From what research I've seen, the phrasing here should be that non-citizens were deported and chose to bring their US citizen children with them. The children themselves were not deported.
This in no way excuses any of the other issues like not allowing contact with legal advocates / attorneys.
Difficult to describe them as choosing to do anything:
> ICE held the families incommunicado, refusing or failing to respond to multiple attempts by attorneys and family members to contact them. In one instance, a mother was granted less than one minute on the phone before the call was abruptly terminated when her spouse tried to provide legal counsel’s phone number.
What would they do, leave their child in an ICE facility and hope that somehow word gets back to family to go get them?
They would transfer custody to an individual who was allowed to remain in the US. This had been organized in the case of at least one of the US citizens deported (expelled?) here.
> phrasing here should be that non-citizens were deported and chose to bring their US citizen children with them. The children themselves were not deported
This is what ICE alleges. They're a uniquely uncredible witness among government agencies [1][2].
A judge found the father's allegations worthy of meriting "strong suspicion that the Government just deported a
U.S. citizen with no meaningful process," an act which is itself illegal [3]. That is far more credible.
The actions by ICE in this and other cases are beyond defensible. If they have a case, let it be heard in open court with adequate counsel. Stop playing the silly reindeer games with people's lives.
That would be one way to make America great again.
A post elsewhere about the details said ICE found the two-year old was unable to 'describe her status in full, intelligible sentences', so deported, even though her father (not deported and not consenting to his child's expulsion) wanted her left with him.
From my experience with two-tear olds, I guess ICE was technically correct.
The father explicitly did not want the child deported with the mother, had informed ICE of that, and initiated legal proceedings to that effect [1].
The mother and US citizen child were held largely incommunicado. They were not given access to a lawyer, and communication with the father was monitored, and upon the father attempting to give them the phone number for an attorney the phone was taken from the mother. Then promptly put on a flight out of the country
When a judge attempted to contact the mother, while the mother and child were still in US custody: The US did not respond for an hour presumably so that it could remove the mother and child from US custody prior to responding.
> The Government contends that this is all okay because the mother wishes that the child be deported with her. But the Court doesn’t know that. [2]
And that's a quote from the Trump appointed very Trump leaning [3] judge.
All actual evidence we have here is that the child was intentionally deported (expelled?) against the parents wishes. Certainly against one of the parents wishes.
Note that it's advised for a single parent traveling internationally with their children to carry an letter from the other parent granting permission, because it may otherwise be interpreted as an attempt at international kidnapping and you may be prevented from traveling. The US government itself says this: https://www.usa.gov/travel-documents-children
Yet here they are deliberately moving a child internationally against the express wishes of at least one of the parents.
Oh wow, what a choice! Imagine, having a gun to your head and saying "but i had a choice!" In no way can you say that these people, given no legal advocates, chose to bring their children, or at least freely chose.
Being eventually forced to decide whether to leave your child behind or take them with you out of the USA is a direct consequence of the choice to illegally enter the country.
Are you suggesting we never deport parents under any circumstance? Having a citizen child is not some get-out-deportation-free card.
One thing I don’t understand is how this is even a choice the parents have the legal right to make, assuming their US citizen children do not have passports (I don’t know if the answer to that is publicly known). Can a child legally be taken out of the country without a passport and some kind of verifications?
The same happens to US citizens who have/bear children in other countries. Moreover some will do much as assume the children do not have local citizenship but US citizenship despite being born in that non-US country.
I don't think the lack of documentation is a barrier to deportation. All that matters is that the country they are being deported to agrees to take them. But this has been rather routinely violated by ICE in the past--they are a totally criminal organization. (They would deport people by shoving them into Mexico--never mind if they are actually Mexican or not.)
> From what research I've seen, the phrasing here should be that non-citizens were deported and chose to bring their US citizen children with them. The children themselves were not deported.
That seems deliberately Orwellian. What's the "not deported" scenario you're imagining? Literally abandoning your child in a jail somewhere?!
It's not like these folks are in hotels, or have access to phones or family.
I mean, yikes. Is that really what we've come to in the discourse on this site? Putting scare quotes around "deported" to pretend that it's only "other issues" that are problems?
Not ironically, yes, that's where we are. I remember when we would say such things about a school of children being gunned down. "Really?? That's where we are now as a society? How did we let this happen?"
We let it happen by not saying "enough" when the last thing happened. If a school of kids gets gunned down and a society lets that slide, that society becomes one more tolerant of violence against children. We said we were powerless to stop that, so here we are now, bringing violence against children as a matter of federal policy.
This is not accurate, though I have found that people who steep in rightwing propaganda tend to repeat these type of talking points.
The Rawlsian veil ethic applies here.
EDIT: RE - the knee-jerk downvotes. I appreciate that people pointing out authoritarianism can be painful if you are embracing it. Cognitive dissonance is never a fun thing to work through, and having done it a few times I sympathize with the struggles you face or may be facing.
I'm not going to downvote you. But Rawls never applies. Rawls is a big scam. At root, it is relativism wrapped up in the august raiment of state-of-nature social contract theory, whatever his protests to the contrary; and the relativism in this case is what "feels right" to him and his fancy neighbors living in Cambridge.
Six months ago I would have endorsed wide-scale deportations, but after seeing the consequences—families swept into jails, plain-clothes officers ambushing people on their way to work or school, and communities living in constant fear—it’s clear that indiscriminate removals are neither practical nor just. This approach diverts resources from pursuing violent offenders, erodes faith in the rule of law, and forces the whole country toward a “papers-please” surveillance culture, where everyone must carry ever-stricter IDs. Watching longtime neighbors dragged off for minor infractions, the policy feels capricious, and that perception of unfairness only accelerates the broader corrosion of civil liberties. A sound path must still secure the border, yet focus enforcement on genuine threats and offer law-abiding residents a transparent route to legal status, so safety is preserved without sacrificing the freedoms.
