ICEBlock, an app for anonymously reporting ICE sightings, goes viral
exiguus | 535 points | 56day ago | techcrunch.com
neither_color|56day ago
I don't see what's so bad about wanting to avoid an area where there's police activity going on. It has nothing to do with whether or not you're doing anything wrong, it's as simple as not wanting to get hassled at a DUI checkpoint or get stuck in traffic because they need 8 squad cars taking up a lane to k-9 search someone. As a more tan law-abiding US citizen, the possibility of some agent asking me for papers and then asking probing questions to "prove myself" anywhere that's not an airport is enough for me to want a heads up not to be in area where that might happen.
afavour|56day ago
There's barely any point examining the app on its merits.
The mere existence of the app shows resistance to the government's attempts at establishing something approaching a police state. They are against the app for that reason. They don't really care about what it does or does not do. It could be an app where you press a button and the phone says "boo ICE" and they'd still happily claim it endangers officers lives.
(the fact that they're also able to attack independent media at the same time just makes it all the more alluring target)
wslh|56day ago
Genuine question: is sharing the location or distribution of information about police presence illegal? I assume this would be treated differently if it involved military positions, but I'm curious about how the law applies in this case.
Waze is another example of an app where users can share information about police presence or roadblocks, while useful to some, could also be seen as having negative implications depending on the context.
goku12|55day ago
While your question is meaningful and well intentioned, let me point out that it may be inconsequential. The legality of an action is moot when the regime ignores and defies the entire basis of those laws - the constitution. It's like trying to evaluate yourself against a standard that is no longer followed.
Instead, evaluate yourself on the basis of your standing with the regime. If they dislike you for any reason including your skin color, they will find some sort of national security threat in your actions. Or they may punish you first and then claim the inability to correct it. On the other hand if they need you, they will completely ignore your actions, including even leaking of extremely sensitive information to unauthorized individuals.
cyanydeez|55day ago
yeah, it's more a question of "has america's justice system been reduced to arbitrary persecution of things the president or his executives deem a threat to America".
Because that's basically what's unfolding under fascism means.
jacquesm|55day ago
That's a rhetorical question at this point.
account42|55day ago
[flagged]
thinkharderdev|55day ago
Deporting people who are in the country illegally is in line with the constitution. Deporting people without due process is not.
ElevenLathe|55day ago
Even this is stretching it. It's not as though the Andrew Jackson administration was doing deportations (besides the Trail of Tears, which was euphemistically referred to as a deportation campaign). The practice of criminalizing immigration enforcement didn't coincide with any amendment to the Constitution, which is itself only nominally even part of U.S. law anymore.
knowitnone|54day ago
so you're willing to pay for it?
SauciestGNU|54day ago
And a bullet is cheaper then incarceration. But we have a duty to human rights, which isn't always cost effective or expedient. But if those rights are lost for anyone they're lost for everyone. After all, how do you prove you're owed due process in the absence of said due process?
UncleMeat|54day ago
Prosecutions would be much cheaper if defendants couldn't get court appointed lawyers. Or if we didn't have the exclusionary rule. Or if prosecutions didn't need to turn over Brady evidence.
Are you willing to pay for these things? It'd be much more efficient for a cop to simply murder anybody suspected of a crime. Efficiency should not be the goal when it comes to people's rights.
thinkharderdev|51day ago
Yes, absolutely. Just like I'm willing to pay for due process for everyone charged with a crime in this country.
account42|54day ago
Most countries don't give you a court hearing for being in the country without a visa or other authorization. Being shipped into a detention facility until you can be deported is the norm here.
mmcwilliams|54day ago
How many of those countries are subject to the US constitution?
Whoppertime|53day ago
The constitution isn't a suicide pact You can't have lawlessness in entry and checks and balances on exit.
RandomThoughts3|53day ago
[dead]
Dig1t|54day ago
Genuinely curious for a good faith answer: one administration allows tens of millions of people into the country during its term. You are saying that every individual is owed multiple court hearings, the full gamut which is usually used for people overstaying a visa or something. A system equipped to handle a relatively small number of people.
The court system cannot possibly fulfill these tens of millions of cases in any reasonable time frame. These people will be in court for the rest of our lives and in the meantime they will have children and ultimately be allowed to stay forever by some future administration. Which is basically the same as just making them citizens.
Do you have a proposed solution other than decades worth of court dates? It doesn’t really seem like the other side has a good faith solution to the problem other than just letting them all stay here forever.
Or maybe I’m missing something and haven’t heard the other side’s arguments.
dummydummy1234|54day ago
So why not hire a 15-20 thousand judges?
They just increased the budget for ice prisons form 3 billion to 40 billion, and did not increase the budget for the legal infrastructure needed to adequately process everyone.
Why they need to do is increase funding for judges, and make the process faster. Aka, like what the Larkin bill did, but the GOP killed that, because solving the immigration issues would be bad for them electorally.
Is seems like the plan is to just lock people up... And then nothing, except maybe deport them to random countries and let them sort them out.
Keep in mind that this has not been a 'biden' issue. The illegal immigrants already have in many cases been in the US for decades, due to ag/construction/hospitality wanting labor at rates Americans were unwilling to work.
Instead, of actually addressing the issue (why are people allowed to hire illegal immigrants in the first place, seems like cutting off the job supply would work as well).
But the question becomes, why are they increasing the infrastructure for locking people up, but not the infrastructure for due process, seems like they want to throw out due process.
Keep in mind, the people they grab off the streets have not all been illegal immigrants, many are legal on work/student/refugee visas.
And maybe you disagree that these people should have been allowed visas in the first place, but there are ways to change those laws.
Whoppertime|53day ago
This would be more convincing if you told us how many judges are currently working, how many cases they handle in a year, and how hiring that many judges would be able to allow quicker turn around, as is, it could be not resolving the issue he described, and result in them waiting around for 20 years for a trial instead of 30 years.
ryan_lane|54day ago
Let's not continue using propaganda numbers around undocumented immigrants. There's not 10s of millions of illegal immigrants. There's roughly 11 million undocumented immigrants in total, and that number has _decreased_ since the early 2000s (when it was closer to 12 million).
A decent percentage of these immigrants are seasonal. A very, very small percentage of the total of undocumented immigrants have criminal histories. Focusing efforts on violent criminals is reasonable, but that doesn't meet the propaganda numbers from the current administration. Deporting tens of thousands of people just doesn't rally hate the same way.
Rather than spending time and money building concentration camps, building out secret police (ICE), and deporting people without due process, we could be fixing our immigration system.
Let's make work visas that allow migrant workers to work seasonally. Let's add paths to citizenship to migrant workers. Let's prioritize fast paths to citizenship for students, especially those with masters and PHDs. Let's introduce a point system to encourage immigration of the best and brightest from high demand countries, allowing them prioritized visas, PRs and naturalization. Let's fix the DREAMER situation by providing those folks clear paths to citizenship.
The reason the immigration situation doesn't get better is because republicans need it to be broken. They use undocumented immigrants as a group to target hate against, which rallies their base.
aydyn|54day ago
> The reason the immigration situation doesn't get better is because republicans need it to be broken.
I try to keep an open mind but its very hard to take the debate seriously when you end with disingenuous points like this.
UncleMeat|54day ago
Why'd they refuse to pass an immigration bill under Biden then?
aydyn|54day ago
Do you really think its a winning argument to say that, actually, its conservatives wanting more illegal immigration? Bizarre.
UncleMeat|53day ago
I don't believe that conservatives want more illegal immigration. I instead believe that conservatives would rather do violence against illegal immigrants than address the reason why people are in the country without legal status.
We could end all illegal immigration in an instant. But this doesn't let the GOP stoke racial hatred and enact its vision of a police state.
aydyn|53day ago
> We could end all illegal immigration in an instant
wdym
ryan_lane|51day ago
They mean the same thing I was suggesting. Illegal immigration is a symptom of a problem. Immigration is too difficult, but we so heavily rely on immigrant labour that we allow it to continue.
Most undocumented immigrants are here for work. If we change the immigration system to give them work visas, the problem mostly goes away. Some of them don't want to stay here permanently, and not even for the entire year. They come seasonally. Others would like to stay permanently, and offering them a legal path to citizenship is likely a good idea.
I think it's not possible to end all illegal immigration instantly, but the vast majority is easily within our reach.
It's worth noting that asylum seekers are not illegal immigrants, and the way the current administration handles the situation itself it what's illegal.
ryan_lane|51day ago
It's not disingenuous. Republicans rally their base against "violent illegal immigrants". They don't rally their base on "fixing immigration issues", but on deporting people, which is effectively the same as running on law and order.
If immigration issues are mostly solved, then republicans lose one of their rallying points.
As someone else pointed out, this is exactly why republicans killed a bill that had support across the aisle. Trump was going to run on mass deportations, and it's hard to do that, when a bill was just passed, co-sponsored by your own party.
lcnPylGDnU4H9OF|54day ago
> Do you have a proposed solution other than decades worth of court dates? It doesn’t really seem like the other side has a good faith solution to the problem other than just letting them all stay here forever.
I think we are at a point where we should accept that there will be decades of court dates. The real alternative is that anyone can be taken away because there would be no process for even a multi-generation born citizen to challenge the arrest. The real deterrent for it happening to such a citizen is reporting and publicity, which is increasingly seeming like it can be thwarted by a population that is primed to strip the humanity of those they disagree with.
The way this is being handled, the timeline where we just let those 10 million stay in the country and avoid similar things in the future seems very appealing indeed. Two wrongs don’t make a right, as the saying goes.
Dig1t|54day ago
>just let those 10 million stay in the country and avoid similar things in the future
But this is what I’m getting at, this is not the first time this has happened, it’s been happening with millions of people for generations now. Heck Reagan pardoned millions back in the 1980’s. So how long are we supposed to keep saying “okay you guys can stay but let’s do better in the future”? After so many decades it is obvious that nothing is going to change without some kind of drastic political change, which is basically why Trump was elected.
But just looking at the system from a Birds Eye view: it’s easy in, difficult out. All it takes is one president to not enforce the law and the law is basically moot. Just seems disingenuous the people saying deporting people is horrible yet offering no solutions other than to just let them all stay here forever. We are well past the point where saying we’ll do better in the future is an argument that anyone will accept.
Why is there nobody suggesting a law to expedite or fast track the “due process”? That at least seems like a moderate approach.
lcnPylGDnU4H9OF|54day ago
> people saying deporting people is horrible
No, you are not hearing what I am saying. This particular implementation of deportations puts you and I and anyone else at long-term risk of being deported in a similar manner. It puts legal residents at a more immediate risk of being deported in a similar manner. You can’t fast-track due process; that is the point. If you are not afforded due process for allegations that you are an illegal immigrant before you are shipped away then the damage is done and it doesn’t matter that you can prove you were born here to parents who were born here.
Dig1t|54day ago
I understand what you’re saying and I can agree with you that the rule of law is important. You are ignoring the fact that the previous admin ignored due process for letting them in in the first place, but that was not my original question. You still have not offered any kind of solution other than letting them all stay forever, and at this point the majority of the electorate is more interested in seeing them all go back than making sure that every single one gets their day in court.
> You can’t fast-track due process
We can make laws and change systems, a serious good faith solution would be to propose changes to the due process to account for this case we keep finding ourselves in where we have 20 million people who need to be processed and a system with no hope of handling them all.
wredcoll|54day ago
>You are ignoring the fact that the previous admin ignored due process for letting them in in the first place
We thought you were kidding, this isn't a fact, it's the complete opposite of a fact, in otherwords, a lie. Very famously the number of arrests of people cross the border went up while biden was president.
Aside from that ludicrous lie, we have to evaluate the situation where we actually live. If there was a literal magic genie who could cause 10 million people to instantly teleport then maybe we could talk about it, but there isn't, so we don't.
In actual reality land, spending 100 billion dollars in order to arrest and deport millions of people who work and pay taxes and in general support the economy of this country is hilariously stupid. Also evil, lets not forget that.
Every axis you want to try to evaluate this on fails at the most cursory examination. Obviously it's a waste of money because you're spending money to remove tax payers and consumers, so that's a double negative. It's also immoral due to the sheer amount of crimes and human rights violations that have already taken place and will continue to take place.
It's not even particularly effective as some kind of macho statement, deporting your own citizens isn't going to impress anyone.
tpm|54day ago
> We can make laws and change systems, a serious good faith solution would be to propose changes to the due process
No, a serious good faith solution would be to establish an actual working immigration/citizenship system with clear rules and then enforce them, because the current situation endangers everyone.
I'm from a different country. We have ID cards. You strictly need an ID card (or a different proof of citizenship or right to residence) from the age of 18 (or even sooner if you are attending schools, using the health system etc) to do basically anything. It's not possible to live here your whole life as a full member of the society without that. When I read how someone lives 60 years in the US without actual legal basis to do that I just shudder. People should be forced to resolve their legal situation one way or another much sooner. And I am pro-immigration, but also there should be order in that.
Once you have a clear, fast proof of right to reside in a country, you don't need to touch due process because it can go fast.
DaSHacka|53day ago
> I'm from a different country. We have ID cards. You strictly need an ID card (or a different proof of citizenship or right to residence) from the age of 18 (or even sooner if you are attending schools, using the health system etc) to do basically anything.
That's essentially how it is in the states, we have the U.S. passport and individual State's drivers licenses as the primary forms of ID. And government bureaucracy is actually notorious for requiring tons of information (two forms of government ID, and proof of residence, sometimes the literal SS card or birth certificate itself) that everyone inevitability ends up running into an issue with forgetting some document at least once in their lives.
> It's not possible to live here your whole life as a full member of the society without that.
It's not really possible here either, even private companies usually require it in some way or another (such as LinkedIn[0]). The issue is illegal immigrants simply forego these things, or work for companies and live in blue states that don't check any form of ID in the majority of places, on purpose (such as when citizens vote in the presidential election, which is still insane to me)
> Once you have a clear, fast proof of right to reside in a country, you don't need to touch due process because it can go fast.
Well, once you have the undocumented migrants inside your borders, how are you supposed to get rid of them other than how the current administration has been attempting to (utilizing private intelligence and beefing up ICE)?
[0] https://www.linkedin.com/help/linkedin/answer/a1342692
tpm|50day ago
> And government bureaucracy is actually notorious for requiring tons of information (two forms of government ID, and proof of residence, sometimes the literal SS card or birth certificate itself)
That means it's actually not like in country. Once you have an ID card, you don't need anything else (only very rarely the birth certificate).
> The issue is illegal immigrants simply forego these things
That would in our country mean no phone, no driver's license, no electricity, no bank account, you can't be employed, etc., so really not something anyone could do for a longer time and lead a normal life.
> how are you supposed to get rid of them
Offer them a clear path to legalize their status. Create a system where it's not possible to live a nearly whole life this way. This is clearly a systemic problem and needs a systemic solution, not one that can be created or cancelled on the whim of a president.
DaSHacka|49day ago
> That means it's actually not like in country. Once you have an ID card, you don't need anything else (only very rarely the birth certificate).
We could just increase the amount of places that need a Passport for verification, then.
> That would in our country mean no phone, no driver's license, no electricity, no bank account, you can't be employed, etc., so really not something anyone could do for a longer time and lead a normal life.
I don't know about phone plans or electricity, but you can't get a driver's license without being a citizen in most states (a few blue ones are the exception), and without a social security number you can't open a bank account or get legally employed (employers need your SSN to pay you), but the issue is some employers knowingly hire illegal immigrants and pay them under the table, oftentimes in cash and without reporting it to the IRS, because they like the cheaper labor. This is illegal, but oftentimes unenforced.
> Offer them a clear path to legalize their status.
Why should we have to legalize them? We have a path to legal immigration in this country, and they decided not to go through it. Reagan legalized all illegal immigrants in the past, and that turned out horribly, and set an awful precedent.
> Create a system where it's not possible to live a nearly whole life this way.
Why should we have to? We've been around for ~250 years, this hasn't been a big problem the entire time. Clearly, it's possible to fix this without it.
> This is clearly a systemic problem and needs a systemic solution, not one that can be created or cancelled on the whim of a president.
It's not just the Executive, the BBB passed the Senate and House too, and deporting illegal immigrants has large bipartisan support [0] (though not to the extent the current administration is doing it, unfortunately)
[0] https://www.pewresearch.org/race-and-ethnicity/2025/03/26/am...
tpm|49day ago
> Why should we have to legalize them?
You don't have to, of course. But once someone has strong ties to only one country, lives most of their life there, in some cases even is not a citizen of another country, it's the only humane thing to do - in these cases they are de facto citizens already.
> It's not just the Executive
But before the BBB it was, and it was Biden doing one thing and Trump doing another without any laws changing and this is not a stable environment to be in. And it is reasonable to expect some stability from the State.
dummydummy1234|54day ago
Aka hire more judges.
This bill did not do that.
lcnPylGDnU4H9OF|54day ago
> a serious good faith solution
You are free to offer something yourself. I was answering your question:
> Do you have a proposed solution other than decades worth of court dates?
No, I don’t. At least, not one that doesn’t degrade rule of law. I’m all ears for better solutions but this shit I’m seeing ain’t it.
aydyn|54day ago
It kind of sounds like you need to offer a solution not him. Because his side did come up with a solution and are implementing it.
sorcerer-mar|54day ago
Oh in that case, I have a solution! We simply deport anyone who makes the argument he's making, then there's no more problem.
Wait just a minute... that's not a valid solution under our laws at all!
aydyn|54day ago
You don't get to decide what constitutes "American interests." [sic]
sorcerer-mar|54day ago
What
aydyn|53day ago
You dont recognize your very own words?
sorcerer-mar|53day ago
> Have you ever used copilot? Its Garbage with a capital G [sic]
Haha! Gotcha! You don't recognize your own words?!
Oh no I do, but my words made sense in the context I wrote them. They don't make sense here.
It turns out words have meanings, and you can't generally copy/paste little substrings from one conversation into another haphazardly.
Feel free to connect the dots between what I said and your response, if you'd like.
aydyn|53day ago
Oh yes words have meaning, some people can understand them.
ImPostingOnHN|53day ago
In the time it took you to make this snide comment on HN, you could have explained your quote which was evidently incomprehensible to all except yourself.
aydyn|53day ago
You complaining about a post being snide
lol funny how that doesnt apply to an obvious bad faith argument like "deport people I disagree with".
ImPostingOnHN|53day ago
That doesn't look like something made in bad faith to me, given that we're seeing threats of precisely that from the usa president [1]. Unfortunately, it's hard to conclude that you're correct in your personal determination of bad faith, because you haven't explained that quote [0] which was evidently incomprehensible except to yourself.
Are you sure you want to talk about the topic? Clearly explaining what you meant there [0] would be a good start if so. Why not just say what you mean, and we can all have a civil discussion? Everybody wins then, right? Not that I'm forcing you to discuss anything civilly if you're not into it.
0: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44466687
1: https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2025/7/2/can-trump-strip-musk...
aydyn|51day ago
That root post made a very civil request: what are realistic alternatives to mass deportation? Let's recap what kind of responses were made:
* "It's your job to come up with an alternative" (not helpful)
* "Just let them all stay" (not realistic)
* "Actually Republican want illegal immigration, not Democrats, so they can rile up their base" (retarded)
* Lots and lots and lots of ad hominem: "check your carbon monoxide monitor"
The responses overall has just been completely lacking in any thought and lacking in any civility. It's a collective tantrum full stop.
> Clearly explaining what you meant there [0] would be a good start if so.
Don't gaslight.
I reiterate that it was a direct response to a bad faith comment. There is nothing unclear about it. He suggested an unrealistic course of action which while he would be personally happy with, goes against what the vast majority of people would consider reasonable and hence fails the request for a "realistic alternative".
> We simply deport anyone who makes the argument he's making
The response is clear: that's unrealistic and not up to him. He understood exactly what it meant but didnt like his very own words used against him.
sorcerer-mar|51day ago
No no, your comprehension is failing you again.
The problem people are raising is not "mass deportation." The problem is violation of due process rights.
This is not a viable solution because it is 1) blatantly illegal under the American Constitution and 2) undermines the very premise of the rule of law.
One reason it is clearly not a viable solution is because if it were, then it would also be a viable solution simply to deport aydyn and people who think like him/her. Doing so would only entail the same convenience-driven Constitutional violations that the current administration is undertaking. Neither is a viable solution.
Let's just get to the meat of the matter so you can pick between hypocrisy or ignorance.
Please answer these yes/no questions:
1. Under the US Constitution, does someone suspected of being an illegal immigrant have a right to due process?
2. Is it acceptable to violate the US Constitution when convenient?
aydyn|51day ago
Oh I'm sorry, I thought we already devolved into fully uncivil conversation?
> Check your carbon monoxide detector.
sorcerer-mar|50day ago
Thank you for sharing with everyone the level of thoughtfulness that backs opinions like yours.
It’s a recipe anyone can follow:
1. Find MAGA pseudo-intellectualization
2. Ask basic factual question
3. Observe theatrical short-circuiting as brain fails to find footing in reality
aydyn|48day ago
Maybe if you get angry some more?
komali2|42day ago
You are a troll, and you've trolled effectively, but I hope others see your comments and then learn you aren't worth engaging with.
ImPostingOnHN|51day ago
> That root post made a very civil request: what are realistic alternatives to mass deportation?
It's been kind of a weird (non-sequitur perhaps?) request, for a couple of reasons:
First because the dismissive nature of some of your responses frames you as the judge of what is acceptable/realistic, which I think we can all agree here without any offense, you're not;
Second, because mass deportation of millions of citizens and noncitizens to gulags, conflict zones, etc, is itself not an acceptable solution. Indeed, "do nothing" is both more acceptable (viewed more acceptably by others) and more realistic (doing nothing is easier than doing something). Thus, it is unhelpful to rule that out as an option while preserving the even-less-acceptable option of maintaining the status quo.
And let's be clear here: the relevant question is of acceptable solutions, not simply realistic ones. As we've unfortunately seen in human history, even killing millions is realistic, but obviously not acceptable.
> [Doing nothing] goes against what the vast majority of people would consider reasonable
"The vast majority of people" find mass deportation of millions of citizens and noncitizens to gulags, conflict zones, etc, to be even more unreasonable. Why, then, must the response be more reasonable than the initial suggestion?
Maybe that's why all the replies expressed confusion at the quoting: it is missing that context, and the full context makes the quote cut against the position of pro-mass deportation of millions of citizens and noncitizens to gulags, conflict zones, etc.
> Don't gaslight
Your personal judgement that people who don't understand your out of context quotes are gaslighting, is rude. The more likely explanation, based on the evidence, is that a given message failed to provide sufficient context and/or explanation.
> The responses overall has just been completely lacking in any thought
This is even meaner. I am confident that you are capable of civil discussion focused on ideas, not on other HN posters. If you want to call your fellow posters thoughtless, you might seek greener pastures.
aydyn|51day ago
> "The vast majority of people" find mass deportation
The majority of Americans agree with mass deportation even if they don't agree with exactly how ICE is proceeding.
There's lots of room for discussion which obviously isn't happening here.
