has basically been given a target of 500k people to expel. They've always had a reputation for being more on the "bully / asshole" side than normal, and now those people have been given a blank check to crank it up to 11.
Finally, there are clear, documented cases of ICE breaking the law and then trying to play games to get around it. Go look up the Abrego-Garcia case:
1. He came in legally, and was documented -- he had a court order forbidding him from being extradited to El Salvador, and was checking in regularly.
2. They swept him up, erroneously identified him as a gang member, and shipped him out to El Salvador before anyone had a chance to do anything to protest
3. They admitted in court that extraditing him was a mistake; but then said, "Well, he's out of our jurisdiction now, we can't do anything to get him back."
4. When, after months of wrangling, they finally did bring him back, they decided to charge him with a crime for something he did years ago (even though they didn't decide to charge him with anything back then, and had plenty of opportunities to do so earlier).
So basically, 1) The immigration laws are broken: not just and not really follow-able 2) ICE often don't follow the law unless browbeaten by the courts to do so 3) they often try to entirely avoid the courts by playing jurisdictional games.
There's a good reason that large numbers of intelligent, dedicated patriots are organizing to oppose ICE.
So here we have what I think is some of the nonsense of the current laws. My understanding is that how you generally apply for asylum is:
1. Show up in the country one way or another
2. Apply for asylum
So, is #1 "illegal", since he didn't have an official reason to be here long-term when he came into the country? Or is #1 "legal", since the laws for step 2 seem to be written in a way that step 1 is necessary?
If you know more about how asylum actually works, feel free to enlighten me.
> Although he was denied asylum, the immigration judge did issue an order shielding Abrego Garcia from deportation to El Salvador because he faced credible threats of violence from a gang there that had terrorized him and his family.
https://www.nbcwashington.com/news/local/kilmar-abrego-garci...
Where did you read, "rival gang"? Under what circumstances are you ok with forcibly removing people to other countries without a trial? What scenarios is it ok to do so and also ignore judge's orders?
The court said not to send him back to El Salvador because he applied for asylum, and was granted asylum because he faced dangers in El Salvador. Not because he's a gang member, which are allegations that have never been proven.
Journalists ? Judges ? What's that ? Real americans get their news from random propaganda accounts on X.
Your list of "usual suspects" cite actual experts and not random Twitter nonsense.
Can you provide an example of such transition (for the context of the discussion)?
This is true of a lot of workflows in USCIS.
What status do they loose? Right to work (i.e., having a valid EAD card) and immigration status are two different things.
> This is true of a lot of workflows in USCIS.
Their workloads increased significantly over the past 3-4 years due to various factors, unfortunately.
They're extremely intertwined and often practically the same thing. They become an "illegal migrant" for continuing to work to pay for groceries and rent while not having a lawful status allowing such activity. A deportable offense, correct?
> Their workloads increased significantly over the past 3-4 years due to various factors, unfortunately.
Good job showing your true colors. Issues like this have existed for decades. I know of people that struggled in this exact scenario in the 90s and 2000s, and I was only a child at the time. Maybe we should have passed that bipartisan immigration bill the orange man said no to which would have actually funded processing the workload. In the end though this administration doesn't want these people, they want to send them to prison camps. You can tell by watching what they do, raiding people showing up to their court proceedings, sending them to hellhole detention facilities without any due process, and ignoring court decisions.
Well, no? You can have a valid status but without right to work. For example, B1/2 or F-2 visas.
> They become an "illegal migrant" for continuing to work to pay for groceries and rent while not having a lawful status allowing such activity.
This is not true. Working without authorization is simply that: unauthorized employment. By itself it does not lead to become an illegal immigrant. However, it can jeopardize future changes in status, etc.
> Good job showing your true colors.
What?
> I know of people that struggled in this exact scenario in the 90s and 2000s, and I was only a child at the time.
Which are what?
