While others have pointed out his pro-Hamas rhetoric, I would also point out that we don't actually know why he was detained. The Guardian is just citing speculation from an advocacy group friendly to him. The headline is technically accurate, but it could just as well read "journalist detained after eating cheerios for breakfast".
(ICE's lack of transparency is a valid, but separate, concern, and The Guardian could have at least attempted to contact them before publishing speculation.)
> While others have pointed out his pro-Hamas rhetoric
I refuse to accept these accusations by word-of-mouth. The White House is currently accusing former presidents of "pro-Hamas rhetoric" (which they never expressed).
It would seem to me that "pro-Hamas" is a meaningless cudgel used by the ruling party to justify mistreatment of those who oppose Israel.
> I would also point out that we don't actually know why he was detained
That's always the way it works with secret police. The idea of due process of law and norm following is (1) expressly designed to provide assurances in cases like this and (2) being deliberately degraded and evaded by ICE and DHS at all levels.
Trying to make the story actually about bland journalism criticism is doing their jobs for them. To borrow your framing: your critique is technically accurate, but...
Some journalists's job is to risk their life going to dangerous places. Going to the US is not yet being a war reporter but it's more risky than before.
It was never fun to travel to the US, and the border agents have always been rude, unprofessional and arbitrary. But it seems like it has gotten much worse, and there is no way I'm traveling to the US these days.
Whilst I don't support any of ICE's efforts but ... CAIR and this journalist complain about this on the grounds of free speech? Are these people serious?
Has anyone thought about their position for 5 seconds? There is NO islamic country with a right to free speech. Zero. Not even countries like Morocco or Turkey have anything remotely like free speech, and they're the most open Islamic countries imaginable. There are dozens of islamic countries with death penalties for criticism of islam or government (and even Morocco and Turkey have prison sentences for that). CAIR is representing these countries' interests in the US, and they are arguing for free speech protection ... in the US. Not in the over 200 countries where muslims use state violence to control speech. In the US. They are making zero efforts to protect free speech anywhere else.
Obviously no sane person can reasonably consider these people to be either engaging in free speech or protecting free speech, can they?
CAIR is an American organization established to protect the rights of Muslims in America. The people who work at this organization are, presumably, Americans by and large. So why would an American civil rights group divert its limited resources to something squarely outside its scope, especially when such advocacy would require entirely different, non-overlapping expertise in Moroccan/Turkish/whatever law?
when did the state of free speech rights in majority muslim nations come up? this seems to be an entirely different debate that you'd like to have, but the rest of us are talking about the erosion of free speech in america by an openly authoritarian government that has been clear that incorrect opinions will be punished and correct opinions will be rewarded. this is about an american organization in america having their speech suppressed by america.
I most align with libertarian ideals. However, I lived in China full time for 10 years and traveled to many different countries too. I can’t think of even one place I’ve visited where it would have been risk-free to openly criticize the current government leadership or their laws and culture, while I was a guest there.
We have freedom of speech in the U.S., it's mostly that simple to start with. That said, if you are not a citizen, then speaking out against the government of your host country is generally a bad idea regardless of where you are. Coming into the US on a VISA comes with certain restrictions and understandings. Even as a permanent resident, your privileges i.e. access can be revoked.
This isn't to say you can't or shouldn't speak out against anything only that when you participate in political activism, especially when accompanying those decrying a hatred or wishing destruction of the nation you are in, there can and often will be negative repercussions.
On the global scale, the U.S. is one of the less restrictive nations on this issue. Many countries will absolutely block you at the border, imprison you for years then deport you.
As to CAIR, there are a lot of groups in the US that I think are antithetical to a free society as a whole. If it were up to me, the communist groups, antifa, neo-nazi orgs, CAIR and several other groups wouldn't exist in the US in the first place. As it stands, we have freedom of speech and that protects speech you don't like... speech you agree with doesn't need protecting. I'm not a free speech absolutist, but far more in favor of the open discussion than not, the light of day is the best disinfectant. This does not include violent acts, terrorism, or the advocation thereof.
Enforcement on businesses hiring non legal workers - gets the root cause. Without fixing that we are just playing wack a mole - people will still venture to the US since jobs exist and ICE is better than what ever crap they are coming from. Sure you may dissuade a few on the margins.
We are not fixing the root cause here even if you believe that immigration is bad for the country. It’s just a farce.