> Your personal judgement that people who don't understand your out of context quotes are gaslighting, is rude.
Given the context and aggressive sarcasm of the post, the vastly more likely explanation is the poster didn't agree with the point rather than not understanding it at all.
You understand now that it is simple direct response. Thus, if you want to call for intellectual honesty and civility, you can lead.
> This is even meaner. I am confident that you are capable of civil discussion focused on ideas, not on other HN posters.
I'm happy to have a civil conversation. I'm also happy to have an uncivil conversation. I'd ask you to be consistent when and with who that incivility started.
ImPostingOnHN|50day ago
If anything, "the vast majority of people" find mass deportation of millions of citizens and noncitizens to gulags, conflict zones, etc, to be even more unreasonable than doing nothing. Please don't cut off my quotes mid-sentence when it omits critical context.
> Given the context and aggressive sarcasm of the post, the vastly more likely explanation is the poster didn't agree with the point rather than not understanding it at all.
Given that every person who responded in that thread expressed confusion at your quote (myself included), the more likely explanation, based on the evidence, is that a given message failed to provide sufficient context and/or explanation.
Now that we have the context explained in my previous post, we see why the quote was confusing: because it does not support the position you have been espousing. That is to say: to whatever extent that other poster 'doesn't get to decide what constitutes American interests', neither do you.
> if you want to call for intellectual honesty and civility, you can lead
I think I have been civil. If I've insulted you personally, I am sorry, and wouldn't mind you pointing it out.
> I'd ask you to be consistent when and with who that incivility started
That other poster isn't being nice either, but I don't like to comment purely to criticize tone. I prefer redirecting to substance when I can. That said, the incivility started when you cited an out of context quote, were asked what you meant, and refused to explain.
Now that you have civilly explained what you meant (thank you), we can focus on substance, which is that if you don't provide an acceptable solution, then it's probably not reasonable to expect others to.
aydyn|48day ago
> If anything, "the vast majority of people" find mass deportation of millions of citizens and noncitizens to gulags, conflict zones, etc, to be even more unreasonable than doing nothing. Please don't cut off my quotes mid-sentence when it omits critical context.
It is not critical context, the root post asked for realistic alternatives.
> Given that every person who responded in that thread expressed confusion at your quote (myself included)
All two of you?
> That said, the incivility started when you cited an out of context[sic] quote,
Flatly untrue.
ImPostingOnHN|47day ago
> the root post asked for realistic alternatives
Yes, reasonable alternatives to mass deportation of millions of citizens and noncitizens to gulags, conflict zones, etc.
The response included options even more reasonable than that one, so no problem there.
> All two of you?
As opposed to all one of you? Why would your own comprehension of your own words somehow nullify other people saying they were incomprehensible? Of course your words weren't confusing to you, they came from your brain!
> Flatly untrue
Of course! It stands to reason that 2 people who tell you the same thing, one a 3rd-party observer, must both be wrong if you disagree with them, obviously.
I noticed you totally excluded the substantive part of my reply where it's explained why everyone found your quoting confusing. I'm sure it's much easier to just ignore it and say 'nope'. Makes for a better conversation, right? Like this one? Anyways, here is the substance again, if you want to focus on it:
The quote, as used by you, does not support the position you have been espousing. That is to say: to whatever extent that other poster 'doesn't get to decide what constitutes American interests', neither do you. So why quote it in that context?
aydyn|46day ago
> reasonable
Thats not the adjective I used.
> 2 people who tell you the same thing
An appeal to the authority of two people with the same ideology and biases is not a convincing argument.
> That said, the incivility started when you cited an out of context[sic] quote,
>> Flatly untrue
>>> Of course! It stands to reason that 2 people who tell you the same thing, one a 3rd-party observer, must both be wrong if you disagree with them, obviously.
For clarification (since you seem to need it a lot) I am responding to your claim that incivility started with me. That is flatly untrue, obviously.
ImPostingOnHN|46day ago
>> reasonable
> Thats not the adjective I used.
Maybe, but that's what you meant when you said "realistic", right?
The holocaust and the holodomor were both, unfortunately "realistic". Surely you're interested in reasonable, acceptable, realistic options, not simply "realistic" ones, however unreasonable and unacceptable? Otherwise, you'll have to share why you're not interested in realistic, reasonable, acceptable options, which as we've seen, are superior to options which are simply "realistic".
> An appeal to the authority of two people with the same ideology and biases is not a convincing argument.
An appeal to the authority of one person with even stronger ideology and biases is even less of a convincing argument.
Since we're on the topic of soliciting alternatives from others: You might suggest a realistic, reasonable, acceptable alternative to what that other poster suggested. This time, I'll play judge, instead of you.
aydyn|45day ago
> what you meant when you said "realistic", right?
No, apparently I must clarify that I meant "realistic" when I said "realistic".
> even stronger ideology and biases is even less of a convincing argument.
I have not even given my perspective so this just reveals your own ideological biases; the mere act of challenging your perspectives means that, to you, that person is biased.
ImPostingOnHN|44day ago
> No, apparently I must clarify that I meant "realistic" when I said "realistic".
You must, yet you still have not! Instead, you omitted everything of substance from my response and just focused on snideness here. Maybe reply to the part of the post that followed that sentence?
> I have not even given my perspective so this just reveals your own ideological biases; the mere act of challenging your perspectives means that, to you, that person is biased.
This goes even moreso when I say it:
Myself and other-poster have not even given our perspectives, so this just reveals your own ideological biases; the mere act of challenging your perspectives means that, to you, those people are biased.
Not sure why you took that hard left into accusing others of being biased, but we don't have to have a conversation like that. We can rise above it.
Unfortunately, your post contained nothing about the actual topic: you're just arguing. If you're interesting in having an interesting discussion, focus on substance in your response, rather than attacking me. For guidance there, check the parts of my previous reply which you omitted.
I am not the topic here, and I'm not interested in you making me it.
sorcerer-mar|53day ago
That obviously was not "the argument" being made, LOL.
Check your carbon monoxide detector.
Then come back and try to connect the dots between your non-sequiturs.
sorcerer-mar|53day ago
I guess I'll just assume there was no connection to be drawn.
It's truly amazing how all the "curious" "just asking questions" types cannot get literally 3 exchanges into a conversation without short circuiting.
aydyn|53day ago
"Deport people I disagree with" is not a post worth engaging with seriously. You couldnt get one exchange deep, so Im not too worried.
sorcerer-mar|53day ago
Ah we're dealing with a comprehension problem. Let me explain then.
The point of "deport people I disagree with" was to highlight it as an illegal solution, much like the "don't give due process" solution.
If we are to take your solution seriously (of simply ignoring our Constitution), then we have all sorts of "solutions" on the table, including ones like "deport people I disagree with." That is to imply that neither of these are actual solutions because both of them would require violating our Constitution.
I suppose I made an error expecting I was speaking to someone with the cognitive firepower required to understand analogies and implicature, so I hope this helps.
lcnPylGDnU4H9OF|54day ago
Some people start abducting anyone off the streets and it’s called a “solution” so other people who don’t like it need to shut up or offer a better one? Well, we are each entitled to our opinion and I don’t agree with that one.
Anyway, here’s a better solution: let them stay. I can’t see how that would be nearly as bad as this. For me personally, for my neighbors, for the rust belt, indeed for anybody except those wanting to abuse power.
aydyn|54day ago
I think this conversation is very clearly people speaking past each other.
Let's reset.
They are asking for a solution that is realistic. Something that is happening right now is, by definition, a realistic outcome. "Let everyone stay" is not a realistic solution for obvious reasons.
lcnPylGDnU4H9OF|54day ago
> They are asking for a solution that is realistic.
Indeed, they asked for “a good faith solution to the problem other than just letting them all stay here forever” and I explicitly said I did not have this. I also see them and you saying “someone” should come up with a solution and, failing to find one yourselves, say deportation without any court hearing is acceptable. I’ve outlined my reasons for why that is dangerous and unacceptable and you just throw up your hands and say it must happen because it’s happening.
(Did you notice how you went from “solution” to “outcome” and then back to “solution”? People are decrying the “outcome” because it’s a shit “solution”. Yes, it seems we are talking past each other.)
aydyn|53day ago
> Did you notice how you went from “solution” to “outcome” and then back to “solution”?
Thats perhaps a bad habit of mine, finding synonyms as I dont like to repeat the same word in the next sentence.
> Indeed, they asked for “a good faith solution to the problem other than just letting them all stay here forever” and I explicitly said I did not have this. I also see them and you saying “someone” should come up with a solution and, failing to find one yourselves, say deportation without any court hearing is acceptable.
So on the other side "just letting them all stay here forever" is also an unacceptable solution.
So what then? There's no acceptable solution we are just screwed?
ImPostingOnHN|53day ago
If "just letting them all stay here forever" is an unacceptable solution, then "send millions of people who are here legally or illegally to gulags forever" is an even less acceptable one.
lcnPylGDnU4H9OF|53day ago
> So on the other side "just letting them all stay here forever" is also an unacceptable solution.
This is a false dichotomy and a false equivalence. I’ll let you figure out what that means.
aydyn|53day ago
no need I know what those things mean.
sorcerer-mar|54day ago
Can you state specifically which law the prior administration chose not to enforce?
Whoppertime|53day ago
The Joe Biden Administration didn't continue the Remain in Mexico policy and brought over people to America who they lost contact with after scheduling a court date.
sorcerer-mar|53day ago
"Remain in Mexico" isn't a law, and in fact the legality of that original Trump policy is still unsettled (but it probably isn't legal without an act of Congress given its clear incompatibility with the INA). The 9th Circuit shut it down within its jurisdiction before the Biden admin did.
In other words: this is bullshit. Try again?
https://www.npr.org/2020/03/05/812474279/court-blocks-trumps...
UncleMeat|54day ago
"Following the law is tedious and expensive" is not actually an argument for violating the law.
All rights for criminal defendants make the state's job harder.
thinkharderdev|51day ago
You are confusing two separate things:
1. What to do with people apprehended entering the country illegally and who then claim asylum.
2. What to do with people already inside the country who are suspected of being here illegally.
The first thing is complicated and badly in need of a rethink because clearly our asylum laws are being gamed. I don't have any ready answers but I'm sure that there are a zillion proposals for reform.
For the second thing, yes I believe that if you are suspected of being in the US illegally then you should absolutely have the right to challenge deportation in court. Otherwise literally anyone can be scooped up off the street and deported with no recourse whether they are an American citizen or not. And honestly it is a bit maddening to see people continuously fail to grasp (or pretend to fail to grasp) this basic point.
easyThrowaway|55day ago
They had people being deported while they were on the queue to renew their documents. US American born citizens were deported just because they "looked latinos". Your legal status is pretty much just in the eyes of whoever ICE agent you're gonna meet today.
Dig1t|54day ago
Is there proof of this? What’s the source?
US citizens were deported because of their skin color?
I think this is disinformation.
rawgabbit|54day ago
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/jun/16/los-angeles-...
https://www.wsj.com/us-news/ice-us-citizens-arrest-deportati...
Dig1t|54day ago
>Gavidia was released
>Eventually, the officers reviewed the identification in his wallet and released him
I thought you said they were deported based on their skin color? Both of these articles seem to say the opposite of that.
bigbadfeline|54day ago
Much selective quoting on your part, here is the other half of the truth:
> Gavidia was released, but Javier Ramirez, another US citizen who is Gadivia’s friend and coworker, was detained by two agents, forced facedown on the ground and taken to federal detention, where he has remained in custody, the New York Times reported.
Arrested and eventually released is guilty until proven innocent.
umbra07|53day ago
But you said they were deported. Being detained is not the same thing as being deported.
moolcool|55day ago
What about deporting a student who is in the country legally as punishment writing an op-ed you don't like?
Slamidan|55day ago
as a guest that's the deal in most countries.
Kim_Bruning|54day ago
Actually, that's NOT the deal in most Western democracies. In countries with free speech protections, writing an op-ed as a legal resident is following the rules, not breaking them.
Yes, even Western democracies sometimes fail at this - through mistakes, bad laws, or moments of fear. That's precisely why we need to call it out when it happens, not shrug and normalize it.
Rights are inherent to all people. When any government - Western or otherwise - punishes peaceful political expression, they're violating fundamental human rights.
'That's just how it is' is how rights erode. We should aspire to strengthen protections for everyone, not excuse their violation by pointing to other failures.
JumpCrisscross|54day ago
> that's the deal in most countries
Most countries aren’t America.
buzzerbetrayed|54day ago
So.. America can't protect American interests when deciding who should be in the country? If I went to Mexico and started protesting I would fully expect Mexico to send me home. And I'd support their right to do so.
Kim_Bruning|54day ago
This comparison actually undermines the argument. Mexico's constitution allows non-citizens to participate in peaceful protests generally - it only restricts participation in 'political affairs of the country' specifically (Article 9)[1]. So even Mexico, with significantly weaker democratic institutions, is more permissive than the scenario being described. Canada, meanwhile, guarantees peaceful assembly for everyone (Charter Section 2(c))[2]. The premise that other democracies would automatically deport protesters simply doesn't hold up.
[1] https://www.constitucionpolitica.mx/titulo-1-garantias-indiv...
[2] https://laws-lois.justice.gc.ca/eng/Const/page-12.html under article 2(c)
sorcerer-mar|54day ago
You don't get to decide what constitutes "American interests." We all do, and our current consensus is encoded in the First Amendment which states plainly that the government cannot take action against people (not constrained to US citizens*) on the basis of their speech.
You can change the Constitution if you don't like it!
burnt-resistor|54day ago
ICE is already brutally arresting vacationers in the US on valid tourist visas, accusing them of being "illegals" simply for being brown. This is why no one from the rest of the world wants to vacation, work, or live in America anymore.
account42|54day ago
> ICE is already brutally arresting vacationers in the US on valid tourist visas, accusing them of being "illegals" simply for being brown.
Can you back that up with evidence? Just because someone claims that they were denied entry / detained / deported due to skin color doesn't mean that was the case. Many such cases where media has jumped on to claims that turned out to be false.
> This is why no one from the rest of the world wants to vacation, work, or live in America anymore.
Absolutely false, only those who let them be manipulated by scare media think there is actually a measurable risk for coming to the US legally.
trealira|53day ago
> Can you back that up with evidence?
I'm not them, but there have been reports of tourists locked up for weeks.
https://apnews.com/article/border-tourists-german-canadian-d...
kashunstva|54day ago
> So.. America can't protect American interests when deciding who should be in the country?
Free speech is (was?) an American interest. Further, the country contains multitudes of different, opposing interests, not just those of the current regime.
For all its grandstanding over “cancel culture” this regime’s unusually thin skin when it comes to opposing views would be laughable, were it not so dangerous and abusive.
refurb|54day ago
That doesn’t make a lot of sense when you apply it.
If a legal immigrant in the US starts recruiting for ISIS (entirely legal behavior), don’t you want the ability to remove them? Generally countries don’t want immigrants who support people who want that countries destruction.
JumpCrisscross|52day ago
> If a legal immigrant in the US starts recruiting for ISIS (entirely legal behavior)
Recruiting for a terrorist organisation is textbook lending of material support. Very illegal.
refurb|52day ago
It's not.
Providing material support is, which is a gray area when it comes to recruitment as recruitment doesn't have to be explicit.
What if I post information that indirectly support terrorist groups such as justifying their actions? What if I post information that supports groups indirectly connected with terrorist groups (say a fund raising arm the US government hasn't listed as a terrorist group)?
None of those things are illegal.
Shouldn't the US government, well any government for that matter, be able to deny such people entry?
As they say "the Constitution isn't a suicide pact". It wasn't intended to be a mechanism by which foreigners can destroy the country itself.
JumpCrisscross|52day ago
> Providing material support is, which is a gray area when it comes to recruitment
It’s absolutely not a grey area, what source do you have that’s claiming this?
> What if I post information that indirectly support terrorist groups such as justifying their actions?
That’s fine. That’s speech. Terrorist or freedom fighter is like mandatory freshman dorm banter.
> What if I post information that supports groups indirectly connected with terrorist groups (say a fund raising arm the US government hasn't listed as a terrorist group)?
If it links to a listed group you’re fucked. Even if you didn’t know about the connection.
Grey areas resolve differently depending on context. When it comes to terrorism, we tend to be fine being more brutal. Debating Hamas is fine. Waving their flag is questionable, potentially fair grounds to deny visa entry (or at least do a very deep dive into whether actual support occurred). Encouraging folks to join Hamas, directly or indirectly, should result in immediate detention and incapacitation.
refurb|51day ago
> It’s absolutely not a grey area, what source do you have that’s claiming this?
US legal code? You made the claim recruiting is illegal, find me the law that says so.
> That’s fine. That’s speech.
So you’d be fine with a neo-Nazi being admitted to the US? Or someone actively supporting ISIS in their speech?
And you never really responded to my point - the Constitution doesn’t require the US admit people actively working to destroy the US.
JumpCrisscross|54day ago
> America can't protect American interests when deciding who should be in the country?
America shouldn’t be sending masked goons into courthouses to disappear people.
I was actually supportive of Trump’s illegal immigrant pitch at the get go. But then he totally ignored the gangs, going after tax-paying migrants because Miller found them easier to round up. And then he started deporting Americans.
This isn’t even a problem of evil. It’s one of incompetence. We have a bunch of nutwads in masks wearing camo doing whatever they can to hit numbers. This is bureaucratic failure on steroids.
> I'd support their right to do so
Honestly, I’m fine with this. I am also fine with someone publishing this app. (We frankly need a database of ICE agents who have broken the law so they can be dealt with down the road.)
discgolf3|54day ago
Gangs are being deported, if they are here illegally. US citizens are not being deported.
ImPostingOnHN|53day ago
Unfortunately, that is not correct:
> Three young children who are US citizens - including one with cancer - were deported to Honduras alongside their mothers last week, according to advocacy groups and the families' lawyers.
> One of the children is a four-year-old with Stage 4 cancer who was sent without medication, a lawyer for the child's family said. [0]
JumpCrisscross|53day ago
> Gangs are being deported
Lots of evidence showing the hard police work of pursuing gangs is being substituted for the easier task of deporting tax-paying migrants. I don’t have any particular issue with the latter. But it’s incorrect to claim this administration is pursuing gangs; its deals with Bukele have essentially freed multiple members of MS13’s leadership.
breakyerself|55day ago
Do you like freedom or not?
Tryk|55day ago
What makes you say that?
mensetmanusman|55day ago
America argues it is their right to assemble who they want in their borders.
nullstyle|55day ago
Not America. The current administration and a select set of piss poor citizens
JumpCrisscross|54day ago
> Deporting people who are in the country illegally is very much in line with the constitution
You’re correct. But in a somewhat irrelevant way. The problem for most Americans aren’t the deportations. It’s the lack of due process, extrajudicial torture, and expansion of these police privileges to now encompassing all naturalised Americans.
pjc50|55day ago
Easy when a DOGE 21 year old can simply open up the SSN database and set your "legal resident?" flag to "no".
cyanydeez|55day ago
it's unlikely the original SS databased had any information about this.
The new one they're building is clearly going to have all this bullshit so they can cherry pick at lightning speed reasons to exile, rendition or punish people.
But just so we're clear, the SS doesn't really care if you're a citizen. All it's tracking is who pays into it and who receives the benefits from the payments.
pjc50|55day ago
Yeah, I don't think the US actually has a reliable nationality status database other than those it's issued passports to. This may make the situation worse rather than better for those affected.
JeanMara|55day ago
>Deporting people who are in the country illegally
Oh? What about people who are permanent residents and are arbitrarily deemed "threat to national security" because of their opposition to Israel? What about the recent denaturalization DOJ unit that was just set up? Are those people "illegally" here too and that is constitutionally valid?
The tunnel vision here is astounding. Do you really not realize that this administration isn't stopping at "just the illegals?" They have deported US citizens, children at that.
rantallion|55day ago
Indeed. GP needs to read "First They Came".
immibis|55day ago
The HN voting record shows that HN broadly agrees with GGP (your GP). It makes sense, since people here are big tech developers, who will never come into contact in police in this kind of way.
catlover76|55day ago
[dead]
zabzonk|55day ago
how about illegally deporting people?
sorcerer-mar|55day ago
https://www.cato.org/blog/50-venezuelans-imprisoned-el-salva...
What about sending people who are here legally to a foreign torture camp (not "deporting", by the way) without due process? Is that in line with the Constitution?
No. No it is not.
Stop playing stupid.
https://www.onthewing.org/user/Bonhoeffer%20-%20Theory%20of%...
djexjms|55day ago
What about ignoring due process while doing so? Is that, in your view, in line with the constitution? If it is, what recourse does a US citizen detained by ICE (either accidentally or not) have? Also, how do you view Trump's efforts to end birthright citizenship via Executive Order? Birthright citizenship is in the 14th Amendment. If the president is allowed to arbitrarily redefine who is and is not a citizen, are constitutional protections anything more than ink on paper?
chasd00|55day ago
[flagged]
breakyerself|55day ago
As if that's the extent of things. As if the worst abuses of the Trump administration are just deporting people who were here illegally.
Don't worry about the mass revocations of legal status of previously legal residents. The deprivation of due process. The sending of people to a foreign prison where they endure all kinds of human rights abuses based on flimsy evidence, no due proceas and no expectations of ever getting out alive.
Fascist fucks
Jtsummers|56day ago
Only if you knew by virtue of something like access to secret information (the things you'd have a security clearance to access).
If you see the police are gathered around your local 7-Eleven, you're absolutely free to post it.
If you know in advance that the police are going to be performing a raid on a meth house and you got that information by virtue of a security clearance (I assume they do have something of this sort like federal employees have, though I'm not sure the precise mechanisms) then you'd be violating the policies around that access. This could be illegal (just like a fed leaking secret or top secret information).
If you know in advance because the police have loose lips, but you are not personally under any kind of confidentiality policy, you're free to post it. So the loose lipped cops at the bars I used to frequent could have caused real problems for themselves.
mingus88|55day ago
Worth pointing out that the question of legality is besides the point if you are purposefully antagonizing the police state.
It’s not about legality. It’s about compliance.
If you become a target, they will arrest you and drop charges later. They will make you miss work and lose your job. They will set up surveillance on you to catch you doing anything else they want to continue harassment.
You don’t have to look hard to see reporting of officers using official databases to settle personal scores. 404 media just did a big expose on ALPR Flock DB abuses
techdmn|55day ago
Crowd-sourced flock camera locations: https://deflock.me/
danudey|55day ago
Honestly, they'll put you in an ICE detention facility indefinitely. They don't have to drop charges if they don't even have to charge you in the first place, and because they're all hiding behind masks there's no way for them to face any kind of repercussions.
Beyond that, Trump has repeatedly floated the idea of sending "homegrowns" to overseas concentration camps, so it won't be long now before you don't have to do anything wrong to be targetted and you don't have any recourse regardless.
defrost|55day ago
Behold the June 11 Justice Dept Memo on wedge applications for "5. Prioritizing Denaturalization"
https://www.justice.gov/civil/media/1404046/dl
with some discussion at: DOJ Opens Door To Stripping Citizenship Over Politics - https://talkingpointsmemo.com/news/doj-opens-door-to-strippi...