> Maybe we should have passed that immigration bill the orange man said no to which would have actually funded processing the workload.
Biden could have done it during his term in 2020-22: he had both the senate and the house. Yet, he didn’t. It’s extremely naive to think that lack of reform is due to Trump. No party is interested in changing the status quo. Especially, if you consider how anti illegal immigration the Democratic Party was pre 2021 or so (enough to watch Bernie’s interviews pre 2020).
You're showing your true colors suggesting this issue happened during Biden's term, and now you're both sides-ing the issue. One side's solution was passing an immigration reform bill and hiring more judges and administration to handle the influx in applications. The others is to send people to CECOT and other prison camps with no due process (even those with legal status) and ignore the courts. They're not the same.
No. Illegal immigrant is someone who entered without inspection, or someone who overstayed their visa (e.g., B1 tourist admitted for 90 days, and who failed to leave the US). See here, for example, https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/illegal_immigrant
In contrast to that, the same individual on B1 visa admitted for 90 days who decided to work without authorization, and caught, will not be considered illegal immigrant, because they are in the country legally even though they violate some terms of their visa. Of course, when caught they probably will be deported, which again won't make them illegal immigrants.
I do not know why can accept that these are two different definitions. I personally know F-2 visa holders who had to not work between EADs. It did not make them illegal immigrants, because they had a valid status.
> You're showing your true colors suggesting this issue happened during Biden's term, and now you're both sides-ing the issue. One side's solution was passing an immigration reform bill and hiring more judges and administration to handle the influx in applications. The others is to send people to CECOT and other prison camps with no due process (even those with legal status) and ignore the courts. They're not the same.
I am sorry, but I do not plan to engage in emotions and hypotheticals as it is not constructive and leads nowhere.
Like, say, continuing to work the job even after their work visa expired?
> I personally know F-2 visa holders who had to not work between EADs. It did not make them illegal immigrants
I'm not talking about those people who lawfully stop working during that window, I'm talking about those who do not have that luxury to coast for 90+ some odd days. I do not know why you can't seem to understand it.
Actually, I do. Because you're the kind of person who acts like our immigration woes happened 3-4 years ago.
> will not be considered illegal immigrant
You're narrowly defining "illegal immigrant" as someone without any visa status. Most others would include violating the terms of their lawful admission, aka working when they're on a tourist visa. There isn't an official government definition to "illegal immigrant" under the law.
> engage in emotions and hypotheticals
These statements are not hypotheticals. They are detaining those with lawful status. They are sending people to CECOT without due process. They are ignoring court opinions. The Republican party did vote down a bipartisan bill in the end because Trump didn't want it. You appear to not engage with reality.
The why was he
> checking in regularly.
I think this already means that he was in deportation proceedings, no?
My understanding (perhaps not complete, and I would like to learn more) is that he was in deportation process and the only place he could not get deported to was El Salvador.
The methods ICE is using currently to detain people for deportation look a lot like secret police tactics for disappearing folks and resemble kidnapping, when a van full of armed men with face masks jump out and remove you from your vehicle, zip-tie you, and transport you to a secret facility.
There have also been reported situations of ICE officers breaking windows of cars and pulling folks out, when all they had was an administrative warrant.
And that doesn’t include the recently reported and videoed situation of an ICE agent firing at a vehicle that was stopped by ICE agents.
All of these tactics increase fear among the populace, and that fear is what drives apps like these. Whether you’re here legally or not, no one deserves the secret police tactics that fly in the face of the principles of limited government and freedom of movement.
Committing a crime might well result in your movement being curtailed, and addressing crime is definitely within the remit of limited government.
Is this reasonably and sensibly established before applying the secret police tactics on the respective person or the ones around them?
You know. Back when "the rule of law" was a thing.