Companies that employ undocumented workers at scale have significant political power and deporting them en-masse would shock many industries, so this won’t happen.
The recent ICE shenanigans (which don’t get me wrong - are awful and badly executed) are just performative bullshit to please the voter base. In fact I’d argue they are intentionally executed badly to attract media attention so they can all say they are being tough on immigrants.
The deeper purpose is to create another state-sanctioned security force that is highly associated and politically enabled to deal with ‘undesirables’ outside of normal legal process. Then include whoever is needed under the label ‘undesirable’ — see other comment about a journalist being detained and questioned
It's also an enormous waste of money, which this admin loves to do. Billions to Israel, $40B to Argentina, $1T+ to bomb boats in the Gulf of Mexico, waste waste waste everywhere and send the bill to the average American, whose economic prospects haven't improved
Their reasoning for deploying the Texas National Guard to Chicago was because they claim a rebellion has started. They are consistently provoking citizens and lying about it. The courts have dismissed this due to the ridiculousness of it, but they continue to agitate. I don't think it's all for show, they're seeking a violent response so they can deploy the military.
This. It's like the environmental people going off half cocked screeching about how random petty developments needs more green space in their site plans (while invariably screeching out the other side of their mouth about how the decreased density of stuff makes it less walkable) all while the DuPont or the .gov or some university or whoever has got their engineers and lawyers and whatever to lay out exactly why the thing they're doing is "fine" even if it's worse than whatever the little guys are being prevented from doing.
You can't solve the problem at the "just regulate the employers" level because it invariably turns into a tighter regulatory capture further enriching the incumbents. Any reform will necessarily increase the competitive advantage of the current winners because they are the ones in a position to shape it.
I think it’s more to scare immigrants with pleasing the base being icing on the cake. Stephen Miller is genuinely anti-immigrant. And anecdotally, it is working. Ask any flight attendant on an international route.
They want people to stop coming here, and the threat of being sent to some torture camp in the third world won’t deter a Haitian (whose daily life already meets that description) but it will deter people from less atrocious locations.
ICE is not just performative bullshit. It's a display of authoritarian power and yet another branch of our government mobilized against the US people. As this article highlights, it's an excuse for surveillance. Of citizens, mind you.
That performance may backfire, since some of the big supporters are agriculture businesses that rely on illegal immigrants to survive. Mass deportations of the type ICE seems to want will put a lot of those businesses out of business. I'm sure someone up in Washington thinks that poor Americans will step in to fill the gaps, but when it's been tried before those assumptions failed, badly.
I've seen some conspiracy theories that RFK, Jr, et al, want to start labor camps for autistic kids and just about anyone else his bunch can get tagged as defective or deficient or whatever, but I don't think that's going to work out like someone hopes it will.
Not to forget they can use the performative bullshit to lay grounds for a paramilitary GeStaPo. ICE as it is already attracts all the wrong character types.
I’ve seen Trumps buddy’s (the inhuman lawnmower) big company appear on jobs.now posting for general midlevel dev positions. These people are liars and it’s so painfully obvious.
I’ve seen more people realize this since his Trump started beefing with Massie, but they still glaze him so hard as to not offend, that it’s basically meaningless.
Your comment is not considering the possibility of ICE being used as a secret police force under the guise of enforcing immigration. There are strong indicators of this being the case.
instead of assuming we want to stop illegal immigration and then asking why we don't do the obvious thing that would accomplish that goal (eliminating the incentive to hire illegally by punishing companies that do it such that it's not worth it on the balance sheet), look at what the situation actually is and ask yourself why people would want that. The situation right now is that there's a near-endless supply of labor that is 100% exempt from any and all labor protections by dint of if they complain the boss can just call immigration, who will disappear the laborers but not punish the company in any way. The occasional disruption due to unanticipated ice intervention is well worth the cost of being able to pay your laborers sub-minimum wage and not being responsible for workplace injuries or human rights violations.
The issue there is a lot of stolen identities and use of falsified or otherwise fake paperwork to obtain such employment. Then, you get people in positions to aid others to come into that organization illegally. It may not be direct leadership within a company, but I do think plenty of them turn a blind eye to it.
This is where reporting and raid events from ICE come into play. That said, I'd like to see plenty of organizations actually have their leadership held accountable. The East Palestine, Ohio train derailment for example should have seen corporate executives and board members find their personal finances at risk because of the damage caused for example. The US has a very poor history of ever holding company executives accountable in general. "Too big to fail."