"We can't let those (accused) commies take over New York (even if elected)"
godelski|55day ago
IANAL
Flashing your headlights to warn others of cops or anything else is generally considered free speech. IIRC, this has been ruled on several times in pretty high courts.
So double check with a lawyer, but I'm like 99% confident there's nothing illegal about these types of Apps. I mean Waze has been doing it for years and even Google maps notifies you about speed traps.
If some new ruling makes it not free speech, we're in danger
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Headlight_flashing
lupusreal|55day ago
In the UK during the early era of cars, the Automobile Association used to send boys out with bicycles to warn drivers about speed traps. This was challenged in court, obstruction of justice or some such, so the AA simply inverted the scheme. The boys were now told to always salute cars to signal that everything was okay, but wouldn't salute if there was a speed trap ahead. It was reasoned that the law couldn't compel the boys to salute. Apparently they kept this up for a few decades, before eventually deciding that speed limits were generally reasonable.
belorn|54day ago
If you drive around in EU then be aware that the law is different depending on the country. Schweiz for example do not allow to use or sell databases that has the location of speed cameras. In Germany you are not allowed to use apps that warn you of it. You are also not allowed to use your car lights to warn other drivers, but you can use hand signals. They are however allowed in other places like Belgium, Neitherlands and Spain.
Here is a list (but I can't say how accurate it is): https://lizhiguos.com/driving-aids-and-speed-camera-warnings...
pjmlp|54day ago
As someone that lives and works on the DACH region, you just have to listen to German and Swiss radios, they do tend to point out radar spots, regardless of those laws, so dunno how they get their permissions to do so.
notahacker|55day ago
Now you get the warning on your satnav...
ndriscoll|55day ago
I use OsmAnd and it alerts me to pedestrian crosswalks. My wife uses google and it alerts her to speed enforcement. Interesting difference in priorities.
overfeed|55day ago
What are the benefits of crosswalks alerts? Usually, there are lots of signs leading to, and at the crosswalks. This is the opposite for fixed and mobile speed traps, they'd rather it be a surprise to drivers.
lupusreal|55day ago
The benifit is adding another layer of safety to reduce risk. In the swiss cheese model of accidents, each safety measure is a layer of swiss cheese, which has holes through which accidents may go through. But if you stack up a lot of cheese, the accident has to thread a path through several different holes and that is less likely to happen.
bluecalm|50day ago
Idk about danger. There are countries with better functioning democracy and personal freedom than US that make it illegal to use an app that warns about speed traps. For example Switzerland. In multiple other countries you also can't flash your headlights to warn about police presence on the road.
You can have a reasonable system one way or another. I would take Swiss regulation over US one any day personally.
account42|55day ago
Flashing headlights gets people to drive more carefully and within the speed limit, thus you are not helping someone commit a crime. However if you help someone avoid being lawfully detained this might make you complicit in their actions and the courts could very well decide differently. Intent very much matters here.
haswell|55day ago
Using this line of reasoning, let’s imagine for a moment that a car speeding 20mph over the limit sees someone on the other side of the road flashing their lights and slows down in time to avoid a ticket.
Hasn’t the light flasher helped someone who was breaking the law avoid detection?
And isn’t the intent of the flasher to ensure that people who were breaking the law have enough time to stop doing that long enough to avoid detection?
> However if you help someone avoid being lawfully detained
Obligatory “I am not a lawyer” disclaimer, but the people who make posts on this app have no contact with the people the app ostensibly benefits. If the app helped targets of ice find willing drivers in the area to help them escape to somewhere else, that’d be one thing since there is now a direct relationship with a person and the accused and direct action on the part of the app user. But I don’t see how this app is materially different from posting speed traps or DUI checkpoints on Waze, an action that has absolutely helped people avoid lawful intervention by police.
ndsipa_pomu|55day ago
The light flasher has merely persuaded someone to stop breaking the law. Whether or not the lights flashed, the police would not have been able to detect prior speeding, but merely detected speeding near them.
An analogy might be to have a sign in a shop warning thieves of CCTV - the purpose is to prevent theft and is not considered to be helping someone avoid detection, although it does also do that.
account42|54day ago
Speech that indirectly results in someone committing more crime is not the same as speech that directly incites someone to commit more crime.
cmiles74|55day ago
We’re saying that “intent very much matters here” but when we are talking about people flashing headlights to warn others of a police-manned speed trap, we focus on the effects of the action. Isn’t the intention of the person flashing their headlights (in many cases) to help people break the law? That is, people see the signal and slow down while passing the speed trap only to increase speed once past, evading detection.
This looks much the same to me as people warning those around them of ICE activity.
zdragnar|55day ago
Nobody flashes their headlights with the intent that someone will speed up. Driving at night, you're not even able to determine whether oncoming traffic is speeding.
It is literally telling someone to obey the law, because the law is watching.
bee_rider|55day ago
Maybe they’s why people post on the app too, to remind folks to have their documentation in order.
zdragnar|55day ago
If you have the app, you likely don't need the reminder. You're either evading ICE or helping other people steer clear of ICE.
Police notifications on GPS don't really give you much notification to turn off onto a different road or to avoid them, at least on freeways, which is the only time I've seen them.
koverstreet|55day ago
Fondly remember 20 years ago when I was doing over 100 on a highway in northern Alaska and all the _cop_ did was flash his lights at me to tell me to slow down.
Times sure are changing
Brendinooo|55day ago
In Pennsylvania the court ruled that flashing your lights to signal isn’t illegal but it is dangerous at night. So presumably it’s fine during the day, or perhaps one could signal by turning headlights off and on instead.
throw4565e3|56day ago
Since Waze still has their speed trap reporting feature, I’m guessing it’s still legal.
mrbombastic|55day ago
This is now built into google maps
dzhiurgis|55day ago
Waze in NZ removed this feature after threats from police.
If you post to local social media groups about DUI checkpoints or mobile speed cameras you’ll be scolded by about 30% of people.
phatfish|55day ago
Pretty depressing it is only 30%.
ghssds|55day ago
Why?
jhy|55day ago
Because folks don't want to enable drink-drivers and speeders? Maybe they want to use their roads with some basic level of safety?
const_cast|55day ago
There is a risk to DUI checkpoints and speeding checkpoints even if you are doing neither. Innocent people die at the hands of the police fairly often, but many more are wrongfully imprisoned. Wanting to limit your interactions with the police is a valid safety and risk management proposal.
pasc1878|55day ago
Not in NZ
matwood|55day ago
If safety was the real goal the police themselves would announce checkpoints and speed traps. This gives people a chance to not drink too much or speed in the first place. I've lived in places where DUI checkpoints were all announced ahead of time, and I think for many it was a serious reminder to not drink and drive.
But for many DUI checkpoints safety is not the goal. It's simply a pretext to check everyone's papers.
victorbjorklund|55day ago
That only works if you actually have a DUI checkpoints all the time everywhere. It is a random check because then people need to be careful all the time. If there is a DUI checkpoint 2 times per year in your area you can just avoid driving drunk at those two days per year.
aerostable_slug|55day ago
They do. DUI checkpoints are heavily advertised here in California for exactly that reason — to deter drunk drivers. The only thing they don't do is tell the exact intersection so drunks don't just drink and drive the other direction.
Whoppertime|53day ago
https://www.chch.com/chch-news/police-services-across-ontari... In Ontario they announce R.I.D.E. checkpoints ahead of time, it is always before winter holidays.
willsmith72|55day ago
Like in sports, how before every drug test the athlete is given a heads-up right?
Or is perhaps the chance of a random test at any moment more of a deterrent?
RHSeeger|55day ago
What about people that are on their way to work (or somewhere else time sensitive) who want to be aware of places with a slowdown because of checkpoints?
lupusreal|55day ago
A lot of people think that a few delays once in a while are a reasonable price to pay for suppressing the rate of DUIs.
redeeman|55day ago
yeah, and thats fine, but you dont have the right to say someone cant have another opinion
lupusreal|55day ago
1. I didn't say people can't have another opinion. I didn't say that because I don't believe it and never implied otherwise.
2. Supposing I did believe it and did say it, I would be well within my rights to say it. The First Ammendment assures the right to say things like that, no matter how dumb and misguided those things are.
mensetmanusman|55day ago
Umm, that’s exactly what free speech is.
redeeman|51day ago
okay you can say it, but you have no right to actually get your way
WaxProlix|55day ago
True, they should set up child abuse checkpoints too - think of the children after all.
Izkata|55day ago
Doctors and teachers handle that, since they have regular contract with children. At least in my state they're required by law to report suspected child abuse.
shadowgovt|55day ago
As a side note, these laws are doing damage to organizations looking for volunteers that I don't think we have fully grasped yet.
People are willing to put a couple of weekends into making a middle school or high school competition happen. They're a lot less willing to do it if they have to go to an FBI station to get fingerprinted or produce a state and federal background check first. And I'm not talking about people with something to hide; I'm talking about people with a completely clean background who just don't want to be bothered.
rjsw|55day ago
The equivalent checks outside the US may not require fingerprinting, they don't in the UK.
dzhiurgis|54day ago
NZ OP here. Few weeks ago there was a morning checkpoint to inspect everyone's child car seat installation.
Few years back got chased by a cop and ticketed (and scolded) for not restraining kiddo (small town and my clever 2yo somehow learned how to unbuckle themselves (even that houdini clip didn't help)). Warned I could get prosecuted for child neglect if I continue. I suspect the daycare has tipped him off.
aspenmayer|54day ago
Nanny state isn’t synonymous with police state, but it rhymes.
jhy|55day ago
Making slippery slope arguments like this is not discussing in good faith. I was providing the context of someone who lives in that geo-political area.
HaZeust|55day ago
And check that every single one of your federal papers are present and punctual. We'd hate to have someone that's unbecoming to share a full disclosure of themselves to officers on the road.
zem|55day ago
the whole idea behind a police state is that legality doesn't matter when it conflicts with "the state wants to employ machinery to keep you in line"
idontwantthis|56day ago
Absolutely not illegal.
zaptheimpaler|54day ago
They literally did detain travelers who have funny meme images of the VP on their phones.
buzzerbetrayed|54day ago
This is a perfect example of the problem with media reporting bullshit and then later correcting it. Everyone hears the bullshit, very few people hear the actual reason.
more_corn|54day ago
Or, and hear me out on this, maybe he was ejected for funny memes and they made up the other excuse after the fact.
thedrbrian|54day ago
they detained him for his drug use
https://x.com/CBP/status/1937651325354795444
aigen001|54day ago
"He told the Norwegian newspaper Nordlys that he was questioned at the airport about illegal drug use.
He admitted to having used cannabis on two occasions — in Germany and in New Mexico.
- It’s legal in both places, so in my mind it was irrelevant, he said." - Nordlys
https://www.snopes.com/news/2025/06/25/norwegian-tourist-jd-... https://www.nordlys.no/denied-entry-to-the-us-admitted-to-le...
rsingel|54day ago
Sadly, if that were actually true that would be even f*** worse.
Oh we're not going to let tourists into our country because we asked them whether or not they'd ever smoked pot and they said yes.
We have no idea whether that's actually true or not, but if it is, that's the dumbest thing I've ever f*** heard, especially given the marijuana's legal in most states in the United States that anyone outside the US would actually want to visit
grafmax|54day ago
> “Verbally they said it was because of extremist propaganda and narcotic paraphernalia," with "extremist propaganda" referring to the alleged meme
With the “narcotic paraphernalia” referring to “a photo of the traveler with a homemade wooden pipe” according to Mikkelson.
The official document for his rejection stated this reason:
> it appears you are attempting to engage in unauthorized employment without authorization and proper documentation
With all these conflicting accounts in mind, perhaps it is plausible that he was denied entry because of his admitted legal cannabis use on two prior occasions. Or perhaps Homeland Security indeed retaliated against a someone for possessing a JD Vance meme, then decided to lie about it.
ashleyn|54day ago
It's not legal federally. Not that I agree with giving him shit about it, but the federal government basically considers it the same thing as fentanyl. Don't admit it on any federal application.
cmurf|56day ago
If the existence of the app is evidence of nascent police state, what does increasing the budget of ICE by 13x suggest?
amarcheschi|56day ago
That reinforces the idea of police state
analognoise|55day ago
Civil war, obviously.
Whoppertime|53day ago
We saw the government establishing something approaching a police state under COVID
zzzeek|55day ago
> It could be an app where you press a button and the phone says "boo ICE"
oh great, stealing my idea?
jumpman_miya|56day ago
[dead]
Slamidan|55day ago
[dead]
db48x|55day ago
[flagged]
aceazzameen|55day ago
So you're saying 2 previous presidents were more successful without using a campaign of threats and violence? And they didn't have to ignore court orders either? Makes you wonder...
db48x|55day ago
Yea, that is worth looking in to. It could be that individual ICE agents are just not doing their job in order to sandbag the president. Or it could be that far, far fewer illegal immigrants crossed the border <https://x.com/RealTomHoman/status/1940156659084796257> during Trump’s terms than Biden’s or Obama’s; it’s currently about 60× lower than the average during Biden’s term. There’s also the million people who signed up to self–deport in order to avoid being arrested by ICE. Perhaps the removal numbers will rise as they actually leave.
But have any of Trump’s executive orders told ICE to be more violent? I haven’t noticed any that said that, but maybe you could link to it.
aceazzameen|55day ago
"But it could be this, or it could be that." Just look at the facts without trying to reframe everything. Your comments come across as deceitful.
Listen to the words of this President, and the people in his administration compared to previous Presidents. Not to mention deploying the national guard and USMC against civilians to assist ICE, because ICE's methods have changed.
Then ask yourself why does ICE need a budget of $75 billion in the bill Trump is pushing, when ICE was apparently more successful with magnitudes less in previous administrations?
db48x|54day ago
You might want to link to a specific bill, because I don’t know for sure what you’re referring to otherwise. Do you mean the recent budget bill? There's no way I’m reading that for an internet comment, but if that’s the one you mean then I’ll quote a news article about it:
> The GOP bill allocates $46.5 billion toward completing Trump's border wall. It also puts $5 billion for Customs and Border Protection facilities and $10 billion to be used for border security more broadly. The bill sets aside $4.1 billion to hire and retain more agents and officers, and invests in upgraded technology for screenings and surveillance of U.S. borders.
It doesn’t say anything about ICE specifically, so it’s not very helpful. ICE wouldn't be doing construction, and they wouldn’t be running CBP facilities, but maybe they’ll be getting more agents or officers or both. They also don’t screen travelers or surveil the border. Overall it doesn’t sound like ICE is getting $75 billion.
Anyway, the budget is not very relevant to my question. If removals are down to a third (well, two fifths I guess) of what they were during Biden’s term, how is it that we are suddenly in a police state? If ICE makes us a police state, then weren’t we in a police state then?
Why didn’t anyone care about this last year?
db48x|54day ago
No, these are very clearly confounding factors. When there are fewer people walking across the deserts, for example, then there are both fewer deaths from exposure and fewer people to put on a bus and immediately return to Mexico. That makes ICE’s numbers go down. Pointing out confounding factors is not an attempt to reframe the issue; deliberately ignoring confounding factors is actually one of the easiest ways to lie with statistics.
Damogran6|55day ago
Do you honestly think (being mean to perps at their place of work, church, or while voluntarily attending a court case) needs to be written down? %waving hands at everything% This is the hill you want to (literally or figuratively) die on?
southernplaces7|55day ago
The comment you responded to with this asked a completely legitimate question and even looked up the hard numbers to back up their doubts, only to be flagged. The bratty man-children on this site who flag such comments because "me no like" truly should learn a thing or two about reasoning like a thinking adult.
aceazzameen|55day ago
Conflating less deportation numbers with less of a police state is twisting the narrative, and you know it.
southernplaces7|55day ago
Nope, it was a legitimate question that does touch upon a number of debatable subjects about narrative, media focus, definitions of deportations and so forth. Either way, flagging comments into literal non-existence just so you can completely shut down whatever opinion you don't want to read is simply childish, and fundamentally moronic.
jghn|55day ago
Why is ICE slated to have a higher budget than the USMC if they're only removing ~40k people per month?
aerostable_slug|55day ago
Because border security is extremely expensive. The point isn't just removals, it's also deterrence & denial of entry (of people and contraband) in the first place.
The security worry isn't extra laborers driving down wages, it's terrorists coming across the border and blowing up Mardi Gras (secondarily, serial rapists or murderers or what have you coming here to ply their trade). Prevention of entry is the only defense there, because presumably those bad actors aren't here for the long haul, economic gain, etc.
I haven't seen a budget breakdown so I can't speak to how defensible the budget is, just that it seems clear that removal metrics don't tell a useful story on their own.
amazingman|55day ago
You're essentially peddling the poisoned M&M fallacy. Do we need capable, rational border security? Yes. Do we need unaccountable masked men armed in our city streets, forcefully detaining anyone who looks like they might be [insert bogeyman caricature]? Absolutely fucking not.
aerostable_slug|55day ago
When did I defend authoritarian masked men? Perimeter defense is an expensive endeavor, and if you read the words I wrote that's clearly what I was talking about. At first glance, the new budget includes over 50 billion (!) dollars for increasing our perimeter defense. That sounds like capable, rational border security to me.
Please stop accusing people of peddling the straw man you want to tear down. It's Reddit-tier, not worthy of HN.
amazingman|55day ago
A single dollar figure (with no additional context) suggests capable, rational border security to you?
jghn|55day ago
> it's terrorists coming across the border
Then why are they spending so much effort deporting everyday people? This talking point is tired, it's the equivalent of "for the children!". Something that everyone can get behind but isn't anywhere near the level of problem it's made out to be.
StochasticLi|55day ago
don't illegal immigrants commit less crimes per capita?
amazingman|55day ago
Parent is clearly not interested in that kind of statistic. Instead their framing implies that even 1 terrorist/rapist/murderer/etc that makes it across the border is a problem worth solving via authoritarianism. The only successful response is to draw this out and make it clearer for everyone else.
aerostable_slug|55day ago
Please stop with the straw man BS. That's not what I was saying at all and I think you know that.
HN has reached Reddit levels of partisan nonsense. Sigh.
amazingman|55day ago
It's right there in your framing. The most charitable take available is that you're approaching the problem like a software engineer, and accepting that framing as defensible. It is not. One of the most important facts to remember at the level of government is that while we must abstract human problems in order to solve for them, humans themselves are not abstractions. When perfect becomes the enemy of the good (enough), human suffering increases.
All that aside, feel free to walk your framing back and I'll change mine accordingly.
hightrix|55day ago
Please stop defending masked thugs that don’t identify themselves kidnapping us citizens and trafficking them to foreign countries.
Previous administrations followed this thing we call “due process”. This admin is not.
db48x|54day ago
No, that’s simply incorrect. ICE is following exactly the same process that has been in place since 1996. It can’t be due process under Biden but then suddenly unconstitutional under Trump.
ICE is not “kidnapping” anybody, and is not “trafficking” them. They are federal police officers who arrest criminals and deport them according the legal process defined by Congress in 1996.
amazingman|54day ago
I didn't realize Biden was instructing ICE to grab people off the street and deport them to a gulag in a country they aren't from before they can have a hearing or make any appeals. Would you please provide references for this?
aerostable_slug|55day ago
These are presumably threat actors choosing an infiltration route on purpose. At least, that's how I understand the logic behind it.
Upas|55day ago
I think the key difference is the usage of face masks and plainclothes - as far as I can tell, from various different news articles - ICE agents weren't concealing their identities en masse using face masks under Biden and Obama.
Based on historical examples of secret police, plainclothes and face masks on Federal Agents by default could definitely make people think that we are "approaching a police state".
db48x|55day ago
I guess it could be purely a misperception that will vanish mysteriously in four years.
popularrecluse|55day ago
So real reporting of happenings from news outlets that don't comport with your desired reality : misperception. Got it.
db48x|55day ago
I’m not sure exactly what you mean. It’s an objective fact that ICE was removing almost 3× as many people per month this time last year, but that nobody cared at the time. If it’s all about perceptions rather than the objective reality then that makes some sense.
All the president has to do is to make a few speeches about how tough on illegal immigration his administration is going to be and people’s perceptions will shift enough that they suddenly care. Now that someone cares enough to start making threats against federal officers, the officers start wearing masks and bullet–proof vests. This apparently causes perceptions to shift even more and people start thinking we live in a police state.
But the reality is that they’re doing ⅓rd of the work. They’re literally arresting fewer people. If anything, that makes it _less_ of a police state than before. And the law that ICE is upholding was passed last amended in by Congress in 1996, so it’s not like Trump has suddenly given them a new job to do.
So yea, I would say that it’s a misperception. The perception doesn't appear to agree with the objective facts.
tomjakubowski|55day ago
> It’s an objective fact that ICE was removing almost 3× as many people per month this time last year
It is? What is your source for this?
According to TRAC's published stats, in May 2024, ICE booked 8,451 people into detention. In May 2025, ICE booked 23,662 people into detention.
https://tracreports.org/immigration/detentionstats/book_in_a...
db48x|54day ago
I should probably have said “removed” rather than “arrested”, since not every person removed gets arrested. I am using the DHS’s own statistics <https://ohss.dhs.gov/topics/immigration/yearbook/2022/table3...> which cover every year from 1892 to 2022. For Biden’s term and Trump’s current term I used estimates found in news reports though I don’t have the links in front of me. The estimate for Trump’s current term was just for the first four months of the year.
colpabar|55day ago
I get what you are saying, honestly, I too wonder why if so many deportations occurred under both obama and biden, why didn't anyone seem to care? Why weren't judges trying to block that from happening?
But then I remember that trump is invoking the ancient "war powers act" to do them. Why didn't obama or biden have to do that if they were able to deport so many people? I also remember when that psycho dog-killing-enjoyer kristi noem tweeted "suck it" when a group of people who were trying to use legal means to not get deported got deported. Fuck her.
You say it's a misperception, but I think we are all perceiving it exactly as they want us to. They are going to do whatever they can get away with by any means necessary and fuck you if you try to get in the way. Some people just think that's bad.
db48x|54day ago
You might have confused two different things. There's been a bit of a fight over whether the President can intervene in Iran and Yemen recently, since Congress hasn’t declared a war. But that has nothing to do with immigration.
> psycho dog-killing-enjoyer kristi noem
If you want anyone to take you seriously then don’t call people names. State your claim without ad hominem attacks or other obvious fallacies.
dragonwriter|54day ago
> I get what you are saying, honestly, I too wonder why if so many deportations occurred under both obama and biden, why didn't anyone seem to care? Why weren't judges trying to block that from happening?
Because the Obama and Biden administrations were not going out of their way (which the Trump administration both is and is publicly flaunting that it is) to avoid providing due process under the terms of existing case law, defying "you must not deport person A to country X" orders of courts.
> But then I remember that trump is invoking the ancient "war powers act" to do them.
"Alien Enemies Act", the War Powers Act is much newer and unrelated, but not all of the controversial deportations are attached to that.