But the common language of 'illegal immigrants" is exceedingly vague because it contradicts how the law its drawn up. One is not considered an immigrant legally until one has some sort of status that allows them to adjust their status to permanent residency. Before 1970 this was basically almost everybody. Today it's virtually nobody when they first enter the country. To be an immigrant is by definition to be legally present. The moral panic is actually based on a conflation between two distinct categories of people: those who entered the country without inspection (EWI) and those who are out of status and have yet to cure their status issue. Inspection doesn't literally mean what it means in the dictionary, by the way, it's a legal fiction. A wave-through is considered inspection even though one doesn't get their passport stamped. Parole can in some cases be considered the predicate that leads to inspection (advance parole establishes the inspection element that turns someone with no status into someone eligible for a green card) or it doesn't in other cases, although in those cases one is not legally considered to have been admitted into the country. Confused yet? Don't worry, DHS lawyers get confused over this as well, and even federal judges are frequently confused. Texas v. US was mooted but if it wasn't mooted, the petition actually reversed the terms of art which makes the petition gibberish if it reaches the merit stage.
Either way, whether someone is out of status or have status is not something that can be determined outside of a court and frequently, both administrative appeals and adjudication in actual Article III courts. ICE agents are not lawyers, they're not even technically cops, and they sure as hell can't tell the minutiae of immigration law where every word you think you know the definition of, you actually likely don't. One collateral attack that was commonly seen was that the person was actually a US citizen who never knew they were since depending on when you were born the criteria through which you acquire citizenship even while born overseas can differ dramatically. And by that I mean in the 1970s the criteria went under several changes that requires a whole new inquiry that requires some serious genealogical research to determine. This is a huge pain in the ass even if you know about the law, and ICE agents aren't lawyers and certainly aren't legal historians, but either way as a matter of statutory interpretation and application ICE agents making the determination would go far beyond what they're legally allowed to do. You and me and everyone else who aren't speaking for the government can use shorthands, but ICE agents can't while they're on the job. Who's "illegal" as a matter of law is not something ICE can actually decide, but they operate under presumptions that can't be rebutted since once they ship you out of the country, that's it. You can't get a visa to respond to a lawsuit. It used to be something that one can get parole for, but not anymore. Most no-shows in immigration court happen because of unavailability or because of lack of proper notice given. DHS OIG audits turn up this kind of problem all the time. I can believe that Trump and Miller having no clue about any of this, but the lawyers working for DHS? If they don't know, they're not competent for the position.
Interestingly native born Americans actually don't have a definitive and mandatorily accepted way to prove their citizenship. ICE routinely without evidence treat real documents as fake. You are not required to even have a state ID or driver's license, and neither is dispositive of status, and neither is a social security card. God forbid you were born at home with a midwife since many don't have birth certificates that conform to the more standardized forms of today. Most Americans don't have a passport. If you naturalize, at least the same agency will give you a certificate of citizenship that attest to your status. A green card likewise attests to your legal permanent residency status. But DHS doesn't issue such documents to native-born citizens, and routinely rejects documents issued by other agencies. ICE deports US citizens every year and we only have a limited set of data on how many. If you manage to make it back, you can't even sue ICE. You'd have to sue the municipality that held you for ICE based on what amounts to a hunch, which is not evidence. Voluntarily cooperating with ICE almost inevitably will lead to lawsuits, settlements, and once in a while, the bankruptcy of the city. Thanks to indemnity clauses, local cops are the last to get hit.
And all that is really unnecessary. The country was founded with open borders and while we had a lot of problems, immigration was not viewed as a problem serious enough for the federal government to specifically intervene in in the harshest and most racist way possible for 100 years. If you want both the economic benefits of immigration and also want immigrants to truly be seasonal workers voluntarily, get rid of the system and that will happen. Militarizing the border forced people into choosing which side they want to be on. I'm old enough to remember driving from Vermont to Montreal to hang out with my cousin at McGill for weekend brunches and smoked meats with just a driver's license - not even one issued in Vermont, but California - and the border checkpoint in New Hampshire - the only one in the state - being unstaffed most of the time. The southern border was like that until the 70s. Most Americans and Europeans don't have to contend with visas since visa waiver programs cover the so-called "First world nations" and some well-to-do ex-colonies and so the problem is an abstraction to them. In reality, it's a reality based on abstractions. Either way, since "illegal immigrants" are not a thing as a legally meaningful descriptor, there's no actual answer. Feel free to read this pretty good summation of the specific problems that involve the constitution though, it essentially covers up to Kerry v. Din (2015). https://scholars.law.unlv.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=19...