I think the most common of human mistakes is to think that because something is easy to say, it is easy to do.
Once you actually dig in to how to accomplish something you find the devil in the details and complexity in places you didn't realized it exists. I would not believe someone is an experienced programmer unless they understand this idea in their bones.
I think so many people here, with the benefit of hindsight, are accusatory, but they've committed this very same type of error themselves.
I am vehemently against this administration, but feeling like something must be done about border violations is reasonable and thinking there is a way to do that is reasonable. I personally don't think it's the best use of resources, but I think it is reasonable to want some kind of border with meaningful enforcement.
What is not reasonable is thinking this administration would do it in good faith, rather than as a means of power grabs against the legal system, but some people aren't capable of taking heed of warnings, and must experience consequences before they understand. Some people aren't able to think through "where is the public plan that explains this" and realize that if it's not there, if there is only the concept of a plan, then that's someone vying for power, not someone attempting to solve a problem.
When people come back to reality and choose to be grounded in it, that should be celebrated rather than persecuted even if they materially caused damage by their ignorance and lack of thought. Game theory requires punishment/defection against those who don't cooperate, but it also requires forgiveness for those who repent.
Good question. I still think it's unfair for these people to stay here, when legal refugees spent waiting years or decades for permission to enter often in bad conditions in refugee camps. The issue here is officials keep rounding up students on legal visas and parents who’ve lived here for years—exactly the people the article labels “families who had lived in the United States for years and had deep ties to their communities.” Where are the fresh arrivals?
I’m sure they thought it was like the Boondocks Catcher Freeman master’s version of slavery where they were all in the fields playing games and hanging out with pre-packed picnic baskets, waiting for the expedition
I'm pretty sympathetic to people who are hawkish on immigration: the right's been demagoguing it for... forever? You hear all kinds of total bullshit like they drive down wages or they eat fuckin dogs or whatever.
The real tragedy is that immigration is probably the reason we've outpaced other OECD nations in economic growth recently, and more to the point, immigrants almost always drive wages up. TL;DR: immigration is practically all upside.
The second part of this is that immigration and border enforcement is often pretty cruel, just by nature. You're talking about turning kids back into some Central/South American social system, breaking up families, etc. You only hear about it now because the Trump admin perversely rejoices in trumpeting the cruelty, but it's only slightly more gross now than it usually is. Until Trump, the right used to leave this part out.
Assuming that this is truthful about your changing perceptions (not just a familiar astroturf tactic of "I used to think X, but now Y"), that's really commendable.
It seems we don't learn and revise much lately; we mostly just get angry and try to score points against the opposing team.
Well done for changing your mind. Most people would find this post impossible to write.
The arguments that changed your mind are important information. If we want to change the minds of fence sitters then focusing on these arguments should be the priority.
You make an interesting “right-wing” case against mass deportation of immigrants.
> This approach diverts resources from pursuing violent offenders, erodes faith in the rule of law, and forces the whole country toward a “papers-please” surveillance culture, where everyone must carry ever-stricter IDs.
> No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.
The states are responsible for providing equal protection of the laws to everyone here. The states need to stand up and fight ICE.
We honestly need a Democrat governor to grow a pair and begin arresting ICE agents unlawfully detaining and kidnapping people. Then let the FBI and Bondi escalate it into a full-blown states' rights issue.
I’m so tired of how pussy democrats are. The moderate wing is so dominated by corporate money that they’ll never do it and just let American fascism happen.
The left in America is ran by geriatrics (Bernie) or unelectable young people (AOC). None of them have the guile to do what you’ve said (or rather to pressure and call for the governors to do that).
The left has a pussyfooting problem. The left is beta, and has surrendered the aesthetics of power to the right again and again throught history (and the only times that they keep it they end up becoming as bad or worse than what they are fighting)
But for interesting HN discussion... anyone got any juice on why this is happening. Is there orders going down the chain of command from the president to do this sort of thing. Was this behaviour always there but less reported before? Are they more emboldened by the current environment?
The current administration has set targets for numbers of people deported(which ICE is currently behind on). That creates an incentive to skip due process in order to get more people deported more quickly (and the awareness that there will no consequences for doing so probably contributes as well)
The administration has also been "defending" their absence of due process and trying to work around judge orders to stop, shaving as close to the letter of judicial orders as they could when they don't just ignore them entirely.
ICE taking that as carte blanche to smash and grab is perfectly logical given that agency is ICE.
And while trying to meet those numbers, they are being specifically told not to do mass raids of farms and other business in red states that will hurt Trump voters
Because it's always been happening. If they didn't already have this sort of abuse practiced they wouldn't be so good at it. The ACLU used to write basically the same exact pieces about the DEA
Maybe it's 10% or 20% more prevalent or worse, I can't say from my vantage point, but it's a difference of degree, not a categorical one. You read these stories and they read exactly like all the other stories of how all sorts of "criminals" have been abused by the system for years, especially when they have a political blank check to do do. Making it hard for people to get a lawyer, moving too fast for people to appeal anything or get outside scrutiny is exactly how these systems have always behaved when they feel like it.
Now it's ICE and not DEA or whatever but this is basically the level of abuse with which the authorities have always treated with.
It's nice that the public is paying attention now, but I have very little hope that it will actually lead to systemic changes.
It has not. We have never previously sent immigrants to foreign concentration camps. There were internment camps which were bad enough during the war, but we're now kidnapping people, sending them to El Salvador, and locking them up for life.
I don't like this kind of response because it's basically kind of an assumption, and you don't really give any evidence for it.
On one hand, sure, abuses by people in positions of power have always happened, so if you're just making a general argument that enforcement authorities abuse power, I mean yeah, human nature.
But this article is making some specific points:
1. Those who were deported were given basically zero access to even talk to a lawyer, and that in at least one case a habeas corpus petition was deliberately avoided by deporting the family at 6 AM before courts opened.