> Why didn't obama or biden have to do that if they were able to deport so many people?
The Alien Enemies Act provides a pretext for deportations with less process than traditional deportation process under regular immigration law (in fact, until the courts ruled otherwise, the Trump Administration was claiming, and treating it as if, it allowed no process at all once the act was invoked and the executive branch designated the target as an alien enemy.)
db48x|54day ago
Right, the “Alien Enemies Act”. Trump used that to target members of a specific gang, not every single illegal alien from every country. So a few dozen or a hundred people, not 35k people per month. If people conflate the two and think that every single illegal alien has been declared an “Enemy Alien” according to that act then that could explain why nobody cared last year. But if that’s true then it is also another case of a gross misperception of reality on the part of the people who suddenly care enough to protest and/or send death threats to federal officers.
dragonwriter|54day ago
> Right, the “Alien Enemies Act”. Trump used that to target members of a specific gang
There is virtually no evidence for many of the people targeted that they were members of that or any other gang, and the standarss used for that designation were laughable.
Had the courts not quickly shut down the Administration contention that expulsions under the act were not subject to challenge, it obviously would have been used much more extensively as a way to sweep up anyone the Administration wishes to deport.
db48x|54day ago
While that is a valid complaint, don’t move the goalposts. The original comment was:
> But then I remember that trump is invoking the ancient "war powers act" to do them. Why didn't obama or biden have to do that if they were able to deport so many people?
In other words, this guy thinks that Trump is using this act to boost the number of deportations. But the gang doesn’t have enough members to make a dent in the statistics. 35k illegals are being removed from the country every month and no gang has 35k members, or even 3k. They might have three dozen.
And I’ll reiterate that if lots of people are angry at Trump because they think that he’s using some ancient obscure law against _every_ illegal immigrant then they are suffering a misperception of what has actually been going on. If this is the reason for the sudden protests against ICE then it is a very bad reason indeed.
andrepd|55day ago
Masked agents. You have masked unidentified agents snatching people from the street, some of them targeted specifically for their wrongthink.
Note this is even orthogonal to the actual issue of immigration policy.
jackmottatx|56day ago
[flagged]
newAccount2025|56day ago
I don’t disagree with the characterization of ICE officers as racist thugs, but retaliatory violence is (1) still immoral and (2) self-defeating.
You aren’t realistically going to overpower them, so any violent resistance just helps them DARVO harder and excuse escalating their brutality. That’s why they’re always so eager to find or create violent one-offs within non-violent mass protests.
SpicyLemonZest|56day ago
As the source article covers, the Trump regime believes that merely reporting the location of an ICE officer constitutes violence against them. I don't think it's a good idea to punch your local ICE officer, and if anyone's considering it I would definitely advise them not to, but issuing a blanket condemnation of hypothetical violence is just terribly naive at this point. I'm extremely confident that, at some point before 2028, someone is going to end up in federal custody for shooting masked home invaders they had no way to know were ICE.
AnimalMuppet|55day ago
Hmm. So the right has come around to "speech is violence"? I guess I shouldn't be surprised.
esseph|56day ago
There's more than 340 million people in the US and only a handful are ICE.
All it would take is one bad day for anybody in ICE to be afraid to show up to work.
aspenmayer|54day ago
Deportation is a kind of draft, in that deportees are treated similarly to draft dodgers. ICE aren’t MPs, but in this analogy, they largely are folks who have already been drafted themselves, and who have reported for duty.
A bad day at work is just more contact with the “enemy” and is desired by some to separate the weekend warriors from the true believers. The fog of war is obscuring the reality of the outbreak of conflict which has been brewing under the surface for many years.
The revolution will not be televised because it won’t look like a revolution. It’ll look like C-SPAN. Whatever ICE is doing isn’t a revolution, it’s administrative. People voted for this, and they got it. If people want change, make it happen the way that other changes happen that stick. The lesson of Arab Spring is that even with the military on your side, revolution breaks the status quo, and once broken, norms change because the power structure has changed. Most folks don’t want revolution, they just want a vacation from reality. No one wants to put in the work to make revolutions happen because it’s a lot of paperwork, rehearsals, and standing around. It feels like work because it is. All that effort makes it look natural and inevitable, but that’s the magic of make believe.
A bad day at work as you suggest would be a magic act, but who’s gonna put in the work to pull that rabbit out of that hat? And who benefits from such an obvious misdirection?
I was at Occupy San Francisco, so I am not just asking questions, but asking you to re-examine what you believe is possible, and why you think a mock pitched battle with tin soldiers has tactical value, so I don’t know what your motive is, but I doubt you would be honest about your motives given the circumstances.
anonfordays|56day ago
>I don’t disagree with the characterization of ICE officers as racist thugs
50% of Border Patrol agents are Latino. Believing the delusion that they're racist White rednecks is buying into propaganda.
dragonwriter|55day ago
> >I don’t disagree with the characterization of ICE officers as racist thugs
> 50% of Border Patrol agents are Latino.
Even if that was true, and relevant to their capacity to be racist thugs, Border Patrol is a unit of Customs and Border Protection (CBP)—and CBP is a different entity from ICE, at the same organizational level within the Department of Homeland Security—so it would still be a non-sequitur.
anonfordays|47day ago
>Even if that was true
It is true.
>Border Patrol is a unit of Customs and Border Protection (CBP)—and CBP is a different entity from ICE, at the same organizational level within the Department of Homeland Security—so it would still be a non-sequitur.
Not at all, 30% of ICE agents are Latino, and we were told Border Patrol and ICE are White redneck neo-Nazi racist thugs. Surprise, that delusion is objectively false given these figures. QED.
anonfordays|55day ago
[flagged]
heavyset_go|55day ago
50% of the Latino population in the US are White Hispanic solely or in combination.
The idea that only "white rednecks" can be racist certainly is interesting.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_Hispanic_and_Latino_Amer...
Whoppertime|53day ago
That reminds me of the California Recall vote. Larry Elder being called the Black Face of White Supremacy.
anonfordays|47day ago
>The idea that only "white rednecks" can be racist certainly is interesting.
Yes it is. Thanks to delusional beliefs: https://www.nas.org/blogs/article/where_did_we_get_the_idea_...
newAccount2025|55day ago
Are you suggesting all racists are White rednecks? Racist systems are capable of absorbing contributions from all kinds of people. Whiteness has repeatedly expanded over time.
anonfordays|47day ago
>Are you suggesting all racists are White rednecks?
Leftist have suggested and stated that only White people can be racist.
>Whiteness has repeatedly expanded over time.
Unscientific term.
https://www.nas.org/blogs/article/where_did_we_get_the_idea_...
snapplebobapple|56day ago
Please follow your convictions so you can be removed from the internet and placed in jail for a decade or two once you are processed through the legal system and found guilty of assaulting a police officer. The internet will be better off without your calls to violence.
KingMob|55day ago
Slowly running out of alternatives, unfortunately.
"Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable." - JFK
mystraline|55day ago
Absolutely.
Violence does solve things, but also can make for an immediate 'Very Bad Time'.
Police use violence. Military uses violence. Difference is state-monopoly or not. To say violence doesn't work would be to say the police and military don't work - and they do.
Anybody calling on violent means should absolutely call upon peaceful means first, secondly, and more. Violence should only be after all peaceful means have been tried.
Its better to win by peaceful means, than by exertion of violence. And, violence is no guarantee of winning. And even if you do win, can still be pyrric, in which everyone loses.
Tl; dr. Be wary of people casually calling for violence. They're either a state actor, dumb, or both.
Whoppertime|53day ago
That's why Donald Trump's electoral victory stopped a violent revolution
giraffe_lady|56day ago
They are officers and they are racist mercenaries.
This is not a new force, they have no new powers. They didn't need to hire new people willing to perform these actions nor train them how to do so.
If you haven't considered this before it should hit you like a hammer to the forehead: where are the resignations? Where are the "good cops" we keep hearing about, what are they doing?
The other federal, state, and local law enforcement officers that are assisting in these actions, where is their principled refusal to violate their oath to uphold the constitution? What statements are their powerful and normally very vocal unions making about all this?
hatradiowigwam|56day ago
Their "powerful and normally very vocal unions" are saying /nothing/, because the union's overall goal (by their messaging and their members messaging) is to increase and sustain additional hourly pay and increase the wages for said pay.
There is no effective system of checks and balances, or this entire discussion would be moot. Civilian solutions(like ICEBlock and friends) are a whimper of a response compared to the lethal and aggressive actions of these LEOs. Typically entrenched groups(like LEOs) can not be talked or reasoned with into changing their position. Those changes in position come from leverage (ie, your supervisor is replaced or leveraged with the threat of replacement), or direct aggression.
As an example, certain villains took issue with these systems and mounted their own lethal response. We are /still/ talking about these individuals because of how riotously effective their actions were at illuminating and mitigating the perceived problems. Whether your talking about Ted K, or Timmy M....they are examples of people who took action to correct a perceived problem. Right or wrong, every reader of this post knows who they are, what they did, and why they did it. Until something of equal magnitude opposes the authoritarian problem of the day(ie ICE), the status quo will continue.
edit: typo
account42|55day ago
There are no resignations because they signed up to enforce the law and that's what they are doing now. That you have slurped up propaganda painting that as racists doesn't make it so.
newdee|56day ago
[flagged]
lupusreal|56day ago
Inciting violence can be protected by the First Ammendment if it isn't inciting imminent illegal action. His post is probably protected. If he were pointing at a guy and saying "We should lynch that ICE agent right now!", that wouldn't be protected speech.
FWIW, I don't even remotely agree with what he's saying.
account42|55day ago
This is true but HN does not claim to be a free speech site and instead is focused on interesting discussion. There are many things that are legally protected speech that will get you reprimanded or outright banned here.
lupusreal|55day ago
"Shouldn't be allowed" is ambiguous.
heavyset_go|56day ago
To add to this, the speech needs to be imminent, specific and actionable.
For example, "People should [bad thing] ICE agents" would be protected speech as it isn't imminent, specific or actionable.
tiahura|56day ago
[flagged]
velcrovan|56day ago
My wife was just naturalized as a US Citizen a year ago. You can bet she doesn't want to be anywhere near that mess. Her legal status provides her basically no protection from any ICE rookie with a chip on his shoulder.
esseph|56day ago
For those of you not paying attention, just posting a response like this can make you and your family a target.
This is not the US I knew.
anonfordays|56day ago
[flagged]
esseph|55day ago
US resumes visas for foreign students but demands access to social media accounts
https://ground.news/article/us-visa-restrictions-on-ecowas-s...
Note: 565 linked sources in that
You can easily tell when someone isn't asking something in Good Faith just by the first couple of search engine hits. Dead giveaway.
account42|55day ago
This is not an example of the scenario esseph described. Foreign students are by definition not US citizens and thus don't have any inherent right to be in the country.
overfeed|55day ago
Now Google for keywords Trump + denaturalization, filtering for results in the last 2 weeks. Or what he said about "deporting" citizens by birth since before then.
Aside: limiting the conversation to things that have already happened is uninteresting to me; you skate where the puck is going. One can easily do this by applying the administrations internal logic, i.e. what they said/did in the past, and what the ultimate goal/result was, and mapping that to what they are doing now to extrapolate future outcomes.
anonfordays|54day ago
>Now Google for keywords Trump + denaturalization, filtering for results in the last 2 weeks
Lots of links to fake news sites and Russian propaganda outlets. Not sources.
defrost|54day ago
The June 11 Justice Dept Memo on wedge applications for "5. Prioritizing Denaturalization"
https://www.justice.gov/civil/media/1404046/dl
with some discussion at: DOJ Opens Door To Stripping Citizenship Over Politics - https://talkingpointsmemo.com/news/doj-opens-door-to-strippi...
anonfordays|53day ago
The justice.gov site literally states:
The Department of Justice may institute civil proceedings to revoke a person’s United States citizenship if an individual either “illegally procured” naturalization or procured naturalization by “concealment of a material fact or by willful misrepresentation.” 8 U.S.C. § 1451(a).
margalabargala|55day ago
[flagged]
account42|55day ago
This is not a valid argument because there is no way to disprove it. If you was so easy to find an example that actually holds up under scrutiny you would be able to present one yourself.
margalabargala|54day ago
It wasn't an argument, just a response to someone saying something "sounds like" something.
anonfordays|54day ago
>It wasn't an argument
Clearly.
>just a response to someone saying something "sounds like" something.
It was a response asking for sources, sources you still don't have. You're projecting about being triggered and still don't have sources to bring. Sad.
margalabargala|54day ago
Sounds like you and they are equally competent at finding sources. It's not hard if you try.
I don't need to enable anyone's laziness.
anonfordays|53day ago
>Sounds like you and they are equally competent at finding sources.
Sounds like you're failing at basic reading comprehension, which isn't surprising. I am not the one who made the claim, I do not have to supply sources.
>It's not hard if you try.
Trying doesn't make a difference: the sources don't exist.
>I don't need to enable anyone's laziness.
You have too much laziness of your own, I get it. You're also insanely triggered by my basic asks (since they are heretical apparently) which similarly doesn't surprise me. Any reply from you is an admission that you're triggered and don't have any sources.
margalabargala|53day ago
That's a lot of effort you spent trying to move goalposts to try to project your insecurities. :-)
Can I try?
Any reply from you is an admission that you're triggered and don't have any intelligence. Also failing to reply is an admission of the same.
anonfordays|47day ago
>That's a lot of effort you spent trying to move goalposts to try to project your insecurities. :-)
Goalposts haven't moved, you've just missed.
>Can I try?
No you may not, so the rest of your post is disregarded. Bet you're seething over opening yourself up to that.
Any reply from you is an admission that you're triggered and don't have any intelligence. Also failing to reply is an admission of the same.
I won.
margalabargala|47day ago
It's pretty sad that you decided to come back to this a week later, and it's also telling that the majority of your comment is just things I wrote.
Guess we're done now that you've decided you win though. "I'm bleeding, making me the victor!"
anonfordays|47day ago
>It's pretty sad that you decided to come back to this a week later
Not at all, I have a real life and don't log in every day and furiously click refresh and go through all the comment threads unlike you because you're so triggered.
>and it's also telling that the majority of your comment is just things I wrote.
Modern day Sherlock you are.
>Guess we're done now that you've decided you win though. "I'm bleeding, making me the victor!"
Glad you admit defeat.
margalabargala|47day ago
No, some of us just have apps that let us know when someone replies.
Whether you were logged in or not, the decision to reply to this thread after a week was the sad bit. But I'm here for you to let off whatever steam you need.
I can admit defeat more if that will help you? Or should I try to give you an opportunity to say "triggering intensifies"? Or something else? Just let me know what will let you feel better.
anonfordays|47day ago
>No, some of us just have apps that let us know when someone replies.
Sad and cringe.
>Whether you were logged in or not, the decision to reply to this thread after a week was the sad bit.
Translation: "You're not as terminally online as I am and I think that's sad."
>I can admit defeat more if that will help you? Or should I try to give you an opportunity to say "triggering intensifies"? Or something else?
No need to admit more, it's done. You replyguying is more than enough admission.
>Just let me know what will let you feel better.
You coping and seething is enough. Sad.
margalabargala|47day ago
I'm glad you're getting so much out of this. Would you like me to use a "can I" again as a rhetorical device so you can reply "No you may not" again? I promise I'll be devastated.
anonfordays|55day ago
[flagged]
margalabargala|55day ago
Don't confuse my declining to enable your laziness with evidence you are correct.
anonfordays|55day ago
[flagged]
margalabargala|55day ago
[flagged]
anonfordays|56day ago
Her legal status is that she's a US citizen, she has the same "protection from any ICE rookie" as anyone else who is a US citizen naturalized or natural-born.
ocschwar|55day ago
The president of the United States is literally fighting in court to get the authority to treat natural born newborns as aliens even though the plain letter of the United States Constitution says these babies are citizens.
In an environment like that, legal status doesn't mean shit.
anonfordays|53day ago
>even though the plain letter of the United States Constitution says these babies are citizens
Their argument is that the "plain letter of the United States Constitution" doesn't say that explicitly: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Birthright_citizenship_in_th...
Plenty of examples where birthright citizenship didn't apply in the past (and currently don't apply, such as American Samoa
immibis|51day ago
Well, it does say that explicitly. Them arguing the sky is green doesn't make the sky actually green. If they win a court case by arguing the sky is green, that says something about the court, not about the reality.
anonfordays|47day ago
>Well, it does say that explicitly.
No, it says this explicitly:
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.
They're arguing that the sky is blue, which the sky actually is.
>If they win a court case by arguing the sky is green, that says something about the court, not about the reality.
If they win a court case by arguing the sky is blue, and half of the political establishment rejects that, that says something about that half of the political establishment, not about the reality.
ocschwar|53day ago
Yes, we've had decades of assholes trying to worm exceptions to the 14th Amendment. But read the plain letter of it.
anonfordays|47day ago
The plain letter of it states:
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.
lokar|55day ago
She has the same abstract rights.
What people care about is reality. Currently the reality is you can be subject to arbitrary detention and deportation with no due process, regardless of you rights.
velcrovan|55day ago
Right — in the absence of due process, none.
anonfordays|55day ago
Right — in the absence of due process, none, the same as it applies to anyone regardless of status.
velcrovan|55day ago
Agreed!
ocschwar|55day ago
Unlawful presence on US soil is a civil offense. It's literally the same class of offense as a parking ticket.
Are there any other civil offenses that you think should be dealt with using masked police and concentration camps?
refurb|54day ago
This is a very disingenuous question for a number of reasons.
- Whether unlawful presence is a civil or criminal law, countries should control who enters the country.
- Masked police seem like a reasonable response to doxxing of police officers? It’s not like the identity of these police aren’t know to the legal system and lawyers of the accused.
- Calling immigration detention “concentration camps” makes no sense. It’s just meaningless rhetoric as detention bears no resemblance to actual concentration camps.
- Most importantly, the US enforcing its own immigrations laws does not make it an outlier - it was an outlier when it ignored its own immigration laws. Every other country I’ve visited rather strictly enforces its immigration laws including speedy deportation of any encountered who doesn’t have permission to be in the country. If anything the headlines should be “US joins rest of world in enforcing its own immigration laws”
kashunstva|54day ago
> Calling immigration detention “concentration camps” makes no sense.
I don’t think you are paying attention to the abject cruelty in the administration’s own discourse about these facilities. The U.S. president describing with barely restrained delight his anticipation that escapees from the new facility in Florida would be eaten by alligators. I suppose if called out on it, he’d claim it’s a joke. I’m sure many regimes in history had their own euphemistic terms for facilities such as this; but purposeful cruelty is a cardinal feature of concentration camps in my view.
refurb|53day ago
> The U.S. president describing with barely restrained delight his anticipation that escapees from the new facility in Florida would be eaten by alligators
Do you have a specific quote you can share? I haven't seen what you're referring to.
And I guess I think back to facilities like Alcatraz. It was created such that anyone trying to escape would likely drown. Is that the same thing you're talking about?
foldr|53day ago
You can find this by googling "trump allegator escape".
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/videos/cdxlld0dgxwo
refurb|52day ago
I don’t see “barely contained glee at immigrants being eaten by alligators”, I see an attempt at making a funny comment about escaping alligators by not running in a straight line.
foldr|52day ago
That seems like a paraphrase of the same thing? He’s joking about prisoners trying to escape the camp and being eaten by alligators.
ocschwar|54day ago
> - Whether unlawful presence is a civil or criminal law, countries should control who enters the country.
Yes. And it's disingenuous to call for brutal police tactics with enormous collateral damage for something the letter of the law regards as the equivalent of a parking ticket.
> - Masked police seem like a reasonable response to doxxing of police officers?
Fuck. No.
> Calling immigration detention “concentration camps” makes no sense.
When they are meant for detaining people who are literally not guilty of any crime, and they are deliberately designed to feature inhumane conditions, it makes every sense.
> - - Most importantly, the US enforcing its own immigrations laws does not make it an outlier
I'll ask the same question again: which civil offenses do you think should also be addressed with secret police and concentration camps?
The EU is stricter with immigration than the US. But it does not use secret police and concentration camps.
refurb|54day ago
You're not really arguing in good faith when your response is "Fuck. No."
> The EU is stricter with immigration than the US. But it does not use secret police and concentration camps.
You don't think the police in Europe sometimes hide the identity of their police from onlookers when required? I'm pretty sure they do.
Do you also think Europe doesn't detain people who are in their country illegally? I'm pretty sure they do. They are even creating "return hubs", which are basically detention centers outside their own country which hold immigrants until they can be returned to their home or a third country.
pasc1878|54day ago
> You don't think the police in Europe sometimes hide the identity of their police from onlookers when required? I'm pretty sure they do.
Yes in the UK they do. However this is breaking the law and those who do this have been punished.
ocschwar|54day ago
> You're not really arguing in good faith when your response is "Fuck. No."
If you don't already know that keeping the name & badge number visible is the most important part of proper policing, and established as such by the world's first police force and its founder, Robert Peel, there's no point arguing much of anything with you.
It's literally the difference between a police force and a Geheime Staat Polizei.
refurb|54day ago
> If you don't already know that keeping the name & badge number visible is the most important part of proper policing
But clearly there are exceptions. You can even read about them on European police websites.
https://handbookgermany.de/en/police
"In particular, criminal police officers also work in "civilian" clothing and therefore are visually unrecognisable as the police force. They often have to hide their identity, for example, to observe people or to enforce arrest warrants."
ocschwar|54day ago
RIght, because a detective going undercover to gather evidence means it's perfectly okay for masked thugs to pop out of unmarked vehicles and grab people off the streets.
Dude, WTF
refurb|53day ago
Detectives are "masked thugs to pop out of unmarked vehicles and grab people off the streets".
You've never seen a takedown of street level drug dealers? Unmarked cars, plainclothes police, grab everyone off the street?
I'm really trying to understand what specifically you find objectionable. Is it the fact that ICE isn't in uniform? Or that they wear masks? Or that they arrest people?
ocschwar|53day ago
> Detectives are "masked thugs to pop out of unmarked vehicles and grab people off the streets".
The moment they make an actual arrest (which is rare, since they prefer to maintain their cover), they identify and are held accountable for how they do it.
Something ICE is not doing.
computerthings|53day ago
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Urd-|55day ago
>Unlawful presence on US soil is a civil offense. It's literally the same class of offense as a parking ticket.
Overstaying a visa is a civil offense, 'improper entry' e.g. jumping the border is criminal.
ocschwar|55day ago
Yes. Jumping the border is a misdemeanor if you don't immediately self report to request asylum.
But the majority of people getting rounded up right now are for unlawful presence.
And a lot of them have no idea that their presence was marked unlawful until ICE gets them. There's a reason civil offenses are supposed to be handled with proper notification and court summonses instead of this shit.
jakeydus|56day ago
I'll take immigrants in my neighborhood over ice agents in my neighborhood every day of the week.
account42|55day ago
You can campaign for an amendment to give up American's right to self-determination if you want that but you don't get to just decide to do that on your own.
ocschwar|55day ago
The "right of self determination" does not exist in the US constitution or law. It's a rhetorical slogan coined by Woodrow Wilson, and his idea of "self determination" came from growing up as a racist southerner who felt the South should have been allowed to self-determine a continuation of chattel slavery.