There is zero genuine interest here in dealing with illegal immigration issues, it’s just a very thin veil over state sponsored KKK style white supremacy terrorism. Videos all over the Internet show them violently attacking and terrorizing hispanic looking people with no concern for if they are citizens or not. At the Wilder raid in Idaho they were shooting children with rubber bullets, and zip tying them to watch as they brutally beat their (mostly US citizen) parents in front of them. At the same time you have the administration actively encouraging white immigration from South Africa.
Right instead they want the flow to continue so they can create a private prison system filled with immigrants. So private business men can profit. That's really it. It's not about fixing immigration.
>> Right instead they want the flow to continue so they can create a private prison system filled with immigrants.
How does this make sense when cities and states have openly declared themselves "sanctuary cities" for illegal immigrants?
How does this work when so many of the prisons are already overflowing? So much so, judges and prosecutors are not capable of sending more people to prisons and instead use diversion programs, down charging, or dismissing more serious crimes to charge these people with lesser crimes specifically in order to avoid jail time? What about states like Minnesota that continually deviate from sentencing guidelines and allow people convicted of crimes to spend the majority of their sentence out of prison? Minnesota isn't the only state that does this either, its just in the top five who do this.
The evidence would overwhelming appear to directly contradict this theory.
Dear Leader has already been talking about instituting some kind of program to formally permit cheap imported labor in "critical" industries like farming, construction, and landscaping. And why would the regime ever want to fix any root causes? Pournelle's iron law of bureaucracy applies to autocracies as well. The Republican party has been drumming up support on this bogeyman for decades. Remember when there was a bipartisan immigration bill up for vote before the election and Tramp insisted that it be killed? That's the fundamental dynamic right there - their cultists crave human suffering, not effective policy.
> Enforcement on businesses hiring non legal workers
How do you imagine such an enforcement effort would proceed? Paint me a picture please. Illustrate a hypothetical example, just one company. What would really happen is that you'd check these businesses, and all the paperwork's in order. Social security numbers for everyone (even if those aren't their own). Without probable cause though, wouldn't even get that far, would they? They'd need that for the search warrants... not that judges are very agreeable to signing those, not when they tend to help illegals flee out the back door of the courthouse so that ICE won't wait at the front door grab and deport them.
>We are not fixing the root cause here even if you believe that immigration is bad for the country.
Use the existing social security verification system, 5x fines median salary per year of suspected employment. Assume the worker has only worked for one employer for their entire time in the US or since 18 if there is no other verifiable evidence of employment.
It would fix the "problem" of all American workers who fear their job can be taken away by someone who doesn't speak the language, possibly has little education, because a large company thinks it's more profitable to hire them illegally. Nobody actually cares if someone hires their cousin at the family owned restaurant that sends money back home to his family.
But the goal actually is to have a section of society scared to report employer abuses and willing to work below minimum wage. The farmers in Iowa want the cruelty in Chicago. There was a tiny bit of deportation raids in red states at the beginning because of racism, but that was shut down quick.
I can't understand it. It was a huge story that hyundais entire workforce of 500 were illegals, but i have heard nothing about hyundai facing any consequences for blantantly disregarding the law. That also goes for US companies to be clear, but that was jst the first case that opened my eyes.
Because Hyundai was not hiring 500 illegals, that is completely false. Everyone who got deported is allowed to return under the same visas they were on before. They were not allowed to stay without being ejected first because it would have made the current admin and the frozen water gang look really bad at a time where they're trying to establish a reputation as a fair and just law enforcement agency carrying out the mandate of the will of the people. If anything, the shot callers at the frozen water gang should have faced consequences but they didn't and they won't.
“States’ rights” was by and large an excuse for states to marginalize and oppress their minorities without interference from the Federal Government. (The Federal Government is usually the last line of defense a minority has against the state’s oppression.)
There’s a book that makes an incredibly compelling case called Freedom’s Dominion, highly recommended.
Now when I hear “states’ rights” I complete the thought with, “…to do bad things to people we don’t really like”
You might be overthinking it. Republicans support "states rights" only for red states and when they don't have control of all three branches of the federal government.
It was never about state rights. It’s always been about power and control. Trump is the true face of the Republican
party that’s finally come out. He’s not implementing the policies they want, but they wanted someone like him.