2. Multiple US minor citizen children were deported.
So, no, without more evidence, I'm not willing to believe that it's just some minor increase of degree. While yes, I'm sure there have been abuses in the past, the current policy seems hellbent on deporting as many people as possible, due process be damned, and that was not the policy in previous years. I'd also highlight that the current President has said, explicitly, that deporting people without due process is his goal: https://truthout.org/articles/we-cannot-give-everyone-a-tria...
In other words, I don't believe this is just an aberrant, abusive exception to the policy. It very much seems like this is the policy now.
No due process at the borders is a shame both now and before, but hopefully this time there is a willingness to change things. Probably not at the next swing of power.
Not the same thing. They are rushing people onto planes before the have any hope of seeing a judge, not documenting anything other than "we say so", and sometimes even sending deportees off to prisons well known for mistreatment and even torture of prisoners in El Salvador. This isn't even close to the same thing.
I think you’re overlooking the fact that our world - and the U.S. in particular - is sinking deeper and deeper into a deep crisis. No one knows exactly where this crisis will lead, but one thing is clear: everything around us is undergoing systematic change. And if you care about that, now is the time to get involved, because it’s during the moments of crisis that societies change.
Every day across the world thousands of people are removed from countries around the world for violating immigration laws. Except in cases of where it coincided with criminality, it's always going to be very ugly, because it means somebody had built up a life for themselves somewhere and that is now ended due to them having been born in a different place and then overstayed their permission, or never received such, to stay somewhere else.
Like in this case, what do you propose as an alternative with a precedent that you think could be agreeable to most people? The parents were in the country illegally, and the children's citizenship was solely one of birthright. Any sort of "pleasant" outcome would effectively require turning birthright citizenship into defacto citizenship for the parents as well, at least if they can stay illegally for long enough. That's not only completely unrealistic, but also a complete slap in the face to the millions of people who try to migrate legally and are refused entry.
The phrase "solely one of birthright" suggests the diminishment of the citizenship of certain people. That is not how citizenship works: no one is less of a citizen than anyone else.
The most objectionable part here — by far — is not the deportation of the parents, but the deportation of citizens and the lack of due process.
The alternative being proposed is that if ICE is going to deport the parents of US citizen children, the parents should be given the opportunity to seek legal counsel regarding how they're going to ensure care for their children.
> the children's citizenship was solely one of birthright
Under the US Constitution, this is not a distinction. What you're looking for is just "the children's citizenship" without this qualifier that signifies nothing under the law.
The better alternative is to aggressively enforce employment laws against employers. Immigrants come here and stay here to work.
> Like in this case, what do you propose as an alternative with a precedent that you think could be agreeable to most people?
I like how nobody has actually answered this question yet, and have only harped on your birthright comment.
The parents are in the US illegally, ICE deports people who are in the US illegally. Presumably the parents didn’t want to leave their USC kids behind so they brought them.
I guess possible options are
1. Allow illegal parents to designate USC kids a guardian who has legal US immigration status
2. Dont deport illegal immigrants who have USC kids (basically making birthright transitive to parents)
> what do you propose as an alternative with a precedent that you think could be agreeable to most people?
How about real actual fucking due process? Maybe they can NOT cut off communication when the citizen father tried to provide her with a phone number for legal counsel. Anything else is ghoulish. Keep defending it if you really don’t give a shit about your level of humanity.
> and the children's citizenship was solely one of birthright
My citizenship is solely that way too, even though generations of my ancestors were also citizens.
Unless you personally naturalized then your citizenship is solely by birthright. The vast majority of US citizens are this way. Insisting that this is somehow worth less in terms of legal protections is just frankly wrong.
Imagine you said this for other circumstances. "Well, a parent going to prison is always going to be hard for the family - better imprison the whole family!"
> Any sort of "pleasant" outcome would effectively require turning birthright citizenship into defacto citizenship for the parents as well, at least if they can stay illegally for long enough.
No, there are lots of immigration statuses between "illegal" and "citizen". DAPA, which was the Obama administration's policy, gave parents of US citizens a status where they could get temporary renewable work permits and exemption for deportation. This was not citizenship, or even a status that could allow someone to eventually become a citizen.
First, the US needs to resolve its issue of citizenship. It has been proposed that the US citizenship model was always like the Swiss model - you could only be a citizen if you were born of at least 1 citizen (naturalized or otherwise). For reasons I'm not clear, this has not been strictly enforced for some time. Instead we defaulted to "anyone born in a US hospital is a citizen"
Then, as welfare, lack of law enforcement and border grew, the broken citizenship process became a larger problem that now we have to deal with.
To me, the answer to your question of what is the alternative is as follows: The sole act of breaking laws and cutting the line to come into the country, to then birth babies here for the pusposes of straightjacketing the host's own response seems like should not be allowed, full stop. The premise of becoming a US citizen cannot be grounded in 2 crimes being committed before you are a citizen (1 illegal entry, 1 lying about your asylum petition).
We then have the issue of citizenship. It cannot be that because you come out of a womb that happens to be passing by a US hospital, you are a US citizen. US hospitals do not have magic pixie dust that grant american-ness. The Swiss have the right model that you actually have to come from at least 1 national parent, to foster national unity. The Swiss have the longest-lasting democracy in the world for a reason. Ignoring this seems suicidal. In nature and history, no humans prospered without an organized tribe centered around shared history and values.
Then there are the cases of people that came here, all legally, and found a life worth having by contributing to society. There should be a path for them to be citizens. What that path looks like, I dont know. But that's a conversation worth having soon since they are paying the price for the crimes and abuse committed by the 1st group.
The issue is some ability to fight. For instance, I don’t think the child of a US citizen should be deported without consent of their citizen parent or a ruling against that parent. I’d like some assurance my own child won’t be disappeared to another country without my consent.