How this has anything to do with the immigrants in my city trying to live normal lives, perhaps you can explain.
immibis|55day ago
Sorry, I don't think I follow this comment. Which part of kidnapping people is the kidnappee's self-determination?
mbrumlow|55day ago
[flagged]
mystraline|55day ago
The laws themselves are highly political, and ALWAYS on the side of capital.
If I steal $100 from the till at my employer, they call the cops and I'm arrested.
If my employer forges timecards to pay me $100 less, its a civil matter. If the state wants to, they might help, but likely not.
Police can kill people by simply saying "I thought I saw them pull a weapon", and the consequence is paid time off with an investigation.
Citizens killing in self-defense have regularly been tried for murder since they didn't do every possible thing before lethal response.
Congress themselves engage in massive amounts of insider trading, all completely 'legal' cause congress refuses to make laws that apply to everyone.
Yet someone in the public gets word of a secret or upcoming announcement, and the SEC comes down on you like a ton of bricks.
Face it - this country's real problem is that we are the 3rd world corrupt shithole we think of those 'other' lesser nations.
chii|55day ago
> And laws generally should be enforced.
what about the law where people get due process, right to an appeal, and adequate legal representation?
mbrumlow|55day ago
Oh. The cry of due process.
Do you even know what the process is? Or even have a clue how many people deported had a process but it resulted in an outcome they and maybe you did not like?
I don’t have time to investigate everybody, but of the sampling I did all had orders active to be deported.
The part most of you are missing is there was a process. And failure to comply is what results in people showing up at your house and putting you on a plane.
This is no different than if I murder somebody and and escape after the trail before going to jail. 10 years later I am at a coffee shop. Maybe I have a good job a wife a new born and I have been a functional member of society. You better bet that I’ll be arrested and the Jane to go to jail once somebody finds out.
mensetmanusman|55day ago
We would need to 100x the amount of lawyers to deal with the huge pulse that was always going to occur when this aspect of law was going to be enforced.
jawilson2|55day ago
Cool, so no more due process because it's inconvenient.
Hey, you look kinda brown...I think you're an illegal. Or, you posted a funny picture of a political figure on Facebook. Off to El Salvador with you! No, you don't get a day in court, I don't care if you and your parents and your grandparents were all born in the US, you are being sent to a torture camp in a country you've never been to because I THINK you are illegal.
See how that works? Due process is a RIGHT FOR EVERY FUCKING PERSON BECAUSE THAT IS HOW YOU PROVE YOU ARE INNOCENT, YOU FUCKING FASCIST. You CANNOT bypass THE fundamental part of the justice process because you're making shit up and want to deploy tan people with autism awareness tattoos, or people who think maybe shooting hungry kids in Gaza is bad.
zitsarethecure|55day ago
ICE just got a massive boost in funding, so the money is obviously there to pay for it.
Mashimo|55day ago
In for example Germany they have raids on workspaces to check for illegal workers as well. But the "police" (customs officer?) are not masked and also check the employer. They can punish them for too long work hours or hiring "illegals".
What I have seen of ICE in the media it feels a bit one sided.
zdragnar|55day ago
Employers who knowingly employ illegal workers in the US also get in trouble. However, we also have a system called e-verify which handles checking the employability of people for them. It's relatively easily gamed via identity fraud.
dpkirchner|55day ago
> Employers who knowingly employ illegal workers in the US also get in trouble.
If this were true -- if they were actually punished (eg sent to prison for N years) -- the whole problem would solve itself overnight.
vel0city|55day ago
> Employers who knowingly employ illegal workers in the US also get in trouble
They might get a slap on the wrist fine that probably doesn't even negate the profits off the illegal labor.
> However, we also have a system called e-verify
The majority of states do not require e-verify for most jobs. Many states don't have any requirements for e-verify and a few only have limited requirements.
ocschwar|55day ago
No. They don't get in trouble. They could, but they don't.
rat87|54day ago
They don't. They get elected president despite committing crimes
frob|55day ago
Authoritarian states often function via selective enforcement of laws. We see that here. They will use any angle, any technicality to remove someone. Lived here for almost 50 years and are a productive member of your community but you're on a stayed order of release pending you check in regularly and you do so? Sorry, we changed our minds and are deporting you because legally we can. Please come with us in the unmarked car. [0]
Tried to kill police officers while trying to overturn an election on behalf of the dear leader? We'll pardon you and give you a job on a task force about weaponization of government. [1]
The law will be applied to the harshest extent to those Trump and his ilk see as enemies and will be warped in favor of his current friends.
Or, as a Preuvian facist president put it: "For my friends, anything; for my enemies, the law!"
[0] https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/jul/03/ice-iran-don... [1] https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/jul/02/january-6-ri...
newAccount2025|55day ago
I agree with the meat of what you say, but is selective enforcement really so unique to authoritarian governments?
In the US, even before recent administrations, we’ve long had evidence of uneven application of laws. Police love power. Criminalizing more stuff gives them more power to decide who to target.
Look how the war on drugs and policies like stop and frisk have targeted black folks. Even innocuous sounding things like seatbelt laws give police the ability to criminalize “driving while black.”
Meanwhile we’ve long ignored white collar crimes like wage theft. You know rich families aren’t going to be affected by anti-abortion laws.
My heavily tattooed White friends and I recently ignored no trespassing to swim in a nice river in TX. We agreed that if the cops came, I (non tattooed, White) would do the talking.
Anyway, the police have never been interested in holding the rich and powerful to account.
ang_cire|55day ago
The US has been authoritarian from the get-go.
Chattel slavery- direct, constant, and complete control over one's life and death, and the reduction of the person to mere property, is essentially the most authoritarian institution there can be.
whattheheckheck|54day ago
Yeah read chomskys Consequences of Capitalism and see how the "always has been" meme is alive and well
ang_cire|53day ago
Not a huge Chomsky fan. He calls himself an anarchist, but if you pin him down on specifics he turns into a minarchist rhetorically, and a Social Democrat in practical matters.
He's similar to Lenin, imo, in that he advocates using the State to prepare to dismantle the State, all while gassing up the things that the State provides (e.g. social protections). There's never anything more than a vague promise to move on from that in the future, which is exactly the same as the single-party-State USSR.
People mistake Capitalism as the driver for authoritarianism, but Capitalism is just the means to gain power/wealth in our current society, with hierarchical government being the framework within which Capitalism operates. Greed is the driver, and greed is intrinsic to humans. But greed without a framework to amass power (like a State) can only operate on an individual level.
michtzik|54day ago
For the reader curious why the woman in [0] didn't get permanent residency via marriage:
> Milne was divorced from the nonimmigrant student she married prior to 1983. She then married a U.S. citizen but we found, in our above-said unpublished opinion, that she had admitted that it was a marriage of convenience. After another divorce, she married her current husband, a marriage that is uncontested as "bona fide." Her request for legal permanent resident status based on this marriage was denied under INA § 204(c) which precludes approval based on even an admittedly good-faith union if the petitioner had previously contracted an improper marriage.
ocschwar|55day ago
Perhaps you should read the law. "Unlawful presence in the United States" is a civil offense, just like a parking ticket.
What other civil offenses you think should be enforced with secret police and concentration camps?
brandonmenc|54day ago
You can be arrested for not paying your parking tickets.
ocschwar|54day ago
And you can be arrested for overstaying a visa. It used to be that after a process that does not include being swiped off the streets by masked thugs. Now we're doing it this way.
throw101010|55day ago
You need a refresher on what police state means:
> a political unit characterized by repressive governmental control of political, economic, and social life usually by an arbitrary exercise of power by police
Simply enforcing laws is not "becoming a police state", the current administration is doing far worse than this, and is actually blatantly and arbitrarily breaking laws according to multiple courts in various jurisdictions.
This includes ICE which has become a tool of this police state by deporting people (including in a case a US citizen, a two-year-old girl) without due process.
mycall|55day ago
The trouble with laws is two-fold: poorly designed legislation is easily abused by those who enforce it, and regulatory capture often prevents necessary changes to existing laws.
immibis|55day ago
A police state does not mean "a state where laws are enforced." The government is not establishing a police state because it's enforcing laws. It's establishing a police state because it's establishing a police state. But I suspect you already knew that, because I've seen comments like this one far too many times to continue assuming good faith.
Spooky23|55day ago
This ice stuff is more than that. The law and order stuff is more about getting law and order focused people like you onboard.
You should read about how Mussolini came to power and consolidated control. We’re not building a $49B paramilitary force and database to find typos in 50 year old naturalization documents to deport their descendants for law and order. ICE is something else.
rat87|54day ago
If we had laws Trump would be in jail. If we respected immigration laws Trump would be in jail. Since he he's in the white house I don't think we can saw the US takes following the law very seriously
catlover76|55day ago
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marssaxman|56day ago
Navigation apps have long been reporting police activity along with other aspects of traffic you might want to avoid.
Interacting with cops will never make your day better, so it's only sensible to avoid them if you can.
frontfor|56day ago
> Interacting with cops will never make your day better, so it's only sensible to avoid them if you can.
This is a very nice way to put it. In investing terms, the benefits are limited but the risks are severe. With enough interactions you’re more likely to have experienced the downside.
chrisjj|55day ago
>> will never make your day better
> the benefits are limited
So, which is it?
jdiff|50day ago
This is a really weak gotcha. One person is stating an absolute, the other is adding nuance but largely agreeing that the nuance doesn't affect the takeaways.
datpuz|56day ago
Consider yourself lucky that you've never had to call the cops as a victim. People forget that cops also save lives.
acdha|56day ago
Nobody forgets that, it’s just that abuse and misconduct sour that. In many communities, people have to weigh the odds that reporting a crime will lead to more problems for them than it will help, with consequences ranging from lack of help to theft to rape or even being shot by mistake. American police departments have largely set themselves above the law, so the average person doesn’t know whether they’re getting a good cop who is genuinely trying to help them or the bad cop whose behavior has been covered up by their fellow officers for years. Anyone concerned about public opinion of police should be focused on accountability and oversight to rebuild public trust.
AlexandrB|56day ago
Let's be real. For all their flaws, US cops are some of the least corrupt in the world. There are places where you better be ready to fork over cash every time you encounter the police.
afavour|56day ago
> US cops are some of the least corrupt in the world
I don't think that's a good metric to judge them by (I also don't think it's true if you compare to first world countries).
Sure, third world countries have police forces that are more corrupt. But US cops are corrupt in a wide variety of ways and we should be very clear about how unacceptable that is. It doesn't matter if someone somewhere else in the world is worse.
jvergeldedios|56day ago
I've never understood the "be happy you're not in authoritarian Russia" type of argument for papering over the shortcomings of circumstances here in the US. Like, ok? Why are we comparing ourselves to places that are worse? Shouldn't we be striving to make things better relative to our own ideals and standards?
babypuncher|56day ago
It's like any economic discussion I have when visiting my parents. I'll advocate for something every other developed nation has, like paid paternity leave or a sane healthcare system, and they immediately start talking about communist East Germany like that's somehow relevant.
Yeah, we know cops in Mexico are corrupt. Our police force has a very different problem set that we need to solve. Pointing out a different problem in a different country contributes nothing.
jakeydus|56day ago
yOu LiVE iN sOCiEtY YeT yOu CritIciZe SoCiETY
hellojesus|55day ago
> I'll advocate for something every other developed nation has, like paid paternity leave or a sane healthcare system
Paid parental leave creates both deadweight loss and moral hazard. It also tends to reduce labor inversely proportional to labor's cost, with the largest reduction in labor hitting highly skilled, sub middle-aged females. This should be obvious as it lowers the expected productivity of workers, moreso when you extend parental leave to family leave and allow for the care of ailing elders. The argument for it seems to hinge on the dollars allowing greater workforce participation, but I'm not sold that greater participation with lower expected productivity is greater than fewer productive workers.
Why should I have to pay for Debbie across the country to have a kid? Or Fred across the state?
Regarding healthcare, it's well known that decreasing prices increase demand. While some healthcare demand is totally inelastic (injuries, cancer, etc.), the front line pcp interactions are elastic. Compound in people's willingness to decrease self care since they don't have to pay for future healthcare, and you've increased the rate of inelastic demand instances in the future, increasing demand. Now consider that prices would no longer be dictated by free markets, and now we have trouble with price discovery, with the power seemingly going to the single consumer, so it's likely treatments will be underpaid, which may lead to fewer practicioners and fewer innovations. Maybe I'm wrong... I haven't thought about heath economics in a long while. My preference would be to see a forced decoupling of healthcare provided as work benefits such that everyone had to purchase it on the open market (even if that loss of negotiating freedom between private parties irks me).
HaZeust|55day ago
>"Why should I have to pay for Debbie across the country to have a kid? Or Fred across the state?"
Because they pay for the same benefits you get, that they might not reap as often as you. That's the foundation of socialization, everyone's resources - that they fork over from taxation - is shared for various activities and settlements that give as many individuals (past, present and emerging) as much of an acceptable baseline of living as it can.
To be sure, the goal of socialization is also not usually to make everyone rich or give immense quality of life, it's to make sure everyone has the same "lowest" bar for things that members of society deem as essential, and that the bar set as "lowest" is as humane and efficient as possible.
RHSeeger|55day ago
>> "Why should I have to pay for Debbie across the country to have a kid? Or Fred across the state?"
> Because they pay for the same benefits you get, that they might not reap as often as you.
I'd set the reason as even more basic than that. Children are absolutely essential the future of society. There is literally no way to argue that is not true.
Since they are essential to society, we should be working on ways to support them; as a society. Now, this can be argued against. But I feel pretty strongly that "I do not think it is important for us, as a society, to works towards goals that beneficial to society" is a fairly brain-dead stance. You can argue about the best uses for _available_ money; but to argue that's a matter of priorities, not "is it a valid goal".
hellojesus|55day ago
I think my most basic argument is that society is the result of many individuals' participation. It should be viewed as emergemt of individuals working together and not as an organism in-and-of itself.
To that end, I think it is fully appropriate for the society to collapse if individuals within it determine to forgo children. We shouldn't redistribute from some to others purely to ensure society's continuum. Instead, individuals should maximize their utility, and in doing so create society.
These redistributions are not pareto optimal and have major deadweight losses and introduce moral hazard.
RHSeeger|55day ago
> To that end, I think it is fully appropriate for the society to collapse if individuals within it determine to forgo children. We shouldn't redistribute from some to others purely to ensure society's continuum. Instead, individuals should maximize their utility, and in doing so create society.
We have an entire system of laws we put in place to force people to increase their utility within society.
What your statement is effectively arguing is... to go with anarchy; that we should not have rules that change human behavior, because human behavior _should_ be to maximize utility.
I think it's pretty well accepted that "just let everyone do whatever they want" isn't a viable system for a society.
hellojesus|55day ago
You still need constraints. The law should exist to protect private property. The government should collect taxes to fund the legal system and public goods.
But I absolutely agree that the government shouldn't do much, if anything, more than that. Incentives to shape behavior should be extremely limited, because the government is the only entity that is allowed to force involuntarily transactions.
Voluntary transactions ensure that the transacting parties have a pareto optimal outcome. This is what should be maximized, even at the detriment of the longevity of society itself.
immibis|55day ago
Why should the government do exactly the things that benefit society, benefit you, and don't benefit Debbie, but not the things that benefit society, benefit Debbie and don't benefit you? This is just disguised selfishness.
I'm not deep enough in the theory to know whether "voluntary transactions create a Pareto-optimal outcome" is a true statement. I suspect not, because of information asymmetry and so on.
Pareto-optimal is also kind of an arbitrary stopping point - you chose it because it supports your argument, not because it's actually a good one. If it was possible to make everyone 1000 times richer (in physical resources) but at the cost of making Elon Musk just another average person, that wouldn't be a Pareto move because it would decrease Elon's status, but it would still be extremely good. Why shouldn't we aim for that?
hellojesus|55day ago
> Why should the government do exactly the things that benefit society, benefit you, and don't benefit Debbie, but not the things that benefit society, benefit Debbie and don't benefit you? This is just disguised selfishness
I want the government to provide the things that benefit Debbie and me equally, and only those things that benefit us equally.
> If it was possible to make everyone 1000 times richer (in physical resources) but at the cost of making Elon Musk just another average person, that wouldn't be a Pareto move because it would decrease Elon's status, but it would still be extremely good. Why shouldn't we aim for that?
How are you defining good? The same resources may be more equitably distributed, but ultimately the same fixed resources exist, and now poor Elon is far worse off. My point of search for pareto optimality is exactly that we should avoid this outcome because it's not better. Following it to it's logical conclusion, redistributing all wealth until it was exactly equally divided amongst the population would produce the most good outcome.
immibis|54day ago
There's also an extremely wide variety of possible Pareto-optimal outcomes and I should have said this sooner.
Communism is Pareto-optimal (both the utopian kind and the USSR kind). Authoritarian dictatorship is Pareto-optimal. Hitler's Germany was Pareto-optimal. Democracy is Pareto-optimal. Whatever America's doing right now is Pareto-optimal. Pretty much everything that ever arises in practice is Pareto-optimal.
Imagine a society with only two people - me and you - where I am constantly stomping my boot on your face and enjoying it. This would be Pareto-optimal, because in order for you to stop having your face stomped on, you'd have to make me stop enjoying it and that wouldn't be a Pareto improvement. Would you really argue that in this situation, it's immoral for you to stop me from stomping on your face, because it's not a Pareto improvement?
> I want the government to provide the things that benefit Debbie and me equally, and only those things that benefit us equally.
So literally nothing. You want no government. Please acknowledge that. Property rights don't benefit you and Debbie equally, so you don't want those either.
> How are you defining good? The same resources may be more equitably distributed, but ultimately the same fixed resources exist
No, I'm talking about everyone having 1000 times more resources except for Elon. The total amount of resources would increase about 999.999 times or so, since everyone would have 1000 times more except for Elon who would have the same amount as everyone else (less than he does now). With regards to Pareto-optimality, this would be very much a "stop stomping your boot on my face" scenario.
hellojesus|42day ago
> Would you really argue that in this situation, it's immoral for you to stop me from stomping on your face, because it's not a Pareto improvement?
My comments were with regards to a system that enforces private property. To that end, having one's face stomped on involuntarily would be a violation of private property.
We could consider a system whereby one person has 100% of the fixed resources while the other has 0%. It's pareto optimal and maximally inequitable. My point is that it is wrong to take from the person with 100% to redistribute it to the person with 0%. But it would be pareto optimal if a voluntary trade occurs, and I also accept trades of duress to be voluntary (e.g., the person with 0% sells their body for a meal).
> You want no government. Please acknowledge that. Property rights don't benefit you and Debbie equally, so you don't want those either.
Public goods are defined as nonrivalous and nonexcludable. I want these (national defense). Enforcement of private property does violate the nonrivalous condition, but that service is still necessary to provide a system whereby private property exists.
> The total amount of resources would increase about 999.999 times or so, since everyone would have 1000 times more except for Elon who would have the same amount as everyone else (less than he does now).
The move to redistribute Elon's wealth breaks pareto optimality. All this does is move the gini coefficient to 0, but the total resources in the system are constant.
Damogran6|55day ago
"We're making accomodations for the disabled because, on average, 100% of the population is disabled at one time or another."
hellojesus|55day ago
I pay something like $150/month for private LTD insurance. All the government policies do is force everyone to participate with lower expected benefits. It would be more efficient for people to privately purchase it, where those who don't assume the risk of noncarry.
Damogran6|55day ago
I'm talking about ramps to public buildings and handicap accessible bathrooms. It's a public good that most people don't realize they're actually going to use at some point.
Everybody drives the same roads ("Why would I pay to maintain Smith Street? I've never driven on it?"), some people REALLY need a firefighter in an emergency.
hellojesus|55day ago
> I'm talking about ramps to public buildings and handicap accessible bathrooms.
To the extent these impact public buildings, I think this is a good thing. Just like I think public employers should not be allowed to discriminate based on age, race, etc.
But in both cases I would argue that private companies should not be held to the same standards.
Firefighters could arguably be a public good in that they are (approximately) nonrivalous and are definitely nonexcludable. In addition, fire fighting as a public good prevents the free rider problem that would likely exist with this service in the private market.
HaZeust|55day ago
Sounds like a pretty good policy to back to me. I’ll never understand people that want to take advantage of the foundations of society for themselves, then become rather churlish when its their turn to do the same for others.
hellojesus|55day ago
> that the bar set as "lowest" is as humane and efficient as possible
But by definition it is inefficient. Redistribution of money from Person A to Person B necessarily means Person A can't spend that money. If their optimal utility was to give that money to Person B, you wouldn't need such a policy governmentally.
Socialization makes sense for public goods, but healthcare and parental leave are both nonpublic.
As an annecdotal example, my state offers 12 weeks of parental leave. The maximum they are willing to pay is about $550/week. My company provides two weeks of paid leave. So for 10 weeks, I get the $550 from the state. But my w2 income is about 2k/week post tax, post 401k max. So I would forgo about $1400 a week to stay home. Daycare costs $550/week, so it's far better for me to work. But then I don't get the time off. And yet I still pay for others. This is an example of a terrible implementation of the already bad policy.
jakelazaroff|55day ago
No, it's definitely more efficient:
- Preventative care is far cheaper and more effective than reactive care (e.g. your dentist telling you to floss more in a particular area vs. filling a cavity vs. filling a root canal)
- Insurance is more effective at dispersing costs amongst a larger pool of people
- In a system like the US where insurance companies must negotiate prices with healthcare providers, larger pools have more bargaining power
hellojesus|55day ago
Yes, but what happens when you remove competition? Bargining power becomes absolute.
What happens when the single purchaser of healthcare refuses to pay an amount sufficient to raise supply to meet demand?
jakelazaroff|55day ago
There's no need to ask this as a hypothetical; simply look at the many, many countries that have successfully implemented such systems.
HaZeust|55day ago
I used to actually bat against universal healthcare for this reason, until COVID. The majority of private insurance companies are already doing that, here.
hellojesus|55day ago
I think this is mostly because the US system strips choice from the individual. I hypothesize the outcomes would be far better if we decoupled private health insurance from employment and allowed an oprn market for individual consumers.
jakelazaroff|55day ago
I have good news: the open market you're describing already exists! You are free to decline your employer's health insurance and sign up for a private plan at healthcare.gov.
hellojesus|54day ago
I know it exists, but there is no point to denying the employer provided plan unless one is substantially better off paying for out of pocket care plus the forgone income from the employer.
I would propose that we legislate the ban of employer provided healthcare benefits instead of making it universal.
jakelazaroff|54day ago
If you think the foregone income would make the difference, negotiate a raise from your employer in exchange for waiving their health insurance. Problem solved!
You can do what you're describing today, in this world. I think the fact that you don't is instructive.
vel0city|55day ago
Your anecdote values time with your newborn children at $0 and assumes people are physically able to immediately return to work after having a child. Seems like a pretty fundamental misunderstanding of life with a newborn.