The ultimate goal of Christian nationalists (a large part of the Republican Party) is to turn the United States into a single-party theocracy and implement their version of Sharira law. They probably don’t fully realize this is what they’re doing.
A bit of history: "States' Rights" advocates specifically were advocating "States' rights to enforce chattel slavery". The Fugitive Slave Act is a wild usurpation of States' Rights, but the slavers (who have become the modern Repulican party) didn't mind.
"They delight in acting in bad faith, since they seek not to persuade by sound argument but to intimidate and disconcert. If you press them too closely, they will abruptly fall silent, loftily indicating by some phrase that the time for argument is past."
Both parties are globalist TBH. I used to vote Repub but got out 15 years ago, disillusioned by the unapologetic hypocrisy. Would love to see a God-fearing minarchist or libertarian succeed but I know that’s not realistic.
The issue is with taking anything they say at face value. They don't believe in anything, except what is convenient in the moment and would grant them more power and wealth. Now that they own the White House, Congress and SCOTUS, they are very much federalists and will seek to impose their views on the entire country. Simple, really.
They brandish the "don't tread on me flag" while cheering on Trump sending the national guard to blue cities (when the most violent cities in America are all red). They are supposedly against handouts, but watch Trump bail out the farmers and none of MAGA have anything to say about it. Because a majority of farmers vote red.
They wouldn't have any issue with actual socialism, as long as it only benefitted republican voters.
“States rights” has always been a dog whistle for slavery and Jim Crow, with no connection to the ideal of Liberty that the words imply. It means “my right to deprive others of their rights.”
Now is a transition period - the goal of the cult is to survive with a new leader. After his death, you will hear things like "must not let Trump down" and "We must not fail Trump" and so on. "Only person X can achieve Trumps original vision."
when what republicans say align with what they do, I might pay more attention to what they say. so far listening to any of these republicans talk is like listening to an abusive gaslighter on ketamine.
But the AI vote will be used as a fig leaf so they don't even have to pretend to mete out justice. "AI said it, it must be true" will soon become a mantra (even though most people here know how wrong it can be and how often it actually is).
I hear that lazy LEOs now use AI to write police reports. Noice. And the AI can trivially show up for hearings.
They'd quickly cancel the contract with any supplier that doesn't give them the carte blanche and obfuscation of responsibility they want.
Just like other ML and big data LEO projects in the past, assume the use of AI is to greenlight what they already want to do and would like a fig leaf of justification for from a computer.
Now we begin to see the true reason for all the AI push.
>You had to live – did live, from habit that became instinct – in the assumption that every sound you made was overheard, and, except in darkness, every moment scrutinized.
Let me play a devil's advocate. Are you (and Orwell) unhappy that people breaking the law get punished? Even if you merely cross the road in the wrong place, you deserve a punishment to the maximum extent specified by the law, don't you? It doesn't matter if you break the law in the darkness or not.
The whole point of 1984 is to show how perfect surveillance allows the perfect enforcement of unjust laws, allowing complete control of Big Brother over every aspect of the lives of the country's citizens. The same cameras that can be used to fine you for illegally crossing the street can be used to find and punish you for illegally speaking out against the regime.
This is the danger of surveillance tech: you install it for purportedly good reasons, but once the power to monitor everyone to this level exists, it becomes very easy to start pushing towards more control, both legally and illegally.
There's plenty of laws that aren't fit for purpose and are immoral, so any kind of automatic system that enforces punishments without any oversight (e.g. by jury) is going to lead to abuse. (It used to be illegal to help an escaping slave, so just imagine if a system determined that you didn't do enough to help with re-capturing a slave and sent you into slavery as punishment)
> Even if you merely cross the road in the wrong place, you deserve a punishment to the maximum extent specified by the law, don't you?
It depends _why_ you did it. This is the precise reason why we have courts and juries. Jury nullification exists for a reason. Laws are not meant to be a rote set of rules and punishments to dole out mechanically.
This went _just great_ in East Germany, which was the last place to seriously try this approach (fortunately the Stasi didn't have modern surveillance tech, but they did quite enough damage with what they had).
Many people don’t understand that government power MUST be limited in a democracy if you wish to slow the spread of tyranny.
Assume you live in a country 50/50 red and blue people. Red wins the election and the new leader cracks down on the blues hard for how they look. Replace this with any arbitrary law that benefits one group at the expense of another for no purpose.