> also a complete slap in the face to the millions of people who try to migrate legally and are refused entry.
Yeah, it sounds like a completely unworkable situation.
If only there was some way to make it easier for people to stay in the United States with much relaxed concern about their citizenship status or documentation.
... Oh wait, we could just do that. Because it's our laws, which means it's rules for a game we made up for ourselves. The universe does not care about the lines drawn on a map. People do. If the lines drawn on a map and the separation of human beings across those lines is becoming painful... Maybe we stop hurting ourselves?
We could care less. We did care less in the past. It seemed to work pretty well.
> what do you propose as an alternative with a precedent
There is a moral answer, the practical answer, and two popular answers, none of which are particularly satisfying.
The moral answer is open borders. Both capital, which is generally freer than people are, and people should be able to vote with their feet. However, this is unsustainable unless all or a large bloc of countries allow it in reciprocity, or at least countries with an EU-like agreement. It would make a lot of sense for all of North America to have an EU-like agreement, economically, militarily, and legally.
The practical answer: amnesty for parents of children who are born here, conditional on criminality aversion. Like a form of probation.
The right-wing propaganda answer: immigrants somehow took jobs they are unwilling to do and therefore, while we might crack a few eggs making the omelette, all immigrants must go. Authoritarians love this view.
The left-wing propaganda: all immigrants are noble victims of evil capitalist systems, and therefore any control over borders is inherently racist and fascist. This is clearly also unsustainable, and authoritarians love for their opponents to have this view.
The interesting thing about this parallel, is that the "final solution" in Germany was final because it was not the original solution.
Originally they wanted to, well, deport the undesirables to some far off country, initially to Madagascar if memory serves.
Managing mass incarceration and deportation is a difficult task however, and these people (both then and now) are not exactly competent at anything beyond bravado.
Watching this unfolding from afar is interesting, because I can do so with some healthy detachment. If I lived across the pond I would be pretty desperate right now.
I too have noticed the same language coming out of folks here, folks that have had accounts for over 10 or 15 years. They were always here, but now they emboldened and they are doing their best to make sure that overton window stays very very open on the right.
Since we are quoting, I quote FDR: "Democracy has disappeared in several other great nations--not because the people of those nations disliked democracy, but because they had grown tired of unemployment and insecurity, of seeing their children hungry while they sat helpless in the face of government confusion and government weakness through lack of leadership in government."
True, we are not in bad shape like 1930s Germany or United States but as neoliberalism rot has really set in, people feel economically shaky, and government clearly is not responsive to them. Combined with Social Media warping people brain on what is "success" and "strong man" who will take care of things is clearly appealing. Many of them can also be turned around but it's going to take some doing.
Previously with the family separation policy it was part of an aggressive campaign led by Stephen Miller personally. There are now a few more people who want to do this as much as he does, all in the administration. It was Trump who hired those people, and then it was Trump who rescinded family separations and fired Neilsen over it, because it made bad media. The public has a template for exactly how to stop it. All that said, this is what the Republican base wants.
Your last statement is correct. They are just emboldened by the current political environment. Any law enforcement has a problem where all they see is criminals all day everyday, now we know they aren't always criminals, but that's their view point. There should be sufficient checks and balances to ensure that due process is still upheld. What we're seeing now is the lack of checks because law enforcement feels they will never be held accountable for violating due process. This, while likely not a direct order of the president, it is an environment that his rhetoric has fostered. Even in the cases where the supreme court has said, unanimously, that people have been deported improperly this environment causes those in positions to correct it to ignore the courts.
I support the general idea of expedited deportation of those here illegally, those without valid documents to be here, I don't automatically have a problem if there is greater restrictions on entering or issuing new visas, but I have a major problem with violating due process and these kind of mistakes that's are a result of lack of due diligence.
The courts need to get more heavily involved here. It's easy to blame the president but short of some directive telling people to violate the law the blame is misdirected (until it's election time). The blame needs to be on those individuals doing this thing or seeing it and ignoring it. This is where the courts need to totally strip away default qualified immunity, especially for immigration officers. Because qualified immunity allows them to just say they were following orders without them having to evaluate if what they are doing is legal or not.
I believe if qualified immunity was gone a lot of this nonsense would stop. They would make sure that anyone who was deported was meant to be deported.
I have a friend who is here legally awaiting an asylum hearing, been waiting for 5 years. They were stopped by police for a valid reason and, from what was described the police had probable cause, but the charge itself is very minor. Because she's documented waiting asylum they contacted immigration, for no reason. There was no probable cause to think she was in violation of her immigration status, but they still contacted them and they requested she be held. So now she detained and there's probable cause to do so but it's immigration so they can.
This is where no qualified immunity would make these officers think twice. They know they have no probable cause to continue to hold her beyond the initial charge. Without qualified immunity they would understand that continuing to hold someone after a judge has allowed their release means that they would lose their house their life their future. So I really think we need to end to qualified immunity across the board. Have the people who are supposed to protect us and be responsible for their actions.
Without qualified immunity, no one in their right mind would want to work in law enforcement. LE would become an easy target for malicious litigation where the cost/effort to defend would, itself, be the weapon, regardless of whether or not the lawsuits were won.
LE personnel would have to get insurance, like doctors, which would be crazy expensive and, considering their pay scale, unaffordable.
I don't like some of the implications of qualified immunity, but I understand why it's there and needed.
I think the only real solution to LE abuses is criminal accountability and prosecution. We already have the laws and processes in place to make that happen. It's hindered by the tribal nature of the human condition and I'm not sure you get around that very easily, at least, not at scale.
Are you serious? Trump campaigned on spreading cruelty to these people and he's doing it. There's financial incentive to keep people in private prisons, and we're paying to send them to concentration camps, so it's not money. It's just bigotry.