It also ignores the societal costs of separating mothers and babies at such extremely young ages, reducing the rates of successful breastfeeding, and more.
It also assumes a considerably above-average income job.
Your username is hellojesus. Which action is more Christlike, providing for children and families or hoarding your wealth? Are we called to build bigger barns?
hellojesus|55day ago
I omitted the valuation of time with my child since it is hard to capture empirically.
> It also ignores the societal costs of separating mothers and babies at such extremely young ages, reducing the rates of successful breastfeeding, and more.
I'm not ignoring this cost. I'm stating that this cost should be borne by the individual that elected to have a child; e.g., lowered labor participation for some duration. The current US federal policy recognizes this by allowing unpaid leave for some duration.
> It also assumes a considerably above-average income job.
My point exactly. If above average compensation is actively harmed by this policy through deadweight loss, it means the policy is bad. This ignores the plethora of moral hazard that is introduced too. For example, how to we reconcile those laborers that take 12 weeks of paid taxpayer vacations only to promptly quit their job upon restarting it? These folks were always going to drop out of the labor force; now we've given them 12 weeks of free money redistributed from productive members.
> Your username is hellojesus. Which action is more Christlike, providing for children and families or hoarding your wealth? Are we called to build bigger barns?
Religious inclinations should direct followers how to execute behavior for themselves of a voluntary nature. It should not be used to dictate that everyone in society follow the same moral orders at the behest of a gun, which is what governmental policy does.
vel0city|55day ago
That you phrase it as a "vacation" and can't seem to put a dollar value on it but obviously less than a couple hundred dollars a week really points to the idea you have no idea what you're talking about.
I don't think anyone thinks 12 weeks with a newborn is a vacation, and yet most people probably wouldn't trade that 12 weeks with their newborn for anything in the world.
> I'm not ignoring this cost
You literally are ignoring the cost, as its not your given model. And its not a cost that will only be borne by the immediate caregivers, there are knock-on costs throughout society that will be felt by this change.
RHSeeger|55day ago
> Socialization makes sense for public goods, but healthcare and parental leave are both nonpublic.
Challenge. Healthcare is very much a public "good". The healthier evereyone is, the less we spend on healthcare overall. And the more we can accomplish overall. It works in everyone's benefit for society to be healthy.
The same way it works in everyone's benefit to have roads. We both want to get to the store/work/etc, and want healthy people to take care of those places. Neither one is a need, both are beneficial to everyone.
hellojesus|55day ago
There is a duality to providing healthcare as a public good, and that is preventive care through lifestyle choices may diminish. I'm not so careful as to not have four pops a day because the gov will pick up my diabetes tab. It's not clearly a net benefit to society.
For the record, I also suggest roads do not meet the definition of a public good.
collingreen|55day ago
The government subsidizes the birth rate because it has decided it IS a social good to have a constantly replenishing workforce (and potential military force). You may disagree with doing that but the argument that it isn't a social good doesn't match where those policies are coming from.
Moreover, this blinders-on-libertarianism "I should only pay for things directly for me" approach doesn't work if you pick and choose; you have to address it in context of the entire system (ie, you can't silently accept all the benefits and only shout about the individual moments you don't come out on top).
This society, for better or worse, pools money to do things at scale even when some of those things don't have the direct and equal benefit to every individual, instead aiming for a general good for all, stability, and a platform for everyone to have higher potential.
Yes, this gets abused in many ways and yes, it should always be constantly evaluated for effectively spending money.
However, your anecdotes about how the women or the poors get more than you in certain policies aren't impactful without looking at the whole which includes everything from the roads, breathable air, a widespread and capable workforce, a dynamic labor market, powerful financial markets, a justice system, fire departments, and lots of consumer protections so we can focus on growth instead of spending all our time trying to research if your bank is actually a scam or if the restaurant down the street washes their hands enough.
hellojesus|55day ago
My anecdote was used to show how the policy introduces moral hazard and deadweight loss. I would equally oppose it, as I do things like government mandated smoke-free restaurants, even if they benefitted me. I would moreso prefer that smoke-free restaurants exist because the market dictates it wants them by not transacting with smoke-partitioned restaurants.
> everything from the roads, breathable air, a widespread and capable workforce, a dynamic labor market, powerful financial markets, a justice system, fire departments, and lots of consumer protections so we can focus on growth instead of spending all our time trying to research if your bank is actually a scam or if the restaurant down the street washes their hands enough.
There is certainly some gain in being able to outsource research, but it is difficult to determine if it is a net good for society or the individual due to the moral hazard it generates. Not worrying about your bank being a scam allows actual banks to take on outsized risk and then not face any repercussions. It skews the appetite for risk that disproportionately benefits risk takers. For a recent example, see the Silicon Valley Bank failure, which the FEDs totally bailed out to prevent a collapse across many more banks, mostly because those banks overleant at low mortgage rates and couldn't sell the low interest notes at face value after the rise in interest rates, leading to a liquidity crisis.
Focusing on growth comes at a cost; lots of inefficies are introduced. Instead, we could focus on being efficient and low waste and allow the growth to come naturally.
vel0city|55day ago
> due to the moral hazard it generates.
The moral hazard of checks notes mothers breastfeeding and attending to their newborn children and husbands asssisting for a few weeks. Yes. What an absolutely upsidedown society we'll have if we allow such a thing to happen. Terrible. Need to ensure that doesn't happen.
And we need to reduce the rate of this happening to ensure checks notes wealthy people continue producing at high rates to profit the even wealthier.
That so many people have such mindsets and continue to wonder why our birthrates are dropping is astounding.
Wake up buddy. Keep drawing these lines. See where they go. I guess we'll both be dead though, so it doesn't matter.
immibis|55day ago
The people who say they don't want the government to help pay for raising children are the same people who complain about low birth rates. You can't eat your cake and still have it. Would you like sustainable population or would you like low taxes? You can't have both.
Sensible government programs aren't deadweight loss - they are net gains - although a lot of what governments do, especially what the US government does, is not sensible. For example, you pay taxes to have property rights, and I don't think you think that is deadweight loss.
Meanwhile your concern about "why should I pay for someone else?" is literally just insurance but I bet you have insurance, and you only hate insurance when the government does it.
hellojesus|55day ago
> is literally just insurance but I bet you have insurance, and you only hate insurance when the government does it.
Yes. This is exactly right. And that is because private insurance allows people to voluntarily consume it. Not everyone has the same appetite for risk. Allow people to maximize their individual utility!
trealira|55day ago
>Why should I have to pay for Debbie across the country to have a kid? Or Fred across the state?
It's a net benefit to society encourage people to have kids and keep the number of births closer to replacement rate.
hellojesus|55day ago
I don't think it's reasonable to steal from some for the betterment of others. Clearly if those from which money is taken maximized their utility by charitably giving it away to familes with newborns, this policy wouldn't be necessary. To that end, this policy creates deadweight loss for those from whom the redistributive policy takes more than it returns.
trealira|55day ago
> Clearly if those from which money is taken maximized their utility by charitably giving it away to familes with newborns, this policy wouldn't be necessary.
>To that end, this policy creates deadweight loss for those from whom the redistributive policy takes more than it returns.
First, clearly such people don't donate to families, making that a pointless argument, and second, even if they gave new parents money directly, they might still not have a baby if they don't have time to take care of the baby without parental leave. Long work hours for couples decreasing the national birth rate is a negative externality. If all companies acted hostile to parents and no one became a parent, that might boost each individual company's productivity levels, but they would be killing off the workforce in the long term. That, like overfishing, would be an example of the tragedy of the commons.
hellojesus|55day ago
> First, clearly such people don't donate to families, making that a pointless argument, and second, even if they gave new parents money directly
Yes. That is my point. Theft is required to execute this policy, which defines the deadweight loss.
I argue that companies may offer better leave benefits in order to attract workers. My company provides six weeks for primary and two for secondary caretakers.
Amazon gives a month or something like that. Clearly I would have incentive to work there if I could, and by that I mean others better skilled than me fill those vacancies. The policy is effective.
collingreen|55day ago
"All taxation is theft!" is a funny thing to claim in a world where standing alone is no longer viable.
I have a lot of libertarian tendencies but shouting that you're being robbed (from the safety of your stable, productive, society that protects even your right to complain like that) feels childish to me - the actual first step if you're going to act this way seems to be trying to get out from under this government that you never agreed to so you can start doing things your own way. The irony of people who say "if you don't like it, leave" is that they rarely take their own advice.
As a side note, I'm always curious when I see someone say that taxes are theft -- what is "theft" and "property" in your world view without the other systems underpinning it? It seems to always boil down to "stuff in your possession that you can keep someone else from taking away" which always boils down to violence at the end. Does " theft" even make sense in this context and, if so, did you "steal" everything first? It always seems like such a "rules for thee but not for me" kind of claim so I'm (genuinely) curious if you have a more substantial platform for your libertarianism.
hellojesus|55day ago
The libertarian bent typically suggests that the government must be funded to the extent that it can protect private property. This means it must be able to recognize private property and litigate against its theft, including bodily harm. Therefore I shout from my safe stable, but my prerequisite is that the government exists to provide that safe stable.
It also exists to provide public goods, which are defined as nonrivalous and nonexcludable, such as national defense (where I would only suggest it be provided insofar as the workforce be entirely voluntary).
Redistributibe policies such as PFML or universal healthcare, are indeed theft. You take from Person A to give to Person B when Person A would otherwise not do so. Please help me understand how that is not theft?
collingreen|55day ago
Thanks for the answer and that makes sense for your perspective - government is pretty much just there for you to be able to lay claim to things and all other benefits should be done by explicitly optted-in individuals.
I don't think it's helpful for me to try to take a position about what is and isn't theft by governments you were born into but wish you weren't. I don't even know how to start untangling that one and I think perspective overwhelms any reason there anyway.
I do appreciate your response about my question - very helpful!
hellojesus|55day ago
Thanks, I appreciate that.
I want to be more progressive. I really do! It feels good because typically you get to provide for the less fortunate. But my atomic unit is the individual, and I can't seem to make my belief system reconcile individual liberty and government-enforced charity. That's why I come here sometimes. It helps me talk through things and try to find counterexamples to my ideology.
I appreciate everyone's time and discussions.
CamperBob2|54day ago
Here's one way to think about health care in particular: the money being "stolen" from you has no intrinsic value. It's a number in a computer somewhere. If you were truly alone in the world it would have no value at all. So its value comes from an implied consensus of sorts, one that exists because the surrounding society provides infrastructure ranging from national defense to roads to law and contract enforcement to communications regulation to weather forecasting to basic scientific research to public health to ... whatever.
It happens that most advanced societies consider the widespread availability of medical care to be a similar force multiplier, something that enables every individual in the society to produce more and earn more and reach their full economic potential.
Free-market solutions to health care are problematic because there's nothing free about a market that everyone is forced to participate in by virtue of being alive. Likewise, private insurance models make little sense when every insured customer is virtually guaranteed to file expensive claims at one point or another.
Consequently health care is widely considered a valid area for governmental involvement and taxation. Yes, the money for public health care is "stolen" from you, but again, there is a widespread consensus that the economy that you participate in is healthier as a whole because of that. Just like public subsidies for many other things that many/most people agree are important but that fall outside what conventional markets do well at providing. In a society that didn't attend to such needs, you might have more money from a numeric standpoint, but it would be worth less.
Obviously there are weak points in this argument from a libertarian perspective, but it's very hard to convince people that it's without any merit at all.
lokar|55day ago
What do you think your retirement savings represent? They are a claim on goods and services to be produced by a future generation. For that to work there has to be a future generation of sufficient productive capacity. If population declines faster then productivity increases the system will collapse.
Look at what is happening to South Korea.
hellojesus|55day ago
That is part of the risk one must take into account when investing. The same happens regardless of population; you must invest where you expect there to still exist market demand in the future.
lokar|55day ago
If the productive capacity of the economy declines your capital will be inflated away. Money is a social construct built on a stable or growing economy.
hellojesus|55day ago
The FED can target either interest rates or the money supply. It could very well adjust supply to meet a shrinking population pool. Otherwise post war losses of many able bodied men would inflate away economies.
lokar|55day ago
Either way you won’t be able to obtain the goods and services you saved for, there just won’t be enough of them.
hellojesus|55day ago
There could be. Our example hasn't considered productivity gains due to capital improvements or tech advancements. We may not need the same population to produce the samd product count in the future.
mindslight|55day ago
You're missing the elephant in the room that our society doesn't have enough distributed wealth to allow most people to pay for their own time off.
I too hate the top-down prescriptivism of narrow "benefit" policies administered by employers. But until we fix the economy so most people have the market power to tell their employer they're taking 3-6+ months off for $whatever, have the savings to pay for it, and be confident that that either their employer will want them back at the end or that they will be able to find a different employer, then it's what we're stuck with. So if you really want to reform this, then work towards fixing wealth inequality.
(The healthcare thing is a politically radioactive topic. It would be fantastic to prevent employers anticompetitively bundling healthcare with employment, but it would take a lot of political capital to rise above fearmongering to people with "good" employer plans and the desire of politicians to lean on the current system out of expedience)
hellojesus|55day ago
I understand your point, but I am unable to reconcile the inefficiencies introduced by redistributive policies. I would instead prefer a charitable system whereby people voluntarily provide funds to be allocated to new parents to afford them the time off for caretaking.
mindslight|55day ago
You're ignoring the current overriding redistributive policy of continually printing a large amount of new money (monetary inflation), and handing most of it to the banks to give away to asset holders. This siphons real wealth away from the edges of our society, and is a significant contributor to wealth inequality.
If you focus on smaller instances of redistributive policies without addressing that, you've done the equivalent of admitting a logical contradiction to your axioms and thus are able to come to some decidedly anti-individual-freedom conclusions. In this case, further turning the financial screws on the edges.
hellojesus|55day ago
I don't mind turning back the Keynesian dials and abolishing the federal reserve. The reason my discussion is focused on PFML and universal healthcare is because that was the topic of the OP to which I replied at the root of my comment chain.
Those two are also not current or longstanding federal policy, which should making their prevention far easier than their repeal.
mindslight|55day ago
> I don't mind turning back the Keynesian dials and abolishing the federal reserve. The reason my discussion is focused on PFML and universal healthcare is because that was the topic of the OP to which I replied at the root of my comment chain.
The point is that without actually doing the former, your point in isolation on the latter comes across as completely out of touch. Currently, the vast majority of people simply do not have the kind of wealth required to make a decision like you're advocating. As it stands, the financial treadmill is a fixed quantity - so in that context, what you're effectively advocating is for people to not have the time to have kids, period.
> Those two are also not current or longstanding federal policy, which should making their prevention far easier than their repeal.
Yes, that is exactly the problem! When you push everywhere with a justification of individual freedom, the places you tend to actually move forward are where you're actually serving an agenda of entrenched centralized power. For example, look at this individual-liberty-appealing "fiscal responsibility" refrain of the past 30 years - it ended up facilitating all that newly-printed money to be given away to banks / asset holders, rather than say purposefully spent making sure our industrial base wasn't getting completely hollowed out. It was basically a kayfabe for looting, and not supporting individual freedom at all.
In a perfect world I would have preferred if that new money hadn't been created in the first place, and that wealth had remained distributed throughout society rather than centrally collected and then centrally assigned. But that wasn't anywhere close to being on the table. So we have to be real about the actual results of the specific policies we're advocating for, lest we become patsies helping to destroy individual liberty.
AlexandrB|56day ago
[flagged]
const_cast|55day ago
The reason people think defunding the police might work is because American police are overly militarized and people speculate that plays into violence escalation.
Basically, if you give the police way too many guns and armored vans then they might start thinking those are appropriate tools for too many circumstances. Sort of "if you have a hammer, everything looks like a nail" type argument.
I don't know if it'll work, but that's the idea.
jvergeldedios|56day ago
So you're erecting a straw man and attacking that. My assertion is that policing in the US has structural issues that need to be addressed. I disagree that it's helpful to remember that it could be worse as evidenced in other countries. That's irrelevant to the original assertion.
Also the argument that there are proposals on how to address structural issues in policing that you deem "ridiculous nonsense" is a straw man that does not address my assertion.
SpicyLemonZest|56day ago
I don't think we should defund most police agencies in the US. I absolutely think that we need to defund ICE, throw a substantial number of its current employees in jail, and build a new immigration enforcement agency from the ground up. Nobody who authorized masked raids by the secret police can be trusted to enforce the law and I do not consider any agency who employs them legitimate.
jakelazaroff|55day ago
If I tried to abduct someone from my local courthouse, do you think the cops would let me get away with it? Because they've worked in lockstep with ICE as they've done exactly that. Defunding the police and defunding ICE are not two separate issues.
SpicyLemonZest|55day ago
Cops routinely let private bounty hunters abduct people, albeit not from courthouses so often. I'm not happy about it, but I don't know if I necessarily want my local cops to be equipped to fight the Gestapo.
AlexandrB|56day ago
I can't speak for other first world countries, but Canada has its share of police misconduct. The most recent example is the mishandling of the 22-person killing spree in Nova Scotia[1], and the Toronto police are so famously bad at investigating sex crimes and protecting victims that an entire book was written on the subject[2].
[1] https://www.vice.com/en/article/canada-police-mistakes-novia...
[2] https://www.amazon.ca/Story-Jane-Doe-Book-About/dp/067931275...
sgnelson|56day ago
incompetence =/= corruption.
heavyset_go|56day ago
Corruption allows incompetence to thrive. Deliberate inaction can also be whitewashed as "incompetence".
acdha|56day ago
If you define “corrupt” as not asking for bribes on duty, perhaps. If you use the common definition of the term to include things like being bound by the law the same as the average person, however, that’s tragically untrue. Officers routinely cover up the misconduct of their fellows and force rehiring of the few officers who are held accountable even for serious crimes.
indymike|55day ago
We do have good police in the US.
But I'd prefer not to interact in their official capacity with them if possible because there is a non-zero chance that the specific officer I'm talking to is not one of the good ones.
I recently had a run in where I was photographing a duck on the roof of a house. A cop literally ran up to me and asked what I was doing with his hand on his gun, holster released. I was fortunate that he realized how nuts his behavior was when I pointed out that I was taking a picture of a crazy duck sitting on a chimney. I also realized that I probably would have been shot had I not been calm and polite.
chasd00|55day ago
i'm not a cop super fan or anything but i did make it a point to wave at and get to know the officers that patrol my neighborhood. I've had them stop by when walking my dogs to let me know that they got a call about a suspicious person and to keep an eye out. Maybe it comes from working in consulting but that level of relationship with police officers is very useful to me as an individual.
indymike|42day ago
Not being injured or worse is always a good thing. I find the amount of violence in law enforcement is a little out of control. Too many news stories about an 89 year old lady being beat over a turn signal traffic stop, wanting to know why they are being detained or for having an opinion contrary to Officer Pepper Spray.
jimt1234|56day ago
This has been down-voted a lot, but I actually kinda agree, at least with the second assertion. I've been going down to Baja, Mexico frequently for years, and, as an American (white dude), you quickly learn that you're a target for local police - you're basically their ATM. And there's absolutely nothing you can do about it. You just do your best to avoid them, like agents in The Matrix.
WarOnPrivacy|56day ago
>> For all their flaws, US cops are some of the least corrupt
> I actually kinda agree,
It is my long and consistent experience (MI spouse) that the quality of police officers depends on the quality of the police chief.
We had good, experienced officers here a generation ago. A funding-addicted sheriff was elected. He fired cops w/ decades of exp and replaced them with just-graduated kids. The remaining cops were subject to some kind of dept environment that left them half-unhinged.
Addicted sheriff quit after a few terms and his replacement was pretty good for a while. Now he's average, so kind of crappy.
watwut|56day ago
Germany, Finland, France, Sweden, Canada ... when you compare them to most corrupt states, you are not proving they are best. You are peoving they are not absolute bottom.
That being said, America is unique in officially allowing cops to kill people just because of how they feel, with no objective reason for it.
account42|55day ago
In Germany you are not even allowed to insult the police and they do use that to go after people they don't like.
L3viathan|55day ago
While true, that is true for everyone, there's no special law about police.
shadowgovt|55day ago
Speaking of Germany, can you think of other points in history where the public banded together to subvert police authority and hide their neighbors from the cops?
Why did they do that?
potato3732842|56day ago
It's not that they're corrupt in the literal sense. It's that they have discretion of enforcement of laws so expansive with so many precedents in their favor that they basically have de-facto power to arrest anyone and that when they do want to do something stupid they're not "corrupt" so you can't just pay them off to be reasonable.
9283409232|56day ago
LA Police are a literal gang. There are places with police that are corrupt in more obvious ways such as places in Africa but to say US cops are some of the least corrupt is ridiculous.
AlexandrB|56day ago
This is a very sheltered take. Go south of the border to Mexico (you don't need to go anywhere as far as Africa) and you can experience getting pulled over for no reason by a cop looking for a payout. That's not to mention that cartels are allowed to run rampant and collect "protection" in Mexican cities because the cops either don't care, are in the cartel themselves, or are being paid off.
As I said to another commenter, "some of the least corrupt" != "not corrupt". I'm sure some countries are better, but there are not that many.
9283409232|56day ago
You don't need to go south of the border. You can get pulled over for no reason in the US and have drugs planted on you by a cop simply having a bad day. I'm not interpreting least corrupt as no corruption. I think least corrupt is still a ridiculous statement.
wordofx|56day ago
[flagged]
bnjms|56day ago
This is recorded. There is at least one famous one on YouTube.
hollerith|55day ago
In Florida and maybe other states, if anyone requests body cam video on a case, the police usually have to provide it, so, of course there is going to be at least one video on Youtube of cops behaving badly, but that does not say anything informative about the rate of bad cop behavior in the US.
9283409232|56day ago
Spend some time in the less fortunate areas of your city. You'll learn very quickly how things work when it comes to the police.
Volundr|55day ago
Or just anywhere in Northern Idaho. Especially roads that connect to Oregon.
hollerith|55day ago
We are in a thread that began with, "Go south of the border to Mexico and you can experience getting pulled over for no reason by a cop looking for a payout".
Are you saying that the cops in Northern Idaho are out for bribes?
Volundr|55day ago
Let's review:
> You can get pulled over for no reason in the US and have drugs planted on you by a cop simply having a bad day.
The next reply in this thread:
> lol you watch too much tv.
No I'm not asserting they are "asking". They won't bother to ask. They'll either plant something and take your stuff that way, or "smell drugs" and seize your assets under "civil forfeiture".
wordofx|55day ago
No they won’t. Planting evidence is so uncommon it’s hilarious you even make such an absurd claim.
Volundr|55day ago
Of course not. The police would definitely do no such thing: https://www.kristv.com/news/local-news/in-your-neighborhood/...
And there definitely aren't any departments funding themselves by seizing assets from people never even accused of a crime https://www.nlg-npap.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/09/Civil-As...
KingMob|55day ago
"Sheltered take"? Your only concern about police malfeasance seems to be money.