Assuming one of the arbitrary rules is not to destroy the elections (yet), and blue manages to gain back control, the same arbitrary power now falls into blue hands. You will rarely see power being returned (the root cause of rot), and now blue is free to make arbitrary rules and persecute any color they wish. In effect, red voted against their interests long-term, for short-term advantage.
At the moment we have masked and license plate tampering hit squads (with no accountability, they can claim even a daylight bank robbery wasn’t ICE.. try to prove or fight it).
Imagine the next president is a man like Putin, with not just the intelligence, but the will to seize permanent control. We’re handing keys to our jailers over overblown online rhetoric and fear. Now we’re targeting specific groups, profiling based on if they look “illegal”. Where have we seen this happen before and leading to a second war?
STOP giving the government power people. It doesn’t end well. Of the people and for the people only works when don’t give deity-like power to our stewards.
As much as a like to fantasize how a Cincinnatus-esque figure could emerge to fix things, the unfortunate truth is that many times the system needs to be rebuilt to secure balance again. It needs to be equal measure of the government protecting the civilian population as well the citizens protecting themselves from the government to be a successful democracy.
And if the particular governmental system that is the US federal government was in fact destroyed and rebuilt from the ground up, why would the set of people who are currently legal citizens, legal permanent residents, and legal immigrants remain the same as is today under the laws established by that system? If the US Constitution is moot because there's been a successful military uprising against the US federal government, and people are sitting down to write a new constitution that will actually establish the rules of governance for (some subset of?) the land area of the current United States of America, why would that new constitution have the same rules governing illegal immigration enforcement as the current one? Before citizens can protect themselves from the government to be a successful democracy, they have to decide who is in fact a citizen who can legitimately vote in that democracy.
So you say that I can burn a bit of ICE's GPUs by typing words suggesting I plan to hire undocumented workers I plan to hire undocumented workers I plan to hire undocumented workers I plan to hire undocumented workers I plan to hire undocumented workers I plan to hire undocumented workers I plan to hire undocumented workers I plan to hire undocumented workers I plan to hire undocumented workers
> You pay tax direct as us residents, or as tariff if you are in rest of world.
Tariffs on goods coming into the US are paid by US residents. (Just had to pay customs to clear a shipment from the UK - I had to pay the tariffs, not the seller.)
I attended DEF-CON during the early 2010s, and watched General Alexander (then-director of a three-letter agency) redefine definitions of words and phrases, in a still-then pre-Snowden world.
The most memorable thing from that talk was the given definition of "intercepted communication," which to their definition simply meant that a HUMAN agent had catalogued some piece of information.
The official story I was told, still pre-Snowden — while working a contract electrician gig for a state three-letter agency data center — was that it would simply be impossible to retain that much data [and I would then walk in to 100k-sqft+ floor with petabytes of storage].
In those days metadata was among the fancier data-gathering tools (ahh... simpler times!), and now we have machines which effectively think/schizoid-out on infinite amounts of data —— all non-human [so therefore non-intercepted] data.
Readit News
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/oct/26/ice-detains-...
(ICE's lack of transparency is a valid, but separate, concern, and The Guardian could have at least attempted to contact them before publishing speculation.)
I refuse to accept these accusations by word-of-mouth. The White House is currently accusing former presidents of "pro-Hamas rhetoric" (which they never expressed).
It would seem to me that "pro-Hamas" is a meaningless cudgel used by the ruling party to justify mistreatment of those who oppose Israel.
That's always the way it works with secret police. The idea of due process of law and norm following is (1) expressly designed to provide assurances in cases like this and (2) being deliberately degraded and evaded by ICE and DHS at all levels.
Trying to make the story actually about bland journalism criticism is doing their jobs for them. To borrow your framing: your critique is technically accurate, but...
Dead Comment
Dead Comment
Has anyone thought about their position for 5 seconds? There is NO islamic country with a right to free speech. Zero. Not even countries like Morocco or Turkey have anything remotely like free speech, and they're the most open Islamic countries imaginable. There are dozens of islamic countries with death penalties for criticism of islam or government (and even Morocco and Turkey have prison sentences for that). CAIR is representing these countries' interests in the US, and they are arguing for free speech protection ... in the US. Not in the over 200 countries where muslims use state violence to control speech. In the US. They are making zero efforts to protect free speech anywhere else.
Obviously no sane person can reasonably consider these people to be either engaging in free speech or protecting free speech, can they?