The suffering is the point. The current administration thinks that by publicly treating anyone vaguely foreign horribly they will be able to end the allure illegal immigration. I guess the dirty secret is that this sort of stuff has been happening, the difference is that now the government wants everyone to know about it
Of course they do. The hilarity of the US’s uniquely draconian global taxation system collides with its incomprehensible schizophrenic immigration system.
I think a couple of things are important to remember in a time like this:
1. This behavior, whether legal or not, is profoundly inhumane.
2. No law, statute, or rule requires us to treat anyone inhumanely. The people behaving this way are doing it because they want to. These are not people you want to have access to any power.
> "Deports" is wrong word for removing a citizen. "Expels" would be more appropriate.
While this is true, the use of what's technically the wrong word highlights that the wrong action is being applied.
The action is a deportation. The targets are people who must/shall not ever be deported. Therefore the headline immediately gets attention for concisely describing a violation.
I think what happened here is that the parents were here illegally. The children just had to accompany the parents. I find it quite possible that the children will be allowed back in once they no longer have to depend on their parents.
In fact I looked this up recently, and “deportation” has historically been used in the sense of “dispossession”, i.e. expelling citizens. For example the notorious deportation of defeated Jews to Babylon.
But nowadays that “deportation” so often connotes “repatriation” we’ll need to make those distinctions. And people seem to be completely unaware: we’re in a Year of Ordinary Jubilee!
There are already words for that: banished, disappeared, forced exiled, concentration camp victim... just reuse terms already used to describe crimes done by nazis and other fascist goverments.
It's 2018. Children are being separated from their parents and kept in cages[1]. It's really important to notice that the pictures in this article are not from reporters, leaks or anything of the sort. They were released by Customs and Border Protection and, no doubt, make things look better than they were.
What has changed since Trump's first term? Yes, there is now a stronger sensitivity to separating children from their parents, among the public at least. One solution is to simply deport child citizens along with non-citizen parents and claim it was by choice.
What solutions are we not seeing in the media though? How many photos are being published about conditions in ICE facilities, Guantanamo bay, etc.? What's going on that we just don't know about this time? If some judge ordered the release of photos of current conditions in ICE facilities, they'd be ignored or even charged with some made-up crime.
I see a lot of people here trying to reason this away, but it's going to be worse than last time and, eventually, the truth will get out. I know it's tough to care about this while Trump is simultaneously tanking the stock market, waging trade wars, threatening multiple countries with invasion or annexation, etc.. That is by design. Even Americans who cannot spare any sympathy for immigrants need to make the time to care about how their government is treating American children.
It's 2000, Bill Clinton is about to wrap up his second term and has deported more people in that term than any president ever at nearly 7,000,000 deportations. Trump barely had 2,000,000 deportations in his first term. Trump's first term was the lowest level of deportations for any administration since Carter. Obama, Reagan, Both Bushes, Clinton and Biden all deported more people every term of their administrations.
This has been going on for a long time. I doubt Trump will beat Clinton's 2nd term. I'd be willing to bet on it if anyone wants to take the other side.
There is so much lack of context in all these discussions. The 'Maryland Man' that everyone is extremely concerned about was first deported by Obama admin in 2009. Remigration is an ugly business, but it has to happen if you want to live in a sovereign nation under the rule of law.
Saying "there is no such thing as a perfect process" when discussing the unconstitutional deportation of LITERAL American citizens on an overnight, including a child with cancer deprived of medication, isn't a reasonable position. It's an attempt to normalize extreme rights violations.
> Remigration is an ugly business, but it has to happen if you want to live in a sovereign nation under the rule of law.
god, what enemies do you have?? I don't know how you go from "give them due process" to "the west has fallen" unless you mean restricting migration by law, which Biden proposed and Trump rejected last year. I'm actually curious - are you aware of that law? Did you hear about it?
“We’re incompetent and can’t achieve our goals by following the same laws and due process previous administrations used so we’re just going to perform as many random acts of evil and right violations to the people we can grab and hope that makes up the difference “
Oh cool, horrendous things like this have been done for years. I guess it's fine then, human rights violations aren't real if someone else did them too. /s
Readit News
This in no way excuses any of the other issues like not allowing contact with legal advocates / attorneys.
> ICE held the families incommunicado, refusing or failing to respond to multiple attempts by attorneys and family members to contact them. In one instance, a mother was granted less than one minute on the phone before the call was abruptly terminated when her spouse tried to provide legal counsel’s phone number.
What would they do, leave their child in an ICE facility and hope that somehow word gets back to family to go get them?
"Leave your 2-year-old with the angry government man who will totes ensure they are reunited with your spouse" is not a choice that exists.
[0] https://www.hrw.org/news/2024/12/16/us-lasting-harm-family-s...
Dead Comment
This is what ICE alleges. They're a uniquely uncredible witness among government agencies [1][2].
A judge found the father's allegations worthy of meriting "strong suspicion that the Government just deported a U.S. citizen with no meaningful process," an act which is itself illegal [3]. That is far more credible.
[1] https://www.aclu.org/court-cases?issue=ice-and-border-patrol...
[2] https://apnews.com/article/ice-immigration-arrest-trial-cont...
[3] https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.lawd.21...
The actions by ICE in this and other cases are beyond defensible. If they have a case, let it be heard in open court with adequate counsel. Stop playing the silly reindeer games with people's lives.
That would be one way to make America great again.
Being right handed, you choose your left, and he lops it off.
Was it really your choice to have your left hand cut off?
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/25/us/politics/us-citizen-de...
A post elsewhere about the details said ICE found the two-year old was unable to 'describe her status in full, intelligible sentences', so deported, even though her father (not deported and not consenting to his child's expulsion) wanted her left with him.
From my experience with two-tear olds, I guess ICE was technically correct.
edit - typo
The father explicitly did not want the child deported with the mother, had informed ICE of that, and initiated legal proceedings to that effect [1].