What does this mean? If you're a citizen you're legally present. If you're a tourist you're legally present.
Civil matter doesn't mean asking politely (only). Try not paying your mortgage for a while, and see what your bank is doing.
If you don't have a judge's order to kidnap the person, then it's illegal by default.
U.S. Attorney Bill Essayli pulled together an all-star federal taskforce comprising agents from five federal law enforcement agencies—including ICE and the FBI—all working out of an office in Los Angeles. When an illegal alien with a prior deportation is inevitably arrested, upon identification and booking into the local jail, the taskforce seeks a federal criminal warrant—signed by a federal judge—for felony re-entry under 8 USC §1326.
By using available criminal databases to find illegal aliens who were arrested and jailed the day before, the team quickly learns of each new offender. Then, a federal warrant is served on local officials, who obviously won’t buck a federal judge’s warrant. That warrant requires local officials to hand over the illegal criminal alien to ICE.
The critical point is that reentry after having already been deported is a felony, and by getting a federal criminal warrant the government can legally force state and local compliance (which they cannot in a civil matter). That is the rule of law as it stands. It also sets up a dynamic of high-profile "heads I win tails you lose" fights with state & local officials who don't want to comply, providing grist for the base.
https://www.heritage.org/border-security/commentary/sanctuar...
But since those who entered without inspection have almost no way to show when they actually entered, full stop, and ICE doesn't actually have a comprehensive and reliable way of tracking the population that wouldn't run afoul of the Constitution, it's basically a violation that is effectively performative. The people this targets are not eligible for any benefits whatsoever on the federal level for themselves anyway (but still have to pay taxes) and cannot naturalize so there's no carrot and no viable stick. It's a rump piece of legislation.
b) A chart does not trump law, and that chart appears to be for people older than 26, who don't need evidence they signed up for the draft. Or people who entered before 26 and have a reason why they'd be excluded. That chart isn't for evidence needed to submit to the draft, it's a way to show you didn't have to sign up.
I'm not talking about all undocumented immigrants (for instance, instances of foreign born perhaps female or otherwise draft exempt children that are born US citizens but never documented as such and enter the US without documentation), that's why I used illegal rather than undocumented which could be legal presence.
[] https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/illegal_immigrant
improper entry is a felony if its a repeat offense.
(Also, the purposeful-availment test for personal jurisdiction in copyright cases is built on top of a set of facts that is established by geolocating Cloudflare IPs, and in turn, what was once a vague but at least potentially applicable law now has been turned into something that if merits of a contested case actually gets reached, basically no foreign defendant would be under the court's jurisdiction, because of how CDNs work. Since there's no visa for "responding to lawsuits" and in fact, it doesn't even look like proper service was conducted, meaning that the law is made ultimately on top of default judgments to foreign John Does. I have no idea whether this is a result of incompetence or short-term thinking, but that's where we are. The moment the law is applied correctly it becomes self-nullifying thanks to the facts. Same idea here.)
What about when you don't commit crimes?
https://abcnews.go.com/US/georgia-teen-detained-ice-after-mi...
I do love how you felt the need to comment about something that very obviously isn't in contention as if it somehow defends the actions of this current administration.
Nobody is saying "You can't deport criminals". Literally nobody.