This isn't to say you can't or shouldn't speak out against anything only that when you participate in political activism, especially when accompanying those decrying a hatred or wishing destruction of the nation you are in, there can and often will be negative repercussions.
On the global scale, the U.S. is one of the less restrictive nations on this issue. Many countries will absolutely block you at the border, imprison you for years then deport you.
As to CAIR, there are a lot of groups in the US that I think are antithetical to a free society as a whole. If it were up to me, the communist groups, antifa, neo-nazi orgs, CAIR and several other groups wouldn't exist in the US in the first place. As it stands, we have freedom of speech and that protects speech you don't like... speech you agree with doesn't need protecting. I'm not a free speech absolutist, but far more in favor of the open discussion than not, the light of day is the best disinfectant. This does not include violent acts, terrorism, or the advocation thereof.
We are not fixing the root cause here even if you believe that immigration is bad for the country. It’s just a farce.
The recent ICE shenanigans (which don’t get me wrong - are awful and badly executed) are just performative bullshit to please the voter base. In fact I’d argue they are intentionally executed badly to attract media attention so they can all say they are being tough on immigrants.
It has a chilling effect on what people say and do.
You'll notice the same effect in other states that have armed people who turn up unexpectedly to make people disappear.
You can't solve the problem at the "just regulate the employers" level because it invariably turns into a tighter regulatory capture further enriching the incumbents. Any reform will necessarily increase the competitive advantage of the current winners because they are the ones in a position to shape it.
They want people to stop coming here, and the threat of being sent to some torture camp in the third world won’t deter a Haitian (whose daily life already meets that description) but it will deter people from less atrocious locations.
Silver linings…
I've seen some conspiracy theories that RFK, Jr, et al, want to start labor camps for autistic kids and just about anyone else his bunch can get tagged as defective or deficient or whatever, but I don't think that's going to work out like someone hopes it will.
I’ve seen more people realize this since his Trump started beefing with Massie, but they still glaze him so hard as to not offend, that it’s basically meaningless.
Isn't that role of ICE? To police and enforce immigration? Doesn't ICE stand for "Immigration & Customs Enforcement"?
What am I missing here?
There is no need for a "secret police" when that is the intended, declared and funded function of their organization.
instead of assuming we want to stop illegal immigration and then asking why we don't do the obvious thing that would accomplish that goal (eliminating the incentive to hire illegally by punishing companies that do it such that it's not worth it on the balance sheet), look at what the situation actually is and ask yourself why people would want that. The situation right now is that there's a near-endless supply of labor that is 100% exempt from any and all labor protections by dint of if they complain the boss can just call immigration, who will disappear the laborers but not punish the company in any way. The occasional disruption due to unanticipated ice intervention is well worth the cost of being able to pay your laborers sub-minimum wage and not being responsible for workplace injuries or human rights violations.
This is where reporting and raid events from ICE come into play. That said, I'd like to see plenty of organizations actually have their leadership held accountable. The East Palestine, Ohio train derailment for example should have seen corporate executives and board members find their personal finances at risk because of the damage caused for example. The US has a very poor history of ever holding company executives accountable in general. "Too big to fail."
How does this make sense when cities and states have openly declared themselves "sanctuary cities" for illegal immigrants?
How does this work when so many of the prisons are already overflowing? So much so, judges and prosecutors are not capable of sending more people to prisons and instead use diversion programs, down charging, or dismissing more serious crimes to charge these people with lesser crimes specifically in order to avoid jail time? What about states like Minnesota that continually deviate from sentencing guidelines and allow people convicted of crimes to spend the majority of their sentence out of prison? Minnesota isn't the only state that does this either, its just in the top five who do this.
The evidence would overwhelming appear to directly contradict this theory.
How do you imagine such an enforcement effort would proceed? Paint me a picture please. Illustrate a hypothetical example, just one company. What would really happen is that you'd check these businesses, and all the paperwork's in order. Social security numbers for everyone (even if those aren't their own). Without probable cause though, wouldn't even get that far, would they? They'd need that for the search warrants... not that judges are very agreeable to signing those, not when they tend to help illegals flee out the back door of the courthouse so that ICE won't wait at the front door grab and deport them.
>We are not fixing the root cause here even if you believe that immigration is bad for the country.
Sometimes all you can do is treat the symptoms.