The mother and US citizen child were held largely incommunicado. They were not given access to a lawyer, and communication with the father was monitored, and upon the father attempting to give them the phone number for an attorney the phone was taken from the mother. Then promptly put on a flight out of the country
When a judge attempted to contact the mother, while the mother and child were still in US custody: The US did not respond for an hour presumably so that it could remove the mother and child from US custody prior to responding.
> The Government contends that this is all okay because the mother wishes that the child be deported with her. But the Court doesn’t know that. [2]
And that's a quote from the Trump appointed very Trump leaning [3] judge.
All actual evidence we have here is that the child was intentionally deported (expelled?) against the parents wishes. Certainly against one of the parents wishes.
[1] https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.lawd.21...
[2] https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.lawd.21...
[3] See prior rulings: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terry_A._Doughty#Notable_rulin...
Yet here they are deliberately moving a child internationally against the express wishes of at least one of the parents.
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Are you suggesting we never deport parents under any circumstance? Having a citizen child is not some get-out-deportation-free card.
But ICE hid the evidence and prevented the courts from looking into it.
That seems deliberately Orwellian. What's the "not deported" scenario you're imagining? Literally abandoning your child in a jail somewhere?!
It's not like these folks are in hotels, or have access to phones or family.
I mean, yikes. Is that really what we've come to in the discourse on this site? Putting scare quotes around "deported" to pretend that it's only "other issues" that are problems?
We let it happen by not saying "enough" when the last thing happened. If a school of kids gets gunned down and a society lets that slide, that society becomes one more tolerant of violence against children. We said we were powerless to stop that, so here we are now, bringing violence against children as a matter of federal policy.
Dead Comment
The Rawlsian veil ethic applies here.
EDIT: RE - the knee-jerk downvotes. I appreciate that people pointing out authoritarianism can be painful if you are embracing it. Cognitive dissonance is never a fun thing to work through, and having done it a few times I sympathize with the struggles you face or may be facing.
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Once you actually dig in to how to accomplish something you find the devil in the details and complexity in places you didn't realized it exists. I would not believe someone is an experienced programmer unless they understand this idea in their bones.
I think so many people here, with the benefit of hindsight, are accusatory, but they've committed this very same type of error themselves.
I am vehemently against this administration, but feeling like something must be done about border violations is reasonable and thinking there is a way to do that is reasonable. I personally don't think it's the best use of resources, but I think it is reasonable to want some kind of border with meaningful enforcement.
What is not reasonable is thinking this administration would do it in good faith, rather than as a means of power grabs against the legal system, but some people aren't capable of taking heed of warnings, and must experience consequences before they understand. Some people aren't able to think through "where is the public plan that explains this" and realize that if it's not there, if there is only the concept of a plan, then that's someone vying for power, not someone attempting to solve a problem.
When people come back to reality and choose to be grounded in it, that should be celebrated rather than persecuted even if they materially caused damage by their ignorance and lack of thought. Game theory requires punishment/defection against those who don't cooperate, but it also requires forgiveness for those who repent.
This isn't really a surprise [0]
[0] https://www.thisamericanlife.org/846/this-is-the-cake-we-bak...
The real tragedy is that immigration is probably the reason we've outpaced other OECD nations in economic growth recently, and more to the point, immigrants almost always drive wages up. TL;DR: immigration is practically all upside.
The second part of this is that immigration and border enforcement is often pretty cruel, just by nature. You're talking about turning kids back into some Central/South American social system, breaking up families, etc. You only hear about it now because the Trump admin perversely rejoices in trumpeting the cruelty, but it's only slightly more gross now than it usually is. Until Trump, the right used to leave this part out.
https://www.ucdavis.edu/magazine/how-does-immigration-affect...
Dead Comment
It seems we don't learn and revise much lately; we mostly just get angry and try to score points against the opposing team.
The arguments that changed your mind are important information. If we want to change the minds of fence sitters then focusing on these arguments should be the priority.
You make an interesting “right-wing” case against mass deportation of immigrants.
> This approach diverts resources from pursuing violent offenders, erodes faith in the rule of law, and forces the whole country toward a “papers-please” surveillance culture, where everyone must carry ever-stricter IDs.
Dead Comment
The states are responsible for providing equal protection of the laws to everyone here. The states need to stand up and fight ICE.
We honestly need a Democrat governor to grow a pair and begin arresting ICE agents unlawfully detaining and kidnapping people. Then let the FBI and Bondi escalate it into a full-blown states' rights issue.
The left in America is ran by geriatrics (Bernie) or unelectable young people (AOC). None of them have the guile to do what you’ve said (or rather to pressure and call for the governors to do that).
The left has a pussyfooting problem. The left is beta, and has surrendered the aesthetics of power to the right again and again throught history (and the only times that they keep it they end up becoming as bad or worse than what they are fighting)
Basically we are fked.
But for interesting HN discussion... anyone got any juice on why this is happening. Is there orders going down the chain of command from the president to do this sort of thing. Was this behaviour always there but less reported before? Are they more emboldened by the current environment?
ICE taking that as carte blanche to smash and grab is perfectly logical given that agency is ICE.
Maybe it's 10% or 20% more prevalent or worse, I can't say from my vantage point, but it's a difference of degree, not a categorical one. You read these stories and they read exactly like all the other stories of how all sorts of "criminals" have been abused by the system for years, especially when they have a political blank check to do do. Making it hard for people to get a lawyer, moving too fast for people to appeal anything or get outside scrutiny is exactly how these systems have always behaved when they feel like it.
Now it's ICE and not DEA or whatever but this is basically the level of abuse with which the authorities have always treated with.
It's nice that the public is paying attention now, but I have very little hope that it will actually lead to systemic changes.
I don't like this kind of response because it's basically kind of an assumption, and you don't really give any evidence for it.
On one hand, sure, abuses by people in positions of power have always happened, so if you're just making a general argument that enforcement authorities abuse power, I mean yeah, human nature.