Many people have WAY worse concerns. There's a sheltered view here, but it's not the one you're thinking of.
bobsomers|56day ago
This is Whataboutism. What the police are like in Mexico is irrelevant to someone living in the United States.
Whoppertime|53day ago
I remember the Dorner controversy. I hoped it would force a spotlight on the LAPD and their bad behaviour. I thought wrong
lupusreal|56day ago
Credit where credit is due, American cops are considerably less corrupt than American politicians. Most people in America would never even dream of trying to pay off a cop to get out of a speeding ticket, that sort of thing just doesn't work and everybody knows it. On the other hand, bribing local politicians to get some land rezoned for your business, or some other similar crap? That's just standard operating procedure in small towns everywhere.
mlinhares|56day ago
Dude, I paid to have stickers and "sheriff cards" to make it less likely cops are going to stop me cos i'm a "friend of the police".
Its wild to read cops in the US are not corrupt, did people just not read modern US history? Prohibition? Civil rights? Union busting? The Pinkertons?
korse|56day ago
Funny story about the Pinkertons if you don't already know... if you skateboard or do similar shenanigans involving parking structures or industrial wasteland, you've probably been chased by their direct descendants.
[1] https://www.securitas.com/en/newsroom/press-releases_list/se...
Volundr|55day ago
Hey! I resemble that remark!
I worked as a security guard through college. Never chased a skateboarder, but I did ask them nicely to leave at least once a week.
FireBeyond|56day ago
> Dude, I paid to have stickers and "sheriff cards" to make it less likely cops are going to stop me cos i'm a "friend of the police".
In many states the FOP stickers and cards are almost like "registration". You get the sticker to put on your card and just like vehicle registration, a year to show you're current. The FOP will say that's just to "show your ongoing support", but it's rather hard not to see it as "are you paid up? you don't get to get a sticker ten years ago...".
Various FOPs have also sued or done eBay take downs of people selling the "year sticker".
potato3732842|56day ago
They're not literally corrupt. There's just a huge amount of conflict of interests, bad incentives and bad behavior.
People play fast and loose with the word "corrupt" the same way they do with "conspiracy".
mlinhares|56day ago
You could try searching "police corruption in the US" before saying they're not literally corrupt.
They will literally grab a cop that was prosecuted and found guilty, hide the records and have them hired in some other police force in a nearby town. There's a whole mafia setup going on, organized by their unions, we're not far from having "police controlled neighborhoods" like in many LATAM countries.
potato3732842|56day ago
Yeah, corruption happens but it's not endemic nor is it accessible to the everyman.
Yeah they'll bend the law for their buddies but we cannot just shove money in their face to make them be reasonable when they bother us like you can in Mexico. Instead we have to shove 10x as much into all manner of rent seeking systems to maintain an air of legitimacy (this last part is a gripe I have with most government stuff here, not just law enforcement related).
heavyset_go|55day ago
I don't know what you'd call literal police gangs that kill people for initiation rites, kill their own whistleblowers, etc other than corruption.
https://knock-la.com/tradition-of-violence-lasd-gang-history...
AlexandrB|56day ago
"least corrupt" != "not corrupt"
What you're describing is bad but also pretty mild by international standards.
michael1999|55day ago
If you are comparing to northern Mexico, sure. If you are comparing to northern Europe, LMAO.
With FOP stickers, "courtesy cards", placard abuse, and violent impunity, there's lots of corruption going around.
https://apnews.com/article/nypd-courtesy-card-police-miscond...
SpicyLemonZest|56day ago
Corruption just doesn't have much to do with the kind of misconduct that comes up in the US. It's true, yes, that an American officer who's decided to mistreat you won't usually accept a bribe to stop.
KingMob|55day ago
As someone who lives in a SEA country, I'm 100x safer with a local cop who wants a few bucks at a traffic stop than with any American cop.
ang_cire|55day ago
If we're limiting 'corruption' to just be about bribes, then sure. Of course, in reality it also encompasses racism, nepotism, etc (i.e. anything that is a "corruption" of the impartial execution of their jobs).
I suspect many Black people would prefer paying a bribe to being killed by police at an outsize ratio, or paying a bribe to being charged more aggressively and sentenced more harshly.
Police brutality and incarceration is worse than bribes, my dude.
chrisjj|55day ago
> Nobody forgets that
Disproven already: "Interacting with cops will never make your day better"
dpkirchner|55day ago
First, words like always and never should be to mean nearly always and nearly never. That's just colloquial English.
Second, I doubt many victims feel like their days are better after talking with the police. Just look at the abysmal solve rates.
chrisjj|54day ago
> First, words like always and never should be to mean nearly always and nearly never.
Good luck petitioning the dictionary! :)
heavyset_go|56day ago
> Consider yourself lucky that you've never had to call the cops as a victim.
I have, multiple times. They don't give a shit. In my case, the only reason to reach out to them is to get documentation for insurance or to start the legal process for obtaining restraining orders through courts.
danudey|55day ago
People forget that calling the cops as a victim also costs lives. There have been more than enough cases of someone calling in a wellness check on someone who ends up getting murdered by police instead of helped, or victims who call the police and end up getting shot or arrested by them.
The police as they are now in North America are not a good option, they're just the least worst option. You call them and they show up and you hope that they cause more problems for the offender than the victim, but that's never guaranteed.
Rebelgecko|55day ago
I've only had to call the cops a few times, but they usually put me on hold. 50/50 if they actually do anything or just give me the law enforcement equivalent of this meme- https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/i-aint-reading-all-that (aka "please don't file a report because it makes our metrics look bad)
ubermonkey|56day ago
Sometimes, maybe, and increasingly rarely. I live in Texas. Ask me about Uvalde.
marssaxman|56day ago
I have not been unusually lucky in that way, though. I can think of half a dozen occasions when the kind of people who call the cops would have done so, but I didn't, because I expected they would do no good - if they bothered to show up at all - and might well have caused a lot of harm.
cess11|56day ago
Yeah, it's great that someone shows up three hours late and writes a worse report than you would.
nobody9999|55day ago
>Consider yourself lucky that you've never had to call the cops as a victim. People forget that cops also save lives.
I have. Several times. In the latter two cases (burglaries at my home and my brother's home -- one in NYC and the other in the Bay Area), the police were spectacularly inept and completely useless.
In the first case, the police arrested the perpetrators more by happenstance than design, despite the fact that these kids (all except the 22 year-old ringleader were 16 or younger) had been committing similar crimes for months.
As the old saw goes, "I don't hate the police, I just feel better when they're not around."
immibis|55day ago
I called the cops as a victim of a violent crime. They put me in handcuffs because I was the person on the scene who best fit the profile of a perpetrator, despite the actual perpetrators standing there next to me. I gave them a video and audio recording of the crime being committed. I did not get my cellphone back. Later, I went to court with the perpetrators, and their only penalty was paying me a fine which was slightly less than what I paid in legal costs.
Cops are not your friends, even as a victim; neither are lawyers or judges. Treat the whole justice system more like a Linux server with an SQL injection: amoral, and can be made to do anything you want, if you're evil and happen to know how which levers to pull and how to not get caught.
Since it's relevant here, I am a white man.
dmkolobov|56day ago
Consider yourself lucky that you've never called the cops as a victim and then been further victimized by the police.
datpuz|56day ago
[flagged]
thot_experiment|56day ago
lmao, I haven't had a single good interaction with cops and I'm not a minority and I most of the interactions I've had were not as a result of me doing crimes, and the ones that were "crimes" were for things like "being in a park shortly after sundown". I have never once had a reason to view them as anything other than shitty powertripping bullies.
pfannkuchen|56day ago
[flagged]
dmkolobov|56day ago
Yeah no. This happens in my city and to my friends. You're making a lot of assumptions about people's experiences here.
zoklet-enjoyer|56day ago
I have. They showed up late and didn't do anything useful
9283409232|56day ago
I've called cops as a victim. They were less than helpful to say the least. If anything, they were annoyed that I even bothered to ask for help.
mindslight|56day ago
I've dealt with the cops a handful of times, with responses anywhere from unhelpful to helpful. It helps to have the right expectations - can a given situation be improved by adding some readily-aggressive dudes, who at the very least will be a little annoyed at having to be there? Sometimes, that answer is yes. Police perform a necessary function in society, and I wouldn't want to have to do that role myself (despite DIYing most other things).
But that does not justify supporting unaccountability as if its some kind of team sport! In fact, if you respect the role of the police then you must support accountability - a cop breaking the law is just a criminal acting under the color of state authority.
scottyah|56day ago
Since we're throwing in personal experiences to shape skimmer's overall emotions on police- I had a great interaction with police after someone called a wellness check on elderly neighbors. They tried hard to assure they were safe without being invasive or annoying.
bryanrasmussen|56day ago
I have had positive experiences with American police, but not as many as the negative experiences, and the negative where great enough to sour me on authority. In fact whenever I had a positive experience it was just so weird to have a cop not ruining your day because they had the power to do so, that it seemed surreal.
9283409232|56day ago
You are missing the point if you think it is about shaping someones' emotions towards police. The point is that there are plenty of valid reasons to just want to avoid interactions with or areas with police.
kevin_thibedeau|55day ago
I've been nearly killed with significant injuries caused by a repeat offender while in full compliance with the law myself and the police conspired to hide body camera evidence of a witness interview and took the side of the person who broke the law.
cmurf|56day ago
[flagged]
dang|55day ago
Could you please stop using HN primarily for political battle? This is not a valid use of HN, and you're well on the wrong side of the line. I had to go back a good two months before seeing anything else in your posts.
(This is not a comment on your politics. The moderation call here would be the same if you had the opposite politics, or any others.)
Edit: This has been a problem for a long time. I don't believe it's your intention to abuse HN, so I don't want to ban you, but if you don't fix this, we'll end up doing so.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43121542 (Feb 2025)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22436733 (Feb 2020)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19972399 (May 2019)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19715736 (April 2019)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16758558 (April 2018)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16749749 (April 2018)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16457684 (Feb 2018)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16234007 (Jan 2018)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15849007 (Dec 2017)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15773271 (Nov 2017)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15484503 (Oct 2017)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14672661 (June 2017)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14233383 (April 2017)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13517054 (Jan 2017)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13515750 (Jan 2017)
computerthings|55day ago
[dead]
siliconc0w|56day ago
They've abducted US citizens, it's perfectly reasonable to want to avoid them.
xdennis|56day ago
[flagged]
whstl|56day ago
Arrest my ass. If they don’t mirandize, give you a phone call and immediate and consistent access to a lawyer, then it’s abduction.
jahewson|56day ago
Neither of these claims are true. Miranda rights apply to criminal arrests but immigration arrests are typically civil.
The 6th Amendment guarantees the right to a lawyer during critical stages such as interrogation and court proceedings only, e.g. in California the window in which arraignment is guaranteed is 48 hours (this is where the court will offer defendants the opportunity for a court-appointed lawyer).
Buttons840|56day ago
> Miranda rights apply to criminal arrests but immigration arrests are typically civil.
> The 6th Amendment guarantees the right to a lawyer
I think people arrested by ICE are not guaranteed a lawyer, because, as you say, it's a civil matter. This means if you find yourself sleeping on a cot behind a chain link fence in Alligator Alcatraz, and you want to speak to a lawyer, you'll have to pay for it yourself, because it's all a civil matter.
Are we great again?
anonfordays|56day ago
[flagged]
Buttons840|55day ago
Maybe, but I think they meant "treat it like a civil matter while giving civil-matter protections". Be consistent. The current criminal treatment with civil protections is inconsistent. Pick a lane.
anonfordays|47day ago
Deportation is a civil treatment. It's one of the actions the government can use when you violate civil immigration laws:
The Court added that an alien being removed by the government is not being “deprived of life, liberty, or property” and that “the provisions of the Constitution securing the right to trial by jury and prohibiting unreasonable searches and seizures and cruel and unusual punishments [therefore] have no application. That is also why federal immigration officers do not need a warrant issued by a judge before arresting and detaining aliens and why aliens are not entitled to be advised of their Miranda rights or to the assistance of a government-appointed lawyer during their deportation proceedings.
HaZeust|55day ago
It's also just not true that they're giving the much-lower civil protections either. Garcia didn't get a jury despite the Seventh Amendment guaranteeing one in common law (for cases exceeding a challenge of $20, which we've been purposively interpreting for decades)
anonfordays|47day ago
Garcia doesn't get the protections afforded by the Seventh Amendment:
Deportation is a civil treatment. It's one of the actions the government can use when you violate civil immigration laws:
The Court added that an alien being removed by the government is not being “deprived of life, liberty, or property” and that “the provisions of the Constitution securing the right to trial by jury and prohibiting unreasonable searches and seizures and cruel and unusual punishments [therefore] have no application. That is also why federal immigration officers do not need a warrant issued by a judge before arresting and detaining aliens and why aliens are not entitled to be advised of their Miranda rights or to the assistance of a government-appointed lawyer during their deportation proceedings.
HaZeust|45day ago
>"Deportation is a civil treatment. It's one of the actions the government can use when you violate civil immigration laws"
This is true, good catch.
However, one of the issues with this - without guaranteeing proper due process in a civil immigration matter - is that the lack of right to due process or deliberation can make it harder for citizens (or otherwise lawfully-present individuals) to present documentation proving their lawfulness, in the event that they are accused of a civil immigration law. We've already seen folks held for extended periods of time - with intent to hold indefinitely - that were ready and able to prove identification, immigration, and even citizenship. It's a big problem that relies on believing in good-faith for the government ("Why would I be held for an immigration law? I can show my passport with just a car ride home and the passcode to my safe!"), when the government is already acting in bad faith - and not offering strict standards or guarantees (due process, deliberation) for you to prove your lawfulness - before their detention, even if unfounded, starts negatively impacting your life.
And on the note of the case law reinforcing these actions, there's case law for many other actions that we've been compelled to disagree with over the history of this nation. If anything, ongoing case law just means Congress routed a life-altering decision into a DOJ tribunal where hearsay flies, evidence can be withheld as “law-enforcement-sensitive,” with no lawyers provided, and people can sit in detention that I described in my above paragraph for months. My point remains that we often start (and finish) the process to boot someone from the country with less process than you get over a $20* debt. THIS IS BAD PROCEDURE
CamperBob2|56day ago
If the end result is that people are forcibly abducted, extradited, and thrown into an El Salvadoran prison without due process, I really don't give a shit what the law says. It can't be described as "civil."
Due process is ultimately what keeps this from happening to YOU.
jahewson|56day ago
[flagged]
thomastjeffery|55day ago
Of course they can! They just did right there. You don't have to accept their argument. You can be a heartless sycophant and reject it out-of-hand because their argument doesn't follow the rules of the very framework they are arguing against. That's your choice.
Progress is being made in both directions on this front. If you truly believe in the law, then argue for it. Considering the fact that the current POTUS is a convicted felon, and the supreme court has practically eliminated all checks on his power, I'll be taking arguments for lawlessness seriously.
CamperBob2|56day ago
I don't know the law, and didn't say I did. I know the difference between right and wrong, though. I was responding to the GP comment where you basically argued that, "Well, actshually, nothing Trump's doing is illegal."
I also know that the courts are turning into wholly-owned subsidiaries of the Trump Organization. Not all of them, of course. But as for the rest, if there is no way for them to enforce their rulings -- and it seems there is not -- then they have no more power than random commenters on Hacker News, and deserve no more consideration.
whstl|56day ago
Something being into law doesn't change reality. It is abduction even if the Pope and the Queen sign on it, period. Remember not everyone in the planet is American, this is like quoting North Korean law to justify some random atrocity.
It is Hacker News so of course someone is gonna rationalize fucking abducting people.
slg|56day ago
What type of "immigration arrests" are valid against citizens?
jahewson|56day ago
Arrests are based on suspicion. As long as there is reasonable suspicion at the time of the arrest then it’s valid.
slg|56day ago
What qualifies as "reasonable suspicion" of a citizen committing an immigration crime? Aren't you just advocating for the ability of ICE to arrest anyone who has the wrong color skin or speaks the wrong language?
dudefeliciano|55day ago
isn't that the point?
cosmicgadget|55day ago
Probable cause or a warrant. I am not sure what PC for being an illegal immigrant looks like, maybe seeing someone climbing the border wall?
sorcerer-mar|55day ago
Obviously it's being brown or speaking Spanish...
UncleMeat|54day ago
Reasonable suspicion is not a high enough bar to jail somebody.
kstrauser|56day ago
You're so right. I'm not afraid of the cops, especially not ICE flunkies, but interactions with law enforcement has never made my day more convenient and pleasant. It's not that I'd hide anything from them, as much as for me it's a bureaucratic hassle I'd just as soon not have to deal with.
Out of curiosity, does anyone know, officially, how much a multi-generation born-in-America person is actually obligated to cooperate with or answer to ICE?
hayst4ck|56day ago
> how much a multi-generation born-in-America person is actually obligated to cooperate with or answer to ICE?
This is the wrong question. The right question is "who will hold them accountable if they violate your rights or try to punish you for lack of obedience?"
potato3732842|56day ago
>"who will hold them accountable
Politicians looking to score brownie points with either the public or the state itself.
So basically you're SOL if you're not a more equal animal or connected to them (Skip Gates), a public persona (Whistlin Diesel), attractive woman (Karen Read, though you can argue that nobody has held the cops accountable on this one, yet) or highly sympathetic individual.
There is some argument to be made that the truth comes out eventually in these sorts of matters but that's not gonna make Breonna Taylor any less dead or the Phonesavanh's kid from being any less disabled.
I think the Floyd factor also prevents cops who are alone or in a pair from escalating stuff unnecessarily as much as they used to which is where a lot of these abuses historically come from.
danudey|55day ago
Most elected politicians at this point are happy to repeat the same lies of "this person was arrested because they were being violent/interfering/were acting suspiciously/refused to identify themselves" even if there is multiple sources of video evidence to the contrary. Republicans in particular have no interest in the truth where it conflicts with the claims they want to make to advance their agenda, and most Democrats are too toothless to call out this misbehavior with the force and passion it deserves.
And when they do call it out, people will be told by Fox News and others that "this senator is opposed to the work ICE is doing to solve the problem of illegal immigrants", and other news agencies will say "such-and-such official says this senator is opposed to..." and the propaganda will spread and people will believe it.
jahewson|56day ago
So there’s this thing called the judiciary…
netsharc|56day ago
In this thread: you slowly realizing that you live in an increasingly corrupt despotic police state...
Sure you might be fine (they just harass the brown and black people), but it doesn't mean the problem doesn't exist.
jkestner|56day ago
Oh yeah, those guys who came up with qualified immunity.
hayst4ck|56day ago
OK, I don't disagree, but there is nothing that guarantees the judiciary will act constitutionally or protect people's rights, so "who will hold the judiciary accountable if they violate your rights, try to punish you for lack of obedience, or fail to hold those who violate peoples rights accountable?""
watwut|56day ago
Pretty much all layers say judiciary is deferential to cops and prosecution to the point of absurdity.
shermantanktop|56day ago
North Korea has a judiciary. So does Iran. So does China. They all have the rough equivalent of a Supreme Court too.
A judiciary can only function as a check on other types of power when it is allowed to do so. Merely being called by that name is not enough.
potato3732842|56day ago
>Out of curiosity, does anyone know, officially, how much a multi-generation born-in-America person is actually obligated to cooperate with or answer to ICE?
You don't have to say anything to them without a court order but obviously they're still cops so they can screw you if you make a jerk of yourself doing it.
bbor|56day ago
Legally speaking, they need signed arrest warrants. Being "multi-generation" (aka "clearly white"?) doesn't factor into it -- all residents are owed this protection, AFAIK. In this way, they have much less power than local PD or Sheriffs.
Practically speaking, of course, there's news stories every week about them arresting citizens, even when they're saying stuff like "please, check my wallet, my ID is in there!". I haven't followed up, but I'd be shocked if any of these incidents resulted in any sort of reparations for the victim.
As a side note, I'd be way more afraid of "flunkies" than any other type of law enforcement. Getting arrested is bad, but getting shot by someone with terrible trigger discipline and no training is worse... At best, they're especially aggressive, masked cops with absolutely zero accountability.
kstrauser|56day ago
> Being "multi-generation" (aka "clearly white"?) doesn't factor into it -- all residents are owed this protection, AFAIK.
That's my understanding, too. I do happen to be white, but by multi-generation, I mean that I'm not a recent immigrant, nor are my parents, or theirs, so ICE doesn't have any clear power over me that I'm aware of. Similarly, the vast majority of my Black neighbors have been here for many, many years; same deal for them.
> As a side note, I'd be way more afraid of "flunkies" than any other type of law enforcement.
Same here. Being arrested for a BS reason would be quite the hassle, but it sure beats getting shot by a masked try-hard.
davidw|56day ago
> ICE doesn't have any clear power over me that I'm aware of
They have a bunch of guys with guns. Maybe no warrants or id's or anything legal like that, but guns are probably enough.
With this latest bill, they are going to be one of the largest armed forces in the world. They'll get more money than the US Marines.
hayst4ck|56day ago
Citizenship comes from law. Enforcers and the judiciary choose which law to enact and how to enact them. If enforcers of the "law" are more loyal to the administration than the constitution, then the law and all it's implications, such as citizenship, are up to the arbitrary whims of our new king coronated by the supreme court.
That's the problem with not defending Rule of Law. If law is arbitrary and only serves the interests of one person and isn't grounded in some greater objective truth, then it doesn't matter what is officially allowed or not. If judges and enforcers are loyalists then they get to make the call whether your lack of cooperation is obstruction of justice or not. Who is going to punish them for violating your rights? Other ICE agents? The DOJ? You might not even be given standing to fight for your rights in court.
An ICE agent may choose not to believe you are a US citizen and call your documents fake, and put you in a concentration camp or deport you to El Salvador.
As with Kilmar we saw that ICE can act without due process, and due process is what determines your citizenship status.
Trump is also openly talking about revoking the citizenship of citizens.
It's worth a reading about de-naturalization: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Denaturalization#Human_rights
jahewson|56day ago
[flagged]
justinrubek|56day ago
Ah yes, it's certainly the fault of the Biden administration. Why hadn't we realized this, it changes everything.
Stop it. Be serious.
SpicyLemonZest|56day ago
In many states you’re required to identify yourself, but cooperation with law enforcement is otherwise never required. My sense is that ICE generally still releases citizens swiftly, and if they don’t think you’re a citizen for some reason you’re not going to win an argument about it on the spot no matter how much you cooperate.
leptons|56day ago
[flagged]
kstrauser|56day ago
For sure. I think I'm reasonably well connected and could make a political nightmare for anyone who deported me illegally, but that's slim consolation if I'm trying urgently to learn the language of whatever prison I'm in.
jmcqk6|56day ago
Unless your name is nationally known, I doubt this is the case. It's not local people who are deporting you. There are numerous cases of well connected people beloved in their community getting deported. There are no consequences for the perpetrators.
mlinhares|56day ago
That's the main reason its happening, there are no consequences for making mistakes. So they can ship you to a concentration camp and no one will know, because there won't be paperwork anywhere saying this happened, unless someone happened to be there and recorded you being abducted.