Quoting: "The concept of proportionality is used as a criterion of fairness and justice in statutory interpretation processes, especially in constitutional law, as a logical method intended to assist in discerning the correct balance between the restriction imposed by a corrective measure and the severity of the nature of the prohibited act. Within criminal law, the concept is used to convey the idea that the punishment of an offender should fit the crime. [..]"
And: "the principle that a central authority should have a subsidiary function, performing only those tasks which cannot be performed at a more local level"
Apply that to the national guard being rolled out, and apply that to masked police officers destroying the windows of a car. There is no probable cause here. You cannot be like that is a person of color I will detain them because they're illegal. You cannot even pull over a random person like that. Why not? Because the crime of being illegal is not proportional to the violence being used. Now, if they were a murderer, then yes. But then they're a murderer who is also illegal. Not the fact that they're illegal itself is the dangerous factor. Moreover, these illegals actually benefit the economy as they're HR.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proportionality_(law)
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subsidiarity
I'm not saying that, whatever "person of color" is. Plenty of legal e.g. hispanics, and plenty of illegal white people in America.
Whether someone committed a crime or not is for a judge to decide.
They still have rights. Do you know what we call countries where criminals don't have rights? Authoritarian.
Wake. Up.
I expect televised footage of perp walks for the business owners and CEOs who hire "illegal immigrants" then. Otherwise, the point is cruelty rather than law and order.
You are defending playground rules "why are you making me punch you" with people's lives.
Think of it as a cousin to the "he's no angel" style defense of bad acts.
That'll surely make things work out great. right?
Yep. I'm not sure why we're even bothering with deportations. Just shoot 'em in the head and grind them up for fertilizer and pig/chicken feed.
And if a few hundred thousand citizens get caught up in that, it's no big deal. They wouldn't have been involved if they didn't look like illegals, right?
Besides, folks like me (with the map of Ireland all over my face) won't get caught up in that. So why should I care?
Yeah, why bother deporting them. Shooting them is quicker and cheaper. We could save even more money by converting warehouses to gas folks and then we can cremate them and/or use them as agricultural inputs.
Easy peasy. I mean, it's not like they're human or anything. My god! They're criminals, every last one of them! Rapists, killers, gang bangers. If they weren't subhuman, we wouldn't need to treat them like this.
But they're not like us decent, hard working people. They're evil, twisted murderers, just like the pedophile demonrats who murdered all the ICE folks during the Obama and Biden administrations.
Both Biden and Obama just sent the Marines in to ICE offices and killed them all dead!
So it's perfectly fine to do that to all the brown^W illegal people too, right? I certainly won't have to worry about it, nor will the other white^W real Americans.
USA! USA! USA!
Legal is a moving target. Legal was used to justify interment camps.
Be careful justifying what should and could be done based on "it's technically legal"
They only get to do this crap if they follow the rule of law, which they aren’t.
They have privileges. Provisional privileges derived from the people (or at least that is what some very drunk men in wigs seemed to imply). I don't like it when my government uses dressed-up faux authority (DHS just issues itself administrative "warrants") as the basis for assaulting people. Seems pretty cut-and-dry wrong. And as responses go, really lopsided.
So here I am... making a fuss about it.
https://www.npr.org/2025/07/09/nx-s1-5440311/ice-raids-maske...
Also in Argentina you can arrive, on day 1 file court case for citizenship, which bars deportation. Then stall case for 2 years until you meet criteria. I personally have seen court case documents that did this successfully for criminal who arrived with fake passport.
Meanwhile the so called people enforcing the "rule of law" are bagging people up all masked up, no visible credentials, shifting them around in jurisdictions faster than their lawyer can keep up, then sending them in 3rd world shithole prisons even if there is an active order barring that from happening.
If you want to show me rule of law, first of all show me a government that even vaguely follows the very constitution that authorized its existence in the first place. I would rather have anarchy than rule of law enforced by bandits.
This indicates to me that you have no idea how desperate people become in a failed state, in the absence of law and order.