But this article is making some specific points:
1. Those who were deported were given basically zero access to even talk to a lawyer, and that in at least one case a habeas corpus petition was deliberately avoided by deporting the family at 6 AM before courts opened.
2. Multiple US minor citizen children were deported.
So, no, without more evidence, I'm not willing to believe that it's just some minor increase of degree. While yes, I'm sure there have been abuses in the past, the current policy seems hellbent on deporting as many people as possible, due process be damned, and that was not the policy in previous years. I'd also highlight that the current President has said, explicitly, that deporting people without due process is his goal: https://truthout.org/articles/we-cannot-give-everyone-a-tria...
In other words, I don't believe this is just an aberrant, abusive exception to the policy. It very much seems like this is the policy now.
No due process at the borders is a shame both now and before, but hopefully this time there is a willingness to change things. Probably not at the next swing of power.
Like in this case, what do you propose as an alternative with a precedent that you think could be agreeable to most people? The parents were in the country illegally, and the children's citizenship was solely one of birthright. Any sort of "pleasant" outcome would effectively require turning birthright citizenship into defacto citizenship for the parents as well, at least if they can stay illegally for long enough. That's not only completely unrealistic, but also a complete slap in the face to the millions of people who try to migrate legally and are refused entry.
The most objectionable part here — by far — is not the deportation of the parents, but the deportation of citizens and the lack of due process.
The alternative being proposed is that if ICE is going to deport the parents of US citizen children, the parents should be given the opportunity to seek legal counsel regarding how they're going to ensure care for their children.
Under the US Constitution, this is not a distinction. What you're looking for is just "the children's citizenship" without this qualifier that signifies nothing under the law.
The better alternative is to aggressively enforce employment laws against employers. Immigrants come here and stay here to work.
I like how nobody has actually answered this question yet, and have only harped on your birthright comment.
The parents are in the US illegally, ICE deports people who are in the US illegally. Presumably the parents didn’t want to leave their USC kids behind so they brought them.
I guess possible options are
1. Allow illegal parents to designate USC kids a guardian who has legal US immigration status
2. Dont deport illegal immigrants who have USC kids (basically making birthright transitive to parents)
It doesn't have to be as ugly as what is described in the article.
How about real actual fucking due process? Maybe they can NOT cut off communication when the citizen father tried to provide her with a phone number for legal counsel. Anything else is ghoulish. Keep defending it if you really don’t give a shit about your level of humanity.
My citizenship is solely that way too, even though generations of my ancestors were also citizens.
Unless you personally naturalized then your citizenship is solely by birthright. The vast majority of US citizens are this way. Insisting that this is somehow worth less in terms of legal protections is just frankly wrong.
Imagine you said this for other circumstances. "Well, a parent going to prison is always going to be hard for the family - better imprison the whole family!"
No, there are lots of immigration statuses between "illegal" and "citizen". DAPA, which was the Obama administration's policy, gave parents of US citizens a status where they could get temporary renewable work permits and exemption for deportation. This was not citizenship, or even a status that could allow someone to eventually become a citizen.
Then, as welfare, lack of law enforcement and border grew, the broken citizenship process became a larger problem that now we have to deal with.
To me, the answer to your question of what is the alternative is as follows: The sole act of breaking laws and cutting the line to come into the country, to then birth babies here for the pusposes of straightjacketing the host's own response seems like should not be allowed, full stop. The premise of becoming a US citizen cannot be grounded in 2 crimes being committed before you are a citizen (1 illegal entry, 1 lying about your asylum petition).
We then have the issue of citizenship. It cannot be that because you come out of a womb that happens to be passing by a US hospital, you are a US citizen. US hospitals do not have magic pixie dust that grant american-ness. The Swiss have the right model that you actually have to come from at least 1 national parent, to foster national unity. The Swiss have the longest-lasting democracy in the world for a reason. Ignoring this seems suicidal. In nature and history, no humans prospered without an organized tribe centered around shared history and values.
Then there are the cases of people that came here, all legally, and found a life worth having by contributing to society. There should be a path for them to be citizens. What that path looks like, I dont know. But that's a conversation worth having soon since they are paying the price for the crimes and abuse committed by the 1st group.
Is there an acceptable way for POC to get citizenship anymore, if it's not by inheritance and it's not by being born in the US?
A fair trial in court for a start.
Yeah, it sounds like a completely unworkable situation.
If only there was some way to make it easier for people to stay in the United States with much relaxed concern about their citizenship status or documentation.
... Oh wait, we could just do that. Because it's our laws, which means it's rules for a game we made up for ourselves. The universe does not care about the lines drawn on a map. People do. If the lines drawn on a map and the separation of human beings across those lines is becoming painful... Maybe we stop hurting ourselves?
We could care less. We did care less in the past. It seemed to work pretty well.
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I don't see how it's unrealistic.
There is a moral answer, the practical answer, and two popular answers, none of which are particularly satisfying.
The moral answer is open borders. Both capital, which is generally freer than people are, and people should be able to vote with their feet. However, this is unsustainable unless all or a large bloc of countries allow it in reciprocity, or at least countries with an EU-like agreement. It would make a lot of sense for all of North America to have an EU-like agreement, economically, militarily, and legally.
The practical answer: amnesty for parents of children who are born here, conditional on criminality aversion. Like a form of probation.
The right-wing propaganda answer: immigrants somehow took jobs they are unwilling to do and therefore, while we might crack a few eggs making the omelette, all immigrants must go. Authoritarians love this view.
The left-wing propaganda: all immigrants are noble victims of evil capitalist systems, and therefore any control over borders is inherently racist and fascist. This is clearly also unsustainable, and authoritarians love for their opponents to have this view.
”Do you think the nazis appeared out of thin air? No they were everywhere just waiting for someone to enable them with a label and an ideology.”