By the time someone might decide to check ICE records you could be in South Sudan already. No one is safe.
Volundr|56day ago
Could you? We STILL don't know the identities of everyone sent to CECOT. It's hard to make a political nightmare when no one knows where you are, or even that you were "arrested".
aerostable_slug|56day ago
[flagged]
bee_rider|56day ago
I don’t even know if the claim is true or not, but “easily debunked” is a pretty strong statement. How would you easily debunk it?
datpuz|56day ago
Easy debunk: ICE is a federal law enforcement agency. Entering or remaining in the country illegally is, by definition, illegal. ICE agents are law enforcement officers, not "deputized Proud Boys." Federal law enforceent agencies like ICE have recruitment and training processes that are well-established and documented.
https://www.ice.gov/about-ice https://www.ice.gov/careers
leptons|56day ago
The masked ICE gestapo bunch refuse to identify. You can't prove that they aren't "deputized proud boys" if they won't identify.
datpuz|56day ago
Do you have evidence of federal law enforcement officers refusing to identify themselves when making an arrest?
GuinansEyebrows|56day ago
please, if you use instagram, follow @uniondelbarrio and @lataco - they often repost videos of kidnappings in progress.
i have seen many such videos, and not once have i seen any evidence that ICE agents are identifying themselves.
datpuz|56day ago
If you've seen many such videos, certainly you can produce one where the officer refused to identify themselves, right?
GuinansEyebrows|55day ago
unfortunately most sites like youtube etc are blocked on my work network, but i did already give you a couple of sources to find such videos.
there's also discussion of legislation against this behavior here: https://fox40.com/news/no-vigilantes-act-introduced-in-an-ef...
another source (LA Times) which mentions the lack of identification: https://web.archive.org/web/20250702182237/https://www.latim...
the mayor acknowledges this. city council acknowledges this. if you're talking in good faith, it's time to acknowledge this.
leptons|55day ago
https://www.google.com/search?q=ICE+refusing+to+identify
Plenty of articles out there... go read for yourself.
aerostable_slug|56day ago
There's no federal law requiring officers to give you their name or badge number. It's a myth they have to do so when asked, just like it's a myth cops have to tell you they're law enforcement when asked during a sting operation.
All they have to do is assert their authority, and they don't even have to do that on a particular timetable. If you don't like it, tell you legislator to do their job and change the law.
leptons|55day ago
There was already a case of a copycat dressing in a mask and tactical gear and "asserting his authority". If they don't need to identify, then nobody needs to identify. And if they don't identify then they are nothing more than a masked gang.
I'll also add that masks are illegal to use during crimes to hide identity - which is exactly what these people are doing. They are committing crimes by abducting US citizens and they are blocking due process and they are exporting people to foreign 3rd countries. What they are doing is against the Constitution. We will track down and prosecute these people after this fascist regime is over, which is why they are masking and trying to hide their identity - they know what they are doing is illegal.
https://apnews.com/article/los-angeles-lawsuit-trump-adminis...
mindslight|56day ago
> There's no federal law requiring officers to give you their name or badge number
Well then since federal agencies are now abusing this letter of the law in complete bad faith and contributing to this disruption of the general peace, it sounds like it is up to state governors to tackle this epidemic of masked gangs of thugs running around and abducting people - order state and local law enforcement to interrupt any and all masked gang activity and arrest the perps (and order their national guards to deploy if additional force projection is necessary to restore law and order). If it turns out a given gang was acting under "legally valid" federal authority to carry out "legally valid" federal actions and therefore has immunity (and wasn't say a drug cartel hit squad emboldened by the general disorder), that can be sorted out and verified through due process in the courts. States owe no less to their citizens.
aerostable_slug|56day ago
[flagged]
leptons|56day ago
>ICE is breaking the law with zero evidence of that
Arresting US citizens without any cause is illegal, and that's exactly what they have been doing, and they will make up excuses to cover their ass. They are also arresting legitimate tourists, without justification.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/jun/26/immigration-...
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2025/04/12/ice-to...
aerostable_slug|56day ago
"According to her attorney, Andrea Velez was released on bond after being detained by immigration enforcement agents on Tuesday and then charged with assaulting a federal officer." [0]
That's good cause for an arrest. Civil disobedience carries consequences.
[0] https://www.nbclosangeles.com/news/local/family-outraged-fed...
leptons|54day ago
>That's good cause for an arrest.
It's also a lie.
mooooooooooooo|56day ago
So debunk it??
mh-|56day ago
Have we reached a place on HN now where we're asking people to prove negatives, just because it aligns with our collective politics?
bee_rider|56day ago
It is fine to say there isn’t evidence for something. For some reason the poster decided to invite this challenge by calling it “easily debunked” instead. A debunking is specifically a claim that there’s evidence that the original claim was wrong.
mh-|56day ago
This is just a form of gish galloping [0]. Like I alluded to, it's disappointing that discourse on HN is at a place where enough of the participants are supportive of this as long as it's happening to the "other team."
> During a typical Gish gallop, the galloper confronts an opponent with a rapid series of specious arguments, half-truths, misrepresentations and outright lies, making it impossible for the opponent to refute all of them within the format of the debate.
See also Brandolini's law [1] if this feels familiar:
> The amount of energy needed to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude bigger than that needed to produce it.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gish_gallop
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brandolini%27s_law
bee_rider|56day ago
It is not any more effort to say “It is an unsubstantiated and unprovable rumor that ICE has deputized proud boys.” It is also a much more accurate reflection of the level of confidence.
If you call somebody’s claim “easily debunked,” that’s a proactive offer of counter evidence. It isn’t Gish gallop to accept that offer of counter evidence.
Anyway, where else is the conversation supposed to go? The post had the offer of an easy debunking and no other content.
mindslight|56day ago
This is not something that can be or should even need to be "debunked". It is the responsibility of the government to act in a way that engenders trust of the citizens. For example, not deploying roving gangs wearing masks and refusing to identify themselves while purporting to act with government authority. Surely you can see how this destroys the rule of law, regardless of whether those are 30 year career civil servants who just now happen to be wearing masks, or some newly-formed lynch mob.
In general, the government justifying itself to citizens is called leadership. This "government" does the exact opposite across the board, and compensates with divisive propaganda that nurtures loyal all-in extremist followers.
datpuz|56day ago
[flagged]
ljf|56day ago
And I grew up believing that America was 'land of the free'.
I've never had to prove my ID to a police-person here in the UK - once or twice they've asked me who I was, but they didn't check the answer I gave them and no ID was shown. I never carry photo ID unless I'm flying, so I wouldn't have been able to prove who I was anyway.
netsharc|56day ago
The UK has a complicated relationship with IDs anyway, they don't have a national ID, no one's mandated to have a passport, and a driving license is also optional (only if you want to drive). The US is almost like that except that not having a driving license is an oddity there.
ljf|55day ago
Indeed - but even if you have a license, there is no expectations to carry it when you drive. If the police request they can give you a 'Producer' which historically was where you had to attend a police station with your license and insurance documents - but they can check insurance online via ANPR (automatic number plate recognition) before they've even stopped you.
Getting into clubs as a teenager was comical - as there is no standard ID most people had 'work ID' that was just a laminated bit of paper. Or would carry a paper drivers license with no photo on it.
knubie|53day ago
Please don't believe everything crazy leftists say online.
immibis|54day ago
The more the government has to tell you how free you are, the less free you are.
There are zero known exceptions to this principle.
triyambakam|56day ago
[flagged]
whstl|56day ago
I’m a latino in Germany of all places and for years I didn’t carry any identification because the only one I had was my passport, the german work permit was just a sticker in one of the pages. I am obviously not gonna risk losing my passport, so it was home.
Police never stopped me, but when I asked “what should I do?” they were more than understanding of the situation and just said that in the worst case I gotta go home grab it.
Only recently I got a German Personalausweis in the shape of a card.
riedel|56day ago
I am a white German with no migration background and i believe it is not all that beautiful here and I have been checked on various places. The reason is, that it really also depends where you are, because police has the right to check IDs e.g. in places where migration crimes are more likely like railway stations or in a buffet zone close to the border. In other places law requires far more actual reasons or a far more concrete suspicion. But I have also been checked in the middle of the night on a flixbus that got pulled out from the highway at the border between Bavaria and Baden-Württemberg, which IMHO clearly violated German police law.
whstl|56day ago
Oh, definitely. I'm not saying there's no police checks, I'm just saying according to the police officer it was ok to not have with me at all times and leave at home.
Also, when I was outside of the city I live I would bring the passport, and now the Personalausweis...
lbschenkel|55day ago
I was in a similar situation when I immigrated to Sweden ~20 years ago (I'm Brazilian).
Technically the law says that I'm supposed to carry passport + residence permit (first version was a sticker, then it became a card). However, the hassle of carrying them on a daily basis (and especially losing them!) is too much so I was left them at home. I made a color photocopy of both and put on my wallet instead.
Then later the Swedish tax office started issuing ID cards for non-citizens and I started carrying that (but also the photocopy).
As a foreigner I was not fully complying with letter of the law by doing that but to me the risk of losing my paperwork was far, far higher than being punished for not carrying those. I assumed that in practice if it was something serious they would look me up in the system anyway, or escort me home to produce my paperwork.
Not sure if I that was indeed the reasonable thing to do or if I got lucky, but I never had any problems.
hartator|56day ago
> anywhere that's not an airport
Why are we accepting this even at airport?
Locking the doors of the cockpit made another 9/11 close to impossible.
wvenable|56day ago
Murdering all the passengers made another 9/11 impossible -- nobody is going to sit quietly while their plane is hijacked anymore.
hayst4ck|56day ago
History is filled with people who dug their own graves while a person with a gun pointed at them told them to do it.
It takes an exceptional person to act before their fate is sealed and the majority of passengers, if not all of them, will be in a state of denial or shock at the situation they are in preventing them from action. Others who might want to act, but not having been in the situation before, will think about what to do or when the right moment to act is, and the right moment will never come, especially if the hijackers can guarantee the first person who acts dies.
wvenable|56day ago
Prior to 9/11, hijackings occurred with mild frequency and the official policy was appeasement: get the plane safely landed and then negotiate with the hijackers. In any ways, 9/11 was possible due to exploiting that particular policy.
Since 9/11 there have been attempts to disrupt planes and no shortage of people willing to tackle the person responsible.
mh-|56day ago
As a frequent flyer who has thought about this scenario a bit, I agree with this. And I actually think that as long as the FAs kept making their inane announcements about credit cards and so forth, most pax wouldn't even notice a takeover at the front of the plane.
crote|55day ago
You do what the person with the gun says, because you believe they'll shoot if you don't. If you believe that they will shoot and kill you regardless, following their orders is (at best) going to give you a few more agonizing minutes to live. The threat becomes meaningless.
Don't try to overpower the hijackers? You die. Try to overpower the hijackers and fail? You die. Try to overpower the hijackers and succeed? You live. It only takes one person to do the math and realize they are basically in a no-loss scenario.
hayst4ck|55day ago
Yes, the math is the easy part, doing is the hard part. The difference between understanding and doing is large and denial, shock, rumination, and rationalization all fuel inaction and there is often a moment in which it becomes too late.
People on death marches, in concentration camps, or other similar scenarios have the same math, and yet they get gassed or forced to dig their own graves after which they are shot and buried in them.
So yes, rationally that all makes sense and we should celebrate anyone putting themselves at risk to fight for the benefit of a larger group, but reality is different, especially if the hijackers can guarantee at least one death.
To say a hijack could never happen again is wrong. The doors are a much more reasonable explanation than the courage of men.
History also gets forgotten, such as the history of secret police or mass deportation efforts as is quite clear in this thread.
wvenable|55day ago
Airport security has rendered passengers equal. There is no imbalance of power that exists in all the examples that you provided.
hayst4ck|55day ago
Assuming something is true doesn't make it true. Colluding airport employees as well as rural airports seem like clear vulnerabilities. When thinking about security problems you don't just assume your security measure always succeed and assuming that all passengers are "equal" seems like a poor assumption, especially for an exceptional case by highly motivated people, potentially with state backing.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air_West_Flight_612
Here is an example where a man got a gun on a plane in 2007, which directly disproves the 'equality' if passengers.
jollyllama|55day ago
I'm not arguing against anything you've said, but this isn't as popular of a sentiment as you think it is. For example, people who post information about DUI checkpoints in local social media forums are typically pilloried in comments sections.
mariodiana|56day ago
Unless I'm mistaken, I remember some years ago the Apple Store blocked a DUI Checkpoint app. Has that changed?
nashashmi|55day ago
ICE has quota requirements to meet. And this makes it difficult for them to meet it. They don’t want to work so hard. It is a big problem.
insane_dreamer|55day ago
In essence it's no different from users being able to report a speed check on Apple/Google Maps
amy214|55day ago
Speaking as a resident of the United States who does not happen to possess paperwork related to my residency, I think this ICE stuff is terrible. I do want to stay here in the US, I do have needs that require welfare for myself and my children. Food, housing, medicine, these are human rights, we all deserve them it's as simple as that. I thought the US supported human rights so that I could stay here and raise a family on the taxpayer dime because someone threatened me one time in my home country. Sadly, that is not the case, for shame.
mschuster91|56day ago
> As a more tan law-abiding US citizen, the possibility of some agent asking me for papers and then asking probing questions to "prove myself" anywhere that's not an airport is enough for me to want a heads up not to be in area where that might happen.
No matter if you are a law-abiding citizen, the cops have too many rights to annoy people. At least in Western nations, anyone should have the right to not answer the police or any other agent of the state about what one is doing or has done without repercussions. Always remember "three felonies a day"!
In practice, we all know that if you do not do what the cop wants (or, frankly, if you have the wrong skin color), the cop finds a way to make your life difficult - from submitting one to the litany of shit they can legally do (like a full roadworthiness check of your vehicle or, if near a border, a full inspection for contraband) down to stuff that should be outright illegal (like civil forfeiture) or is actually illegal (like a lot of the current actions of ICE).
dzhiurgis|55day ago
> not wanting to get hassled at a DUI checkpoint
We don’t get this in NZ. Waze has removed this feature after threats. I don’t like cops either, but it is super fair and logical to me.
account42|55day ago
Reporting traffic cameras/stops is illegal in many countries but not the US. That however does not mean that reporting police activity is automatically always legal there. Similar to how taking along a hitchhiker is legal but driving a getaway car for a crime is not.
goopypoop|56day ago
> As a more tan law-abiding US citizen
At first I misread this and thought you must be a vigilante
kennywinker|56day ago
[flagged]
|56day ago
nevrchanmge|56day ago
[dead]
kstrauser|56day ago
You can hold both of those opinions simultaneously. They pair nicely.
kennywinker|55day ago
You definitely can. I was prompting the parent commenter to see if they had made that connection or not.
clocker|56day ago
[flagged]
Jtsummers|56day ago
In the US, we're not ordinarily required to keep any sort of ID on our person. There are some exceptions, such as the mentioned airports, crossing federal borders (as in to Canada or Mexico), some federal facilities, maybe some state/local government facilities, and (state dependent I've learned) when operating a car. Otherwise, you're pretty much free to leave your home in nothing but shorts and maybe a shirt (public decency laws and all) and go almost anywhere without issue.
Real ID is irrelevant to this. The issue is that now they can demand that people prove their citizenship almost anywhere and anytime beyond the few places it was permitted before.
OkayPhysicist|55day ago
The shorts and shirt is state dependent, too. If you're in California, the shorts and shirts are optional (indecent exposure requires "intent to arose or offend")
Rebelgecko|55day ago
My understanding is that Real ID isn't considered proof that someone is legally in the US, because in some cases a non citizen can get one while they're here legally and then overstay their welcome.
And that's also ignoring the whole "papers please" of how allegedly Americans aren't required to carry ID if they're just walking around
crote|55day ago
No, why would it?
I live in a country with the equivalent of a Real ID and a law requiring you to present it when asked. Officially they are supposed to have a good reason for it, but in practice they'll happily do it just because they can. And they'll continue "just asking questions" if they feel like it. You're not under arrest of course, but they are happy to waste a few hours of your time when you "refuse to cooperate".
After all, as a law-abiding citizen you don't have anything to hide, do you?
dadjoker|56day ago
[dead]
csbrooks|56day ago
[flagged]
alemanek|56day ago
If you truly believe that; then you are not paying attention
kstrauser|56day ago
The person you replied to was pointing out a typo in their parent post: "more tan", referring to skin color and the demonstrable effect it has on interactions with law enforcement.
account42|55day ago
Intent matters.
bryanrasmussen|56day ago
I've considered making a similar app for Denmark's train and bus ticket checkers, but I expect it would get rule illegal and blocked.
https://www.thelocal.dk/20240529/what-happens-if-you-board-a...
ericmay|56day ago
This is anti-social behavior and it leads to lawlessness and society sometimes having rather overbearing response to the increase (see ICE in the United States).
Paying for public services is a duty of the public. Otherwise you won’t have public services anymore. It’s morally equivalent to being a tax cheat, in my view.
bryanrasmussen|56day ago
Yeah, sometimes people develop an antipathy to certain social structures, and then that antipathy is defined as anti-social I guess, but there's probably no amount of Jantelov you can lay on that will make them change their minds.
potato3732842|56day ago
[flagged]
ericmay|55day ago
Communism is a failed ideology and we should be on guard to extinguish it wherever we find it. We know that state ownership of the means of production leads to poor economic results at the nation state level.
With that out of the way, if we (and I personally do) want to support transit for the masses and even make sure that those who are struggling financially have a means to use transit to maintain their qualify of life and dignity, we should do so through publicly supported programs and funding instead of "yea go ahead and jump the queue" because that leads to other problems, perhaps chief of all is the perception of anti-social behavior.
You can't have public programs or support a strong community when people perceive that there is injustice taking place, and when they see someone cutting line and seeing no repercussions, you will lose broad support for public works. In other words, the bad apple spoils the bunch.
potato3732842|55day ago
>and when they see someone cutting line and seeing no repercussions, you will lose broad support for public works
You mean like how a bunch of states imported every tom dick and harry from the 3rd world, immigration papers be damned, handed out licenses/residency like candy, then signed them all up for bennies and consequently support for those social programs is waning among the voting public?
It's maddening that you can't seem to grasp that your thinking can trivially be used to justify the kind of behavior w're currently seeing from ICE
ericmay|55day ago
Let me summarize my thoughts here:
I think we should fund assistance programs for folks to use mass transit (that we also need to build more of and fund more of) instead of having people hop the queue because it leads to negative outcomes for public programs, and it's unfair.
You're free to make of that what you will. If that means you think I support ICE and their current behavior or something, then I guess I do. I don't really care.
soderfoo|56day ago
I went as a biljettkontrollant (Swedish ticket inspector) for Halloween—thought it’d be funny as a Yank expat.
Entering a room, I could feel the anxiety as some people instinctively grabbed their phones to buy a ticket.
potato3732842|56day ago
That's in poor taste, but only because it cost them money.
account42|55day ago
They should have really had a ticket in the first place though, otherwise they are stealing from all other riders who have to make up the missed cost in increased ticket prices (or from all taxpayers since public transport costs are almost always already heavily subsidized).
abeppu|56day ago
There are so many layers of crazy here but the one that strikes me most is attacking CNN for having a piece about the App. I.e. it's not just that reporting police activity is treated as a problem (it's not) but even an article discussing the way that some people are reporting police activity is a problem.
> "CNN is willfully endangering the lives of officers who put their lives on the line every day and enabling dangerous criminal aliens to evade US law,"
If the engadget article gets enough eyeballs will they be also be willfully endangering lives? What about a really popular forum thread discussing that article?
crote|55day ago
> officers who put their lives on the line every day
This sounds a lot less impressive when you realize that cops have the same fatal injury rate as landscaping supervisors or crane operators, less than half the rate of garbage collectors, and one-sixth the rate of logging workers.
There's definitely a decent bit of risk involved in being a cop, but we're not exactly seeing Thin Green Line flags for landscapers either, are we?
93po|55day ago
Cops should be proud to put their lives at risk. It should be part of the job expectations. You should care so much about the community you're supposed to serve that you'd be willing to make that sacrifice, even for a total stranger. The fact that none of this pride or expectation exists highlights that cops are cowards who get into policing for bad or selfish reasons and perpetuate systemic problems that harm millions.
djexjms|55day ago
That's a nice ideal. I honestly kind of agree with you in the sense that I wish that was how things were. But in my view, it's easier to think about the police as a force whose primary purpose is to enforce the property rights of the capital holding class. In the United States there have been court rulings clarifying that police officers are never obligated to risk their lives.
If you look at the actual numbers, at least in the US, policing can really only be viewed as a risky profession from a white-collar point of view. According to OSHA, construction workers, truck drivers, farmers, and even pilots all have a greater likelihood of dying on the job.
93po|55day ago
I agree that's both the historical basis and continued reality of what policing is in the US (and also probably elsewhere). It's interesting to see how quickly and ravenously cops respond to businesses calling in reports, and crimes associated to the wealthy and powerful. Meanwhile someone can call the cops about their neighbor beating a spouse and they'll never show up and seem annoyed when they want to make a report.
Gud|55day ago
No they shouldn’t.
In an ideal world police are helping tourists find their way to their destination, helping grannies cross the street and writing the occasional traffic fine.
Where I live, violent crime is rare.
93po|55day ago
Sure but that point we're idealizing a society where humans are just... not humans. The occasional violence is going to happen amongst humans for a long time, there is a lot of basic evolutionary wiring in us that is going to lead some section of the population into violence as teenagers or adults.
Gud|54day ago
Yes, but the level of risk police should be exposed to can be negligible.
voidUpdate|55day ago
Now I want a loggers "Thin Brown Line" flag XD
EGreg|56day ago
This reminds me of how we have articles and handwringing about “our soldiers were attacked” in a country they had no authorization to even be. It is never discussed what they were actually doing there, but this is usually framed as in “we need more money to defend our men and women overseas”.
Example: https://amp.cnn.com/cnn/2017/10/23/politics/niger-troops-law...
Several other leading senators also said they were in the dark about the operation in the western Africa nation.
“I didn’t know there was 1,000 troops in Niger,” Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-South Carolina, told NBC’s Chuck Todd on “Meet the Press” Sunday. “They are going to brief us next week as to why they were there and what they were doing.”
He continued: “I got a little insight on why they were there and what they were doing. I can say this to the families: They were there to defend America. They were there to help allies. They were there to prevent another platform to attack America and our allies.”
https://www.npr.org/2020/01/06/793895401/iraqi-parliament-vo...
Even when a country’s leaders unanimously tell us to withdraw our troops, we say nah:
https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/us-withdrawing-iraq-agreemen...
Henchman21|55day ago
“Are we the baddies?” — Mitchell & Webb
zeristor|55day ago
Antagonistic posts could well be by Russian misinformation. They’ve done this before and that’s what they do.
They just need to do enough to trigger others off.
DaSHacka|53day ago
Russia wants the US to deport illegal immigrants and criminals?
That sounds like the opposite of what they should want.