In the failed state I joined a militia, and we actually were able to fight off the people trying to brutalize us. In the USA if you tried this they would just insta Waco you.
Would be nice if that were the reality. But we have a POTUS with 34 counts giving out a presidential medal of freedom to a crooked guy with melting hair goo and releasing all J6ers with a pardon.
Impartiality isn't real.
Personally I'm not sure I have a huge problem with this, yes it's a mess, but I'm not at all convinced we need more consolidation of power just because of that. I'm DEFINITELY not convinced that one side or the other has what it takes to permanently govern everything and always get their way.
The same general principles are at work when it comes to the legalization of weed, with lots of little details being different of course.
Are we talking about a different country than the USA? There's ~174 million potential voters in the US, 77 million voted republican vs 75 million voted democrat at the last presidential election (https://www.statista.com/statistics/1139763/number-votes-cas...)
So there's an about even population split that is in theory in support of those policies, versus the same amount of people against. Surely it's not "one state against what the rest of the country voted for" like you're suggesting...
No. That's not it at all. While Federal law is the supreme law of the land, it is enforced by the Federal government.
The several states and any municipalities within them are under no obligation to enforce Federal laws, just as the Federal government is under no obligation to enforce state and local laws.
Which is why the Federal government often ties funding to legislation, using the carrot of funding (and the stick of pulling such funding if states do not) to compel states to cooperate with the Federal government.
What's more, the Federal courts (including SCOTUS) have repeatedly ruled that the states are not required to enforce Federal law for the Federal government.
And no one is "unilaterally deciding to override the immigration policies of the federal government." In fact, state and local law enforcement have repeatedly been used to back up Federal agents executing those immigration policies.
No Federal law requires a state to enforce Federal immigration policies. And not enforcing a law outside of a law enforcement agency's jurisdiction (again Federal law is the jurisdiction of Federal government not state/local governments) isn't "overriding" anything.
You appear to be confused about the law and how it works in the US and the several states. Here are a few links to help straighten you out:
https://www.cato.org/commentary/yes-states-can-nullify-some-...
https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/521/898/
https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/505/144/
https://www.lawfaremedia.org/article/can-the-u.s.-government...
Be careful with this argument. Cops also don't have any "obligation" to stop crime, so if we take this argument to its logical conclusion, then it's fine (or at least, it's "not unilaterally overriding laws") for a cop to stand by while someone gets lynched.
You're just figuring that out now? You're 50 years late[0] for Warren v. District of Columbia (rape, assault and burglary) and 20 years late[1] for Castle Rock v. Gonzales (triple murder).
Maybe you should start paying attention?
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warren_v._District_of_Columbia
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Town_of_Castle_Rock_v._Gonzale...
You could argue that this is also a trial run to gauge the American public and governmental tolerance for actual secret police on the streets disappearing people (both depressingly high, it turns out.)
One the one hand, you have maybe-semi-reasonable arguments about law and social problems. On the other, you have extremely violent enforcement, carried out in discriminatory ways, which will also end up affecting the entirely innocent. While producing a huge prison population for private profit.
The war on drugs brought all sorts of search and seizure, including forfeiture (effectively a war on cash allowing the police to steal people's money). The war on terror brought mass surveillance and much more intrusive searches at airports. The war on immigration will bring "papers please" to American citizens, as well as the ability to disappear inconvenient public speakers.
ICE officers have no badges. They wear masks. Sometimes they have no uniforms. They grab people off the streets, and stuff them into white vans. They may send those people to foreign prisons, even if a judge tells them not to. Some of the people they take are natural-born citizens.
Taking them to court works sometimes. But ICE will often attempt to move people out of state quickly, and they won't always say where those people went. And as I mentioned above, the administration has just straight-up ignored multiple court orders.
Courts are a cute legal fiction that only works if the people with guns agree to listen to them.
Where I live, which is the suburbs in Ohio and only mildly gun happy by US standards, I’d estimate that if you went house to house busting in doors with masks and no ID you’d make it less than ten houses before you’d get a face full of buck shot.