I suspect something analogous is happening here and it’s similarly not pretty. Hopefully it’ll get nipped in the bud quickly.
My fellow citizens scare me more than the government does.
Originally they wanted to, well, deport the undesirables to some far off country, initially to Madagascar if memory serves.
Managing mass incarceration and deportation is a difficult task however, and these people (both then and now) are not exactly competent at anything beyond bravado.
Watching this unfolding from afar is interesting, because I can do so with some healthy detachment. If I lived across the pond I would be pretty desperate right now.
True, we are not in bad shape like 1930s Germany or United States but as neoliberalism rot has really set in, people feel economically shaky, and government clearly is not responsive to them. Combined with Social Media warping people brain on what is "success" and "strong man" who will take care of things is clearly appealing. Many of them can also be turned around but it's going to take some doing.
Their skin color and national origin is offensive to the president and the percentage of the country that voted for him.
- sloppiness and seeming cruelty of the process, intentional or not
- disregard for judicial rulings
- pushing boundaries with regards to who (those with legal status) and how (sending people to foreign prisons)
Because Trump is an abject racist with a white nationalist policy who ran on deporting what he finds to be undesirable. It's not hard.
I support the general idea of expedited deportation of those here illegally, those without valid documents to be here, I don't automatically have a problem if there is greater restrictions on entering or issuing new visas, but I have a major problem with violating due process and these kind of mistakes that's are a result of lack of due diligence.
The courts need to get more heavily involved here. It's easy to blame the president but short of some directive telling people to violate the law the blame is misdirected (until it's election time). The blame needs to be on those individuals doing this thing or seeing it and ignoring it. This is where the courts need to totally strip away default qualified immunity, especially for immigration officers. Because qualified immunity allows them to just say they were following orders without them having to evaluate if what they are doing is legal or not.
I believe if qualified immunity was gone a lot of this nonsense would stop. They would make sure that anyone who was deported was meant to be deported.
I have a friend who is here legally awaiting an asylum hearing, been waiting for 5 years. They were stopped by police for a valid reason and, from what was described the police had probable cause, but the charge itself is very minor. Because she's documented waiting asylum they contacted immigration, for no reason. There was no probable cause to think she was in violation of her immigration status, but they still contacted them and they requested she be held. So now she detained and there's probable cause to do so but it's immigration so they can.
This is where no qualified immunity would make these officers think twice. They know they have no probable cause to continue to hold her beyond the initial charge. Without qualified immunity they would understand that continuing to hold someone after a judge has allowed their release means that they would lose their house their life their future. So I really think we need to end to qualified immunity across the board. Have the people who are supposed to protect us and be responsible for their actions.
LE personnel would have to get insurance, like doctors, which would be crazy expensive and, considering their pay scale, unaffordable.
I don't like some of the implications of qualified immunity, but I understand why it's there and needed.
I think the only real solution to LE abuses is criminal accountability and prosecution. We already have the laws and processes in place to make that happen. It's hindered by the tribal nature of the human condition and I'm not sure you get around that very easily, at least, not at scale.
Complexity is the root of all evil.
Dead Comment
1. This behavior, whether legal or not, is profoundly inhumane.
2. No law, statute, or rule requires us to treat anyone inhumanely. The people behaving this way are doing it because they want to. These are not people you want to have access to any power.
While this is true, the use of what's technically the wrong word highlights that the wrong action is being applied.
The action is a deportation. The targets are people who must/shall not ever be deported. Therefore the headline immediately gets attention for concisely describing a violation.
In fact I looked this up recently, and “deportation” has historically been used in the sense of “dispossession”, i.e. expelling citizens. For example the notorious deportation of defeated Jews to Babylon.
But nowadays that “deportation” so often connotes “repatriation” we’ll need to make those distinctions. And people seem to be completely unaware: we’re in a Year of Ordinary Jubilee!
It's 2018. Children are being separated from their parents and kept in cages[1]. It's really important to notice that the pictures in this article are not from reporters, leaks or anything of the sort. They were released by Customs and Border Protection and, no doubt, make things look better than they were.
What has changed since Trump's first term? Yes, there is now a stronger sensitivity to separating children from their parents, among the public at least. One solution is to simply deport child citizens along with non-citizen parents and claim it was by choice.
What solutions are we not seeing in the media though? How many photos are being published about conditions in ICE facilities, Guantanamo bay, etc.? What's going on that we just don't know about this time? If some judge ordered the release of photos of current conditions in ICE facilities, they'd be ignored or even charged with some made-up crime.
I see a lot of people here trying to reason this away, but it's going to be worse than last time and, eventually, the truth will get out. I know it's tough to care about this while Trump is simultaneously tanking the stock market, waging trade wars, threatening multiple countries with invasion or annexation, etc.. That is by design. Even Americans who cannot spare any sympathy for immigrants need to make the time to care about how their government is treating American children.
[1]https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-44518942
It's 2000, Bill Clinton is about to wrap up his second term and has deported more people in that term than any president ever at nearly 7,000,000 deportations. Trump barely had 2,000,000 deportations in his first term. Trump's first term was the lowest level of deportations for any administration since Carter. Obama, Reagan, Both Bushes, Clinton and Biden all deported more people every term of their administrations.
This has been going on for a long time. I doubt Trump will beat Clinton's 2nd term. I'd be willing to bet on it if anyone wants to take the other side.
There is so much lack of context in all these discussions. The 'Maryland Man' that everyone is extremely concerned about was first deported by Obama admin in 2009. Remigration is an ugly business, but it has to happen if you want to live in a sovereign nation under the rule of law.
> Remigration is an ugly business, but it has to happen if you want to live in a sovereign nation under the rule of law.
god, what enemies do you have?? I don't know how you go from "give them due process" to "the west has fallen" unless you mean restricting migration by law, which Biden proposed and Trump rejected last year. I'm actually curious - are you aware of that law? Did you hear about it?
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