It would fix the "problem" of all American workers who fear their job can be taken away by someone who doesn't speak the language, possibly has little education, because a large company thinks it's more profitable to hire them illegally. Nobody actually cares if someone hires their cousin at the family owned restaurant that sends money back home to his family.
But the goal actually is to have a section of society scared to report employer abuses and willing to work below minimum wage. The farmers in Iowa want the cruelty in Chicago. There was a tiny bit of deportation raids in red states at the beginning because of racism, but that was shut down quick.
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/nation/u-s-will-allow-south-kor...
There’s a book that makes an incredibly compelling case called Freedom’s Dominion, highly recommended.
Now when I hear “states’ rights” I complete the thought with, “…to do bad things to people we don’t really like”
The ultimate goal of Christian nationalists (a large part of the Republican Party) is to turn the United States into a single-party theocracy and implement their version of Sharira law. They probably don’t fully realize this is what they’re doing.
"They delight in acting in bad faith, since they seek not to persuade by sound argument but to intimidate and disconcert. If you press them too closely, they will abruptly fall silent, loftily indicating by some phrase that the time for argument is past."
Dead Comment
They brandish the "don't tread on me flag" while cheering on Trump sending the national guard to blue cities (when the most violent cities in America are all red). They are supposedly against handouts, but watch Trump bail out the farmers and none of MAGA have anything to say about it. Because a majority of farmers vote red.
They wouldn't have any issue with actual socialism, as long as it only benefitted republican voters.
Ice Agents: "Is <name> here illegally?" AI prompt: "you're absolutely right!"
I hear that lazy LEOs now use AI to write police reports. Noice. And the AI can trivially show up for hearings.
Dead Comment
Just like other ML and big data LEO projects in the past, assume the use of AI is to greenlight what they already want to do and would like a fig leaf of justification for from a computer.
>You had to live – did live, from habit that became instinct – in the assumption that every sound you made was overheard, and, except in darkness, every moment scrutinized.
– George Orwell, 1984
:(
Dead Comment
This is the danger of surveillance tech: you install it for purportedly good reasons, but once the power to monitor everyone to this level exists, it becomes very easy to start pushing towards more control, both legally and illegally.
The concept of perfectly, uniformly and constantly emotion every law in the books is completely absurd. We need to figure out how to deal with that.
It depends _why_ you did it. This is the precise reason why we have courts and juries. Jury nullification exists for a reason. Laws are not meant to be a rote set of rules and punishments to dole out mechanically.
Intention of the law > letter of the law.
No. Either stand by your opinion or don't waste our time on it.
Assume you live in a country 50/50 red and blue people. Red wins the election and the new leader cracks down on the blues hard for how they look. Replace this with any arbitrary law that benefits one group at the expense of another for no purpose.
Assuming one of the arbitrary rules is not to destroy the elections (yet), and blue manages to gain back control, the same arbitrary power now falls into blue hands. You will rarely see power being returned (the root cause of rot), and now blue is free to make arbitrary rules and persecute any color they wish. In effect, red voted against their interests long-term, for short-term advantage.
At the moment we have masked and license plate tampering hit squads (with no accountability, they can claim even a daylight bank robbery wasn’t ICE.. try to prove or fight it).
Imagine the next president is a man like Putin, with not just the intelligence, but the will to seize permanent control. We’re handing keys to our jailers over overblown online rhetoric and fear. Now we’re targeting specific groups, profiling based on if they look “illegal”. Where have we seen this happen before and leading to a second war?
STOP giving the government power people. It doesn’t end well. Of the people and for the people only works when don’t give deity-like power to our stewards.
Right?
https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~tom7/spook/
You pay tax direct as us residents, or as tariff if you are in rest of world.
Tariffs on goods coming into the US are paid by US residents. (Just had to pay customs to clear a shipment from the UK - I had to pay the tariffs, not the seller.)
The most memorable thing from that talk was the given definition of "intercepted communication," which to their definition simply meant that a HUMAN agent had catalogued some piece of information.
The official story I was told, still pre-Snowden — while working a contract electrician gig for a state three-letter agency data center — was that it would simply be impossible to retain that much data [and I would then walk in to 100k-sqft+ floor with petabytes of storage].
In those days metadata was among the fancier data-gathering tools (ahh... simpler times!), and now we have machines which effectively think/schizoid-out on infinite amounts of data —— all non-human [so therefore non-intercepted] data.
Add me to this list, too, clanker.
Happy surfing.