Some of the border states where they’re doing this like Texas and Arizona I’d say no more than three houses.
The whole point of this was to show the consequences of not complying with the brownshirts. Shoot one of them down, you might well discover they have the budget to buy F35s now.
>Some of the border states where they’re doing this like Texas and Arizona I’d say no more than three houses.
Great news: they've been doing this to thousands of houses in the very states you mention. Just not the white ones.
Of course I would guess that undocumented immigrants are less likely to have guns since they tend to avoid anything that could get them in trouble. I lived in SoCal for a while and had several neighbors who I suspect were but of course never asked.
BTW they were the nicest people. One of their daughters taught our oldest daughter to ride a bike.
The scapegoating and persecution of these people is gross. If we don’t want them here we should go after the employers who create the incentive for them to come, but that would mean going after white people.
I think the reality is when ICE knock on your door (i) you're probably not holding your gun if you have one and (ii) as bad as being in a cage detained by masked thugs and deported (possibly even if you're a citizen) is, being shot dead by them isn't necessarily a better fate, particularly not if you suspect they would take great pleasure in "defending themselves" against your unarmed wife and children if given a half a reason
– There is evidence that there is a quota on arrests, [1], rather than deportations, although the administration has inconsistently denied that quotas exist (because it would help legal cases against their strategies.) [2]
[1] https://www.reuters.com/world/us/ices-tactics-draw-criticism...
[2] https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/aug/03/trump-admini...
– Therefore, there have been incidents, especially in targeted cities like LA, where citizens [1] and lawful permanent residents have arrested before being released after multiple days of detention [2], although this data is not systematically gathered, e.g.:
[1] https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2025-08-08/how-many...
[2] https://www.newsweek.com/jemmy-jimenez-rosa-immigration-deta...
– Recourse to the courts in a meaningful, practical way is ineffective. The administration has ignored lawsuits where judges have issued injunctions against ICE dragnets due to plausible evidence that ICE dragnets target individuals who look Latin American, e.g.:
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/aug/06/ice-border-p...
The suspicion (although I need to look up a legal source) is that the administration intends to drag on legal cases as long as possible through appeals, perhaps even up to the Supreme Court, which will take months.
Yes, they can be and are being but it's not much comfort to know that the courts will decide a deportation was unlawful after you've already spent 6 months being tortured in an El Salvadoran prison.
They are also targeting other people with visas for violations both significant and trivial. Trivial meaning misspellings or typos on one of the dozens or hundreds of forms filled out at some point in the past.
Rule of law is being undermined, basically under the guise of whatever state of emergency is in place, they look to act quickly where any ambiguity exists and before courts get to weigh in.
Not so much these days...
> can't they be taken to court?
It costs money, and the low hanging fruits of deportation are low-income families/individuals.
> In case of (1) can't they be taken to court? In case of (2) aren't immigration laws there for a reason
Police, courts and administration work until they don't. There have been cases of people arrested just because of racial profiling, which fits into Trump's racial vision.
The emblematic case IMO, has been the high-profile instance of an American citized deported because of an administrative mistake (!!); Trump has openly refused to apologize or take corrective action (!!!).
The real problem, if one accepts Oliver’s criticisms, is that this is not about law, it's about racial cleansing.
The reason people want to avoid ICE is the same reason you have a smoke detector: Even if you do everything right, a fire can still happen and when it does you're happy you had it.
The US constitution guarantees certain rights to any person on their soil, without them having to be citizens. These rights are currently being violated with approval of at least two branches of government.
I see all the signs of Portuguese dictorship that ended in 1974, and I as first generation being raised in freedom got to hear and learn plenty of stories on how everything used to be.
Sadly also back home people have forgotten what it meant to live under authoritarian regime.
[0]: https://grapheneos.social/@GrapheneOS/114789276549546